480114 KO Colloquium on Literature and Cultural Studies (2022W)

The course is dedicated to the one of the most important cultural and political phenomena of the post-WWII Soviet history - literary/artistic/music underground. Started after Stalin’s death in 1953 (but rooted in the pre-war period) this underground had not just cultural (aesthetic) and ideological (mostly anti-communist) but also social and economic dimension. It could be defined as a sort of DIY cultural industry which established itself in the parallel to the official culture universe but had strong connection to it. The border between official and unofficial Soviet cultures was floppy and from time to time transparent, same can be said about the material foundation of both. Several main topics are to be discussed in the proposed course:
1. A correlation between political, ideological, and aesthetical in the Soviet cultural underground,
2. Why didn’t Soviet underground never become a counterculture?
3. How did Soviet underground artists, literati, musicians survived, economically and socially,
4. How did the mechanism of this underground culture work?

The course consists of the Introduction which is supposed to provide the students with historical and cultural context of the post-war Soviet Union, a series of lectures and discussions focused on the main topics of the course, several workshops where we are going to discuss various texts of Soviet underground literature, some underground artefacts and rock and jazz tracks recorded illegally in the USSR. In the end of the course a wrap-up lecture/seminar is supposed to sum up some of the conclusions.

Types of the lessons:
Lectures
Seminars/discussions
Workshops