This article discusses the role of representative strategies in twentiethcentury Russian culture. Just as Russia interacted with Europe in the Marquis de Custine's time via discourse and representation, in the twentieth century Russia re-entered European consciousness by simulating 'socialism'. In the post-Soviet era, the nation aspired to be admitted to the 'European house' by simulating a 'market economy', 'democracy', and 'postmodernism'. But in reality Russia remains the same country as before, torn between the reality of its own helplessness and poverty, and the messianic myth of its own greatness. Post-Soviet culture is a product of Stalinist culture. 'Russian postmodernism' was created less by artists, writers, poets, and film makers, than by theorists and critics. At the beginning of the 1990s, a need to describe contemporary Russian culture emerged. In this way, 'Russian postmodernism' arose from the desire to 'sell' projects in the West-from the simple obligation to describe socialist experience in concrete, transferable terms that Westerners could grasp. The nostalgia experienced by the post-Soviet era creates its own simulated postmodernism, in which the matrices of the construction and functioning of culture cease to be connected with specifically Russian (Soviet) history, and instead reproduce Western models almost exactly. We are facing yet another attempt at radical cultural modernization. If the first attempt (revolutionary culture) was the most original and fruitful, and the second (Stalinist culture, Socialist Realism) was less productive but still original, then the third, post-Soviet, attempt (rich in individuality, but lacking in original ideas or style) is for the moment the least productive and original. If we exclude sots-art (conceptualism) from 'Russian postmodernism', there would be nothing left. Clearly, an original cultural model in post-Soviet Russia will not take shape until original strategies for
Resumo Este artigo apresenta algumas linhas gerais do debate sobre revolução e cultura entre 1917 e o período stalinista, com destaque para o fenômeno do realismo socialista.
This special issue emerged from the eponymous interdisciplinary conference we co-organized at the University of Sheffield in October 2010. The conference aimed to address the relationship between contemporary Russian culture and Russia's Soviet past, a relationship characterized by profound ambiguity. We approached this topic with the assumption that, two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian society and culture are still dependent on their Soviet heritage, which is upheld and rejected, often simultaneously, in practically all fields of symbolic production, from state ideology to architecture, from elite literature to mass culture. Russian culture remains suspended between the historical narratives of the emergence of the new nation from the ruins of the USSR and the Soviet cultural legacy, whose models are no longer functional; the result is the instability of its ideological symbolic order and a palpable traumatic void, which its subjects fill with their incoherent, emotional, and ideologically charged interventions. This suspension between the traumatic experiences of the past, both remote and quite recent, and an underdeveloped and unstable narrative about it, are at the core of contemporary Russian culture, marking it as an inherently post-Soviet culture. This suspension does not allow for a cutting of the umbilical cord between the Soviet nation of yesterday and the still problematic post-Soviet nation. This is why all strategies of post-Soviet nation-building have stumbled upon the impossibility of creating a coherent historical narrative and the formation of a new national consensus. The question arises as to what is dominant in this process: the generational breaches of the post-Soviet society; the conscious strategies of power; or society's inability to give meaning to and work through its own past? The past is the experience of pain, the trauma of experience; history is anaesthesia, the narrative that is produced by power and envelops this pain, thereby creating a nation that can be
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