(Counter-)Archive: Memorial Practices of the Soviet Underground

Switzerland : Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.

Under the general editorship: K. Smola, I. Kukulin, A. Bachmaier

This book is the first major study exploring archival and memorial practices of the Soviet unofficial culture. The creation of counter-archives was one of the most important forms of cultural resistance in the Soviet Union. Unofficial artists and poets had to reinvent the possibilities of maintaining art and literature that “did not exist”. Against the background of archival theories and memory studies, the volume explores how the culture of the Soviet underground has become one of the most striking cases of scholarly and artistic (self-)archiving, which – although being half-isolated from the outer world – reflected intellectual and artistic trends characteristic of its time. The guiding question of the volume is how Soviet unofficial culture (de)constructed social memory by collecting, archiving and memorizing tabooed culture of the past and present.

Chapters

Collected Works, or Texts Selected and Discarded, or Under Сonstruction and Other Words by Boniface and German Lukomnikov as an Exercise in Authorial Self-Archiving

Pavlovets M., , in: (Counter-)Archive: Memorial Practices of the Soviet Underground.: Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024. Ch. 5 P. 141–170.

German Lukomnikov (who wrote under the pseudonym Boniface until 1994) is a poet whose work does not fit into any of the group poetics or movements in contemporary Russian literature. With equally good reasons, it has been studied in the context of conceptualism and the neo-avant-garde, minimalism and formal restrictive versification, of visual, auditory, performative ...

Added: October 8, 2024

Archival Strategies and Literary Memory in Vsevolod Nekrasov’s Legacy

Elena Penskaia, , in: (Counter-)Archive: Memorial Practices of the Soviet Underground.: Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024. Ch. 2 P. 443–475.

This essay is based on personal testimonies and observations of the unofficial Russian poet Vsevolod Nekrasov’s creative process, resulting from over 30 years of personal communication with the poet. It is focused on an analysis of how the concept of the archive is understood within literary criticism and the theoretical articles authored by Nekrasov. Additionally, ...

Added: October 30, 2024

Keywords: архив, славистика, Slavic studies, Soviet underground, Memory Studies, исследования памяти, Archive, self-archiving, советский андерграунд, самоархивирование