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Summary
This book by the Russian-American cultural theorist and literary scholar Mikhail Epstein is a comprehensive study of Russian postmodernism, its origins and stages of development in the 20th century, as well as its historical differences from Western postmodernism. The book examines the relationship of postmodernism with modernism, Marxism, socialist realism, existentialism, and poststructuralism. It characterizes the originality and dynamics of Russian postmodernism by basing the analysis mainly on the material of literature and critical theory, but also on other aesthetic practices: visual arts, theater, museum displays, and culture as a whole.
Epstein investigates postmodernist trends in the work of its leading representatives (A. Sinyavsky, I. Kabakov, Ven. Erofeev, D. Prigov). Instead of borrowing Western theoretical concepts for the analysis of Russian postmodern phenomena, he articulates new concepts rooted in Russian unique cultural experience and uses them to enhance Western postmodern theory. Thus, the book analyzes a number of major currents and explores such literary and cultural trends as metarealism, conceptualism, presentalism, sots-art, metabole, rearguard, lyrical museum, neolubok, couonter-irony, proto, proteism, new sentimentality, kenotype, essayism, ecology of thinking, and poor faith among others.
The author’s outlook combines a retrospective view of a participant in the literary processes of the late Soviet epoch and a future-oriented perspective of advanced cultural theory. The book consisting of an introduction, seven parts, and a conclusion is experimental in nature as dictated by the novelty of its material and by the necessity to develop an adequate theoretical language to explain the specifics of Russian postmodernism against the background of its Western counterpart. The reader is invited to participate in the laboratory of constructive theoretical thinking.
The Introduction offers a preliminary definition of postmodernism in the context of its historical relations to the culture of modernity and modernism.
The first part describes the world-wide patterns of postmodernism associated with the information explosion and with the dialectic of the transition from super to pseudo, i.e. from the search of ultimate reality to the recognitation of its simulative nature.
The second part considers the specifics of Russian postmodernity in view of Russia’s belated entry into European Modern Age. Special attention is paid to certain affinities of Russian postmodernism with the ideology of communism and the aesthetics of social realism (such as creation of hyperreality).
The third part of the book is devoted to literary movements, with special emphasis on conceptualism and metarealism in poetry and the rearguard in prose, and includes a republication of original postmodernist literary manifestos of the 1980s.
The fourth part examines postmodernist concepts in visual art, in the theory of play/game and in the project of lyrical museum, with its specific relationship between words and things and the words and images.
The fifth part is devoted to those intellectual movements and theoretical reflections that accompanied and partly predetermined literary and artistic postmodernism, and includes a republication of original philosophical manifestos of the 1980s.
The sixth part outlines the boundaries of postmodernism and the ways of its self-transgression, highlighting the «post-postmodern» spaces for new sentimentality, counter-irony, trans-utopism, the removal of the «quotation mode» and imagining the future after the death of the «future».
Finally, the seventh part examines new cultural movements that arose on the basis of postmodernism and in contradiction with it, such as proto (vs post) and proteism, transculturalism (vs multiculturalism) and a new blend of technology and vitalism that characterizes the mentality of the first decades of the 21st century.
The Conclusion defines the role of postmodernism in the techno-informational evolution of humanity and analyzes the place of postmodernism as a specific cultural formation within the larger historical epoch of postmodernity which is now at its early stage.
The Appendix contains the author’s conversation with Andrey Bitov, one of the founders of Russian literary postmodernism.
A number of new concepts and terms are defined in the concise Glossary at the end of the book. A more detailed explanation of these and many other concepts denoting new directions in postmodern culture and theory can be found in M. Epstein’s book Proektivnyi slovar’ gumanitarnykh nauk (The Projective Dictionary of the Humanities; Moscow: NLO, 2017).
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