Table Of ContentEndquote
Northwestern University Press
Studies in Russian Literature and Theory
Founding Editor
Gary Saul Morson
General Editor
Caryl Emerson
Consulting Editors
Carol Avins
Robert Belknap
Robert Louis Jackson
Elliott Mossman
Alfred Rieber
William Mills Todd III
Alexander Zholkovsky
Emlquote
SOTS-ART LITERATURE AND SOVIET GRAND STYLE
Edited by
Marina Balina, Nancy Condee, and Evgeny Dobrenko
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS / EVANSTON, ILLINOIS
Northwestern University Press
Evanston, Illinois 60208-4210
Copyright © 2000 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2000. All rights
reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN 0-8101-1653-7 (cloth)
ISBN 0-8101-1767-3 (paper)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Endquote : sots-art literature and Soviet grand style / edited by Marina Balina,
Nancy Condee, and Evgeny Dobrenko.
p. cm. - (Studies in Russian literature and theory)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-8101-1653-7-ISBN 0-8101-1767-3 (pbk.)
1. Russian literature-20th century-History and criticism. 2. Postmodernism
(Literature)-Russia (Federation) 3. Sots art. 4. Art and literature-Russia
(Federation) I. Balina, Marina. II. Condee, Nancy. III. Dobrenko, E. A.
(Evgenii Aleksandrovich) IV. Series.
PG3026.P67 E53 1999
891. 709'0044--dc21 99-054098
CIP
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the Ameri
can National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed
Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Contents
Sots-Art, Conceptualism, and Russian Postmodemism:
An Introduction vii
Nancy Condee
Part I-Sots-Art: Between Socialist Realism and Postmodemism
Postmodemism, Communism, and Sots-Art 3
Mikhail Epstein
Text as a Ready-Made Object 32
Boris Groys
The Reading, Understanding, and
Discursive Genres of Conceptualism 46
Viktor Lettsev
Playing Absolute Time: Chronotypes of Sots-Art 58
Marina Balina
Part II-Sots-Art and Poetry
Socialist Realism, a Postscriptum:
Dmitrii Prigov and the Aesthetic Limits of Sots-Art 77
Evgeny Dobrenko
Lev Rubinshtein's Early Conceptualism: The Programs of Works 107
Gerald Janecek
Transfiguration of Kitsch-Timur Kibirov's Sentiments:
A Farewell Elegy for Soviet Civilization 123
Gregory Freidin
IosifVissarionovich Pushkin, or Sots-Art
and the New Russian Poetry 146
Vitaly Chernetsky
Part I1I-Sots-Art and Prose
Vladimir Sorokin's "Theater of Cruelty" 167
Mark Lipovetsky
The Diary of a Writer from Teplyi Stan':
The Beautifulness of Life by Evgenii Popov 193
Marina Kanevskaya
Reading Palisandria: Of Menippean Satire and Sots-Art 211
Larisa Rudova
Viktor Pelevin and the End of Sots-Art 225
Gerald McCausland
Notes on Contributors 239
Nancy Candee
Sots-Art, Conceptualism, and Russian
Postmodemism
An Introduction
Sots-art, the mock use of the Soviet ideological cliches of mass culture, orig
inated in Soviet nonconformist art of the early 1970s. Perhaps most familiar
to the reader from the paintings of Vitalii Komar and Aleksandr Melamid,
who derived the term from Andy Warhol's pop art, sots-art figures promi
nently in the work of Erik Bulatov, Leonid Sokov, and others. It first caught
the attention of American intellectuals in the early 1980s, thanks largely to
the writings of Margarita Tupitsyn, curator of the January 1984 exhibition at
New York's Semaphore Gallery entitled "Sots-Art: Russian Mock-Heroic
Style." Aleksandr Kosolapov's 1982 "Symbols of the Century" ["Simvoly
veka"], juxtaposing Lenin's profile with the Coca-Cola logo and slogan ("It's
the real thing"), became the most familiar symbol of this movement.
In literature, sots-art stands out as one of the most distinct directions in
late-twentieth-century Russian culture, both in its explicit aesthetic confron
tation with Soviet history and in its capacity to integrate Russian literature
back into the world literary process after many decades of socialist realism.
While conceptualism is a vast international movement, sots-art (with its
focus on Soviet cultural history) reworks more local artistic practices and ide
ological cliches. At the same time, in its reflection of the speCific cultural
character of Russian conceptualism and Russian postmodernism as a whole,
sots-art articulates the crisis of relations between contemporary Eastern and
Western cultural models. Sots-art often engages a tendency in the Soviet
canon toward excess and monumentalism, articulated in its mammoth archi
tecture, paintings, and sculpture; its epic films; its lengthy novels and narra
tive poems-in essence, that aspect of socialist realism referred to with irony
as "Grand Style."
Sots-art has had a profound influence on contemporary Russian litera
ture, figuring both as distinct texts and as a range of citational devices within
larger, more diverse works. Despite its centrality, sots-art in literature has
vii
Nancy Condee
not yet been systematically studied, either in Russia or in the West. The pur
pose of this volume is to begin that process with an examination of literary
sots-art on several levels: the context and problems (part 1); poetry, includ
ing works by both established and lesser-known poets such as Prigov, Rubin
shtein, and Kibirov (part 2); and the prose of Sorokin, Popov, Sokolov, and
Pelevin (part 3).
