"A provocative exploration of the cultivation of weak subjectivity in late Soviet fiction as both an aesthetic strategy and an ethical code"--
Soft Matter: The Poetics of Weakness in Late Soviet Socialism is a provocative exploration of the cultivation of weak subjectivity in late Soviet fiction as both an aesthetic strategy and an ethical code.
Identifies and examines a poetics of weakness in Soviet underground literature
Artists of the late Soviet era sought new, nonconformist ways of approaching literary fiction, arriving at weakness as a crucial principle of narrative and character formation. Julia Vaingurt argues that this counter-discourse of strategic weakness constituted both an aesthetic strategy and an ethical code, affording like-minded authors a feeling of recognition and commonality and uniting an international community of artists in resistance to the divisiveness of their worlds. Soft Matter: The Poetics of Weakness in Late Soviet Socialism explores the cultivation of weak subjectivity through modes such as gender subversion, queer holy foolishness, intoxication, madness, and writing disorders like graphomania and writer’s block. Identifying the poetics of weakness as formative for Soviet underground literature of the 1960s and ’70s, Vaingurt also traces the inheritance of a far older tradition within Russian culture of salutary weakness. As democratic deliberation continues to be under threat around the world, alternatives to the ubiquitous politics of force are an aesthetic, ethical, and ideological imperative.
Arvustused
Soft Matter seems all too necessary in a world newly divided and threatened by aggressive populism, military invasions, climate change, and increasing socio-economic inequality. Vaingurts study of weakness makes an important contribution to ongoing conversations about Soviet culture after Stalin, the challenges of late modernity, the need to reconsider gender categories, and the ethical and political potentials of solidarity based on human vulnerability. Ann Komaromi, University of Toronto
"Julia Vaingurts Soft Matter brilliantly elucidates a set of attitudes within late Soviet culture that opposed the dominant discourse of heroism and masculinity by embracing weakness as a desirable human condition. Not only is this a rich study in the intersection of literary and philosophical ideas, it is especially apt in an era when a Russian regime has once again resorted to masking its own weakness behind grotesque and exaggerated claims of masculinity."Thomas Seifrid, University of Southern California, Dornsife
Illustrations
Introduction
Chapter
1. A Typology of Weakness: Lacking Heroes in Literature and Film
Chapter
2. Iulii Kims Cinderella in the Concentration Camp: Performing Kurt
Vonneguts Gender Subversion in the USSR
Chapter
3. What a Hero of Weakness!: The Radical Orthodoxy of Evgenii
Kharitonov
Chapter
4. Universal Chicken-heartedness: Low Spirits and Immoderate
Meditations in Venedikt Erofeevs Moskva-Petushki
Chapter
5. Enjoy Your Symptom!: Sasha Sokolovs A School for Fools as an
Artists Guide to Psychosis
Chapter
6. The Weakling, the Genius, the Bomb, and the Globe: Writing as
Weakness in Andrei Bitov
In Conclusion: A Manifesto
Works Cited
Julia Vaingurt is a professor in the Department of Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her previous books includeWonderlands of the Avant-Garde: Technology and the Arts in Russia of the 1920s, also published by Northwestern University Press.
