Soviet unofficial culture in the Perestroika (1986-1991): pragmatics and aesthetics

This project focuses on the Soviet literary underground of the perestroika era and proposes an approach
that, in contrast to the dominant direction of perestroika research, does not emphasize
discontinuity, the break with previous Soviet culture and politics, but rather continuity in cultural
development. It assumes that the development of the underground in the years of perestroika
(1985-1991), which has been neglected in previous research, is particularly relevant because the
Soviet unofficial culture in this period was given the best conditions for the development of its
own aesthetics and the reflection of its poetic principles due to political liberalization on the one
hand, but on the other hand remained at a distance from the dominant, official currents and
deliberately took up a marginal socio-cultural position. This has hardly been taken into account in
the research literature to date; the most influential and original literary projects of this period have
not yet been described or even known. By shedding light on the development of unofficial
communities in the late 1980s, presenting the specific development of samizdat in this period and
important archival materials to highlight the specificity of the biographies and social, cultural and
literary practices of these years, and offering new interpretations of artistic works of the late 20th
century, we hope to fill the gap in understanding this crucial aspect of Soviet culture.