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the cultural process in Rus
sia "after realism" underwent radical aesthetic changes that were completed
in the early 1930s. At the end of the twentieth century, we are again faced
with a cultural process "after realism," yet now it is after socialist realism.
These revolutionary and postrevolutionary cultures constitute the aesthetic
foundation on which the new literature is based and to which it refers, even
as it seeks to create new aesthetic codes. Sots-art is at the very center of this
cultural process. Both inside Russia, where the 1991 collapse of communism
rendered the cultural landscape difficult to comprehend, and in Western
scholarship, with its crisis of traditional SOvietological matrices, the examina
tion of emergent models structuring the contemporary literary process is a
task central to an understanding of Russian culture since the collapse of the
"Great Utopia."
It will be readily apparent that this volume offers little agreement on
the historical or aesthetic boundaries of sots-art. Most contentious for the
scholars represented here is the relationship between sots-art and the broader
category of conceptualism. The latter term is often favored not so much for
its accuracy as for its familiarity, for its multiple allegiances to the interna
tional art world, its stylistic felicity, and its broader historical sweep. The con
tributors differ as to whether the two categories are distinct but hieJ:archical
(Epstein), overlapping and interpenetrating (Groys), a discernible binary
(Balina), or closely related phenomena (Janecek), to mention only a few vari
ants. Rather than impose a unified view by editorial decree, we have sought
to present a spectrum of views in this ongoing debate, the diverSity of which
we will address passim in these introductory remarks.
In the first part, "Sots-Art: Between Socialist Realism and Postmod
ernism," four contributors theorize on the broader issues associated with a
discussion of sots-art and contemporary culture. The first contributor, Mikhail
Epstein, is perhaps the best-known emigre theoretician of Russian postmod
ernism. Here, as elsewhere in his writings, he is concerned with the histori
cal flow from totalitarian consciousness to postmodern consciousness-from
the cultural expression of the former in socialist realism to the cultural
expression of the latter in sots-art, whose relationship to conceptualism he
describes in taxonomic terms (the "family" of sots-art to the "order" of con
ceptualism). Socialist realism is, for Epstein, a lengthy transition between
modernism and postmodernism, which finds its most expressive Russian
viii
Sots-Art, Conceptualism, and Russian Postmodernism
instantiation in such sots-art works as Prigov's "policeman poetry" and
Vladimir Sorokin's novel The Norm [Nonna].
Boris Groys, by contrast, is less interested in this historical quest than
in a structural one: conceptualist aesthetics and its relationship to sots-art.
Fragmentation, "characterness" [personazhnost'], the use of ready-made
material, and the intersection of textual and visual space all figure in this dis
cussion, but the last of these is singled out as the dominanta. At its most char
acteristic, conceptualism blurs the distinction between viewer and reader, at
once desemanticizing the word and rendering the image more sharply (if
ironically) teleological.
What begins for Groys as a straightforward distinction (sots-art engages
the material of Soviet mass culture, whereas conceptualism employs written
text within an otherwise visual field) becomes of necessity nuanced in the lit
erary work of Prigov, as in the paintings of Bulatov. The typed manuscript
font of Prigov's many samizdat texts, for example, simultaneously functions
as a conceptualist aestheticization of an otherwise utilitarian typeface and as
ironic, sots-art nostalgia for the Soviet era. Indeed, if in the West the type
written text is associated with twentieth-century culture, in Russia that "type
writer culture" is largely inextricable from Soviet culture, from the fate of its
intelligentsia, and from the agonized relations between official and unofficial
cultures.
If Epstein's project is historical and Groys's is structural, they share a
curiosity about the boundaries of sots-art. Viktor Lettsev's concern lies still
elsewhere. For him, sots-art is a specific term in a larger argument that seeks
to distinguish the key features of conceptualist discourse: marginality, the
conflation of Text and World, authorial absence, dual form. In an extended
polemic with Epstein's writings, Lettsev uses the work ofPrigov (for Lettsev,
the acknowledged master of sots-art poetry) to distinguish three impulses in
conceptualist texts: language games, schemas, and the world of opinions.
What is for other contributors a distinction between the "sots-artist Prigov"
and the "conceptualist Rubinshtein" is for Lettsev a distinction between eth
ical and Gnostic conceptualism.
Marina Balina's essay addresses the ways in which categories of time
(absolute, objective, and subjective) central to the narrative structure of
socialist realism are variously distorted in sots-art. Her principal distinction is
between those artists whose dominant device is the acceleration of absolute
time (Komar and Melamid, Bulatov, Prigov) and those who seek to retard or
drown out absolute time with the fragmented and chaotic detritus of objec
tive and subjective times (Il'ia Kabakov, Lev Rubinshtein, Timur Kibirov,
Viktor Pelevin). Here the distinction is not between conceptualism and sots
art as equal or hierarchically arranged categories. It is between those artists
who would strengthen the system and hierarchy of absolute time and those
ix
