Performative Practices and Life-Creation

Beginning with Nikolai Evreinov’s concept of the perfomative formed at the turn of the twentieth century, this article discusses performative practices and life-creation in the underground of the 1960s–1970s (excluding the performance art per se). According to Evreinov, the “theatrlization of life” is defined by the transgression of existing norms (behavioral, social, cultural, and moral) coupled withthe excess, redundancy, and demonstrative overproduction of perfomrative forms. These characteristics united the underground group and individual performances with the lifecreation (zhiznetvorchestvo) of Russian modernists and avant-gardists. A special focus is given to such a permanent stage of performative practices as the Leningrad café “Saigon.” The article also discusses group perfomrative styles, shared by such communities as “Philological poets” and Khelenukty, as well as individual lifelong performances exemplified by such figures as Dmitrii Prigov, Venedikt Erofeev, or Sergei Chudakov.

Major Events, State Interference, and Resilience

This article elucidates the major events of the late Soviet underground, grouping them by trials (Chertkov’s from 1957, Brodsky’s from 1964, and Sinyavsky and Daniel’s from 1966); repressed exhibitions (the Manège exhibition of 1962 and the “Bulldozer Exhibition” of 1974); and publicity projects (Solzhenitsyn’s open letter to the 4th Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers from 1967 and the almanac Metropol’ in 1978). It argues that an “underground event” emerges through state interference into the sphere of unofficial art and literature, forcing individual members to surface from the underground. While most individual targets of repression were eventually expelled, the diffuse underground communities developed recurrent tactics of resilience. The article rounds off with distilling the patterns of resilience applied in the underground to undo the impact of the repression of the nonvoluntary protagonists of major underground events on others.

“In-Betweeners”

Late Soviet culture abounded in spaces, practices, and even individuals who existed “in-between” with respect to official and unofficial culture(s). Negotiations between official ideology and discourse and the way people lived and made art became increasingly complex and intimate in the years between the Thaw and perestroika. This article interrogates the concept of “in-between” aesthetics—posited as one of eclecticism and ambiguity—through an examination of widespread, yet highly variable manifestations of “in-between” creative activity, including literature, bard music, translation, and children’s books (including illustration). The disparate examples of “in-between” activity given here only constitute a few instances of a tendency that, even while liminal by definition, approached the mainstream in its ubiquity in the late Soviet period.