Soft Matter: The Poetics of Weakness in Late Soviet Socialism(Studies in Russian Literature and Theory)

Identifies and examines a poetics of weakness in Soviet underground literature Artists of the late Soviet era sought new, nonconformist ways of approaching literary fiction, arriving at weaknessas a crucial principle of narrative and character formation. Julia Vaingurt argues that this counter-discourse of strategic weakness constituted both an aesthetic strategy and an ethical code, affording like-minded authors a feeling of recognition and commonality and uniting an international community of artists in resistance to the divisiveness of their worlds. Soft Matter: The Poetics of Weakness in Late Soviet Socialism explores the cultivation of weak subjectivity through modes such as gender subversion, queer holy foolishness, intoxication, madness, and writing disorders like graphomania and writer’s block. Identifying the poetics of weakness as formative for Soviet underground literature of the 1960s and ’70s, Vaingurt also traces the inheritance of a far older tradition within Russian culture of salutary weakness. As democratic deliberation continues to be under threat around the world, alternatives to the ubiquitous politics of force are an aesthetic, ethical, and ideological imperative.

Table of Contents:
Illustrations Introduction Chapter 1. A Typology of Weakness: Lacking Heroes in Literature and Film Chapter 2. Iulii Kim’s Cinderella in the Concentration Camp: Performing Kurt Vonnegut’s Gender Subversion in the USSR Chapter 3. “What a Hero of Weakness!”: The Radical Orthodoxy of Evgenii Kharitonov Chapter 4. “Universal Chicken-heartedness”: Low Spirits and Immoderate Meditations in Venedikt Erofeev’s Moskva-Petushki Chapter 5. Enjoy Your Symptom!: Sasha Sokolov’s A School for Fools as an Artist’s Guide to Psychosis Chapter 6. The Weakling, the Genius, the Bomb, and the Globe: Writing as Weakness in Andrei Bitov In Conclusion: A Manifesto Works Cited

About the Author :
Julia Vaingurt is a professor in the Department of Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her previous books include Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde: Technology and the Arts in Russia of the 1920s, also published by Northwestern University Press.

Review :
“Soft Matter seems all too necessary in a world newly divided and threatened by aggressive populism, military invasions, climate change, and increasing socio-economic inequality. Vaingurt’s study of “weakness” makes an important contribution to ongoing conversations about Soviet culture after Stalin, the challenges of late modernity, the need to reconsider gender categories, and the ethical and political potentials of solidarity based on human vulnerability.” —Ann Komaromi, University of Toronto "Julia Vaingurt’s Soft Matter brilliantly elucidates a set of attitudes within late Soviet culture that opposed the dominant discourse of heroism and masculinity by embracing “weakness” as a desirable human condition. Not only is this a rich study in the intersection of literary and philosophical ideas, it is especially apt in an era when a Russian regime has once again resorted to masking its own weakness behind grotesque and exaggerated claims of masculinity."—Thomas Seifrid, University of Southern California, Dornsife