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

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.

Part 1: Archiving Subcultures.- Chapter 1: Klavdia Smola, Ilya Kukulin, Annelie Bachmaier: (Counter-)Archive: Memorial Practices of the Soviet Underground. Introduction.- Chapter 2: Juliane Fürst: Notes from the Zone of Kaif: An Exploration of the Azazello Archive.- Chapter 3: Nathalie Moine: Sound Archives from the Margin of the Soviet: Recording Gypsy Tales and Songs in the late Soviet Union.- Part 2: Archival Aesthetics and Poetics.- Chapter 4: Ilja Kukuj: “Keeping the Thread”: on the Archival Practices of Ry Nikonova and Sergei Sigei.- Chapter 5: Mikhail Pavlovets: Collected Works, or Texts Selected and Discarded, or Under Construction and Other Words by Boniface and German Lukomnikov as an Exercise in Authorial Self-Archiving.- Chapter 6: Mary Nicholas: Co-Authorship, Collaboration, and Other ‘Counter-Archival’ Gestures in Late-Soviet Moscow Conceptualism.- Part 3: Artists as Collectors, Philologists, and Cultural Historians.- Chapter 7: Ann Komaromi: The Samizdat Journal Chasy (The Clock) and the Counter-Archive of Unofficial Culture.- Chapter 8: Christian Zehnder: The Leningrad Underground as an Archive of Modernism: Considering Informal Philology in the Late Soviet Union.- Part 4: The Afterlife of Memory.- Chapter 9: Klavdia Smola: Archiving the Life World: Memorial Practices of the Late Soviet Underground and After.- Chapter 10: Maria Engström, Aleksei Semenenko: Recycling the Underground: Archive and Memory Politics in Contemporary Russia.- Chapter 11: Dorine Schellens: Collecting, Archiving, Canonizing: The Role of Exhibitions in the Transnational Reception History of Moscow Conceptualism.- Chapter 12: Michal Mrugalski: The Warsaw Summit of Archivists: Il'ia and Emilia Kabakov’s Meeting with Joseph Kosuth on the Borderline between Soviet and Western Banality.- Part 5: Artistic Testimonies.- Chapter 13: Sabine Hänsgen: Translating Moscow Conceptualism.- Chapter 14: Andrei Khlobystin: Wonders and Curiosities.- Chapter 15: Vadim Zakharov: The Artist as Institution: Self-Organization as Institutional Practice(s) in Moscow Conceptualism.- Chapter 16: Elena Penskaia: Archival Strategies and Literary Memory in Vsevolod Nekrasov’s Legacy.- Chapter 17: Pavel Arseniev: “Poetry was forever, until it was no more”: On the New Temporality and Media-Context of the Contemporary Cultural Movement.

Klavdia Smola is Professor and Chair of Slavic Literatures at the University of Dresden, Germany. She obtained her PhD at the University of Tübingen, was visiting professor at the Columbia University and the University of Constance. She published broadly on the Soviet underground culture, russophone minority literatures, and countercultures in Putin’s Russia.

Ilya Kukulin is Research Fellow at Amherst College, USA. He is a cultural historian and cultural sociologist. He published numerous articles and co-edited several academic collections on the history of Soviet literature, social and cultural history of the USSR, and post-Soviet culture.

Annelie Bachmaier is Researcher and Lecturer (Post-Doc) at the Department of Slavic Studies at the University of Dresden, Germany. She received her PhD in Slavic Studies from the University of Regensburg. In her teaching and research, Annelie Bachmaier focuses on Russian and Polish as well as Yiddish literatures and cultures from the 19th to the 21st century.