In this article Ann Komaromi examines Soviet samizdat based on recendy available materials and fresh critical approaches. Komaromi juxtaposes traditional mythologizing narratives about samizdat and the exposure of such mythology within samizdat and post-samizdat culture. Drawing on recent publications and archival investigations, Komaromi surveys the history of samizdat, its use, reception and resonance. The material form of the samizdat text proves key to understanding samizdat as the lifeblood of a community of Soviet dissenters. That material form, viewed critically through a lens shaped by poststructural concepts, provokes the sense of play between ideal signified and compromised signifier as samizdat's subversive essence. This samizdat text supports both anti-authoritarian playfulness and serious reflection on the threats to the author and the project of culture. Soviet and post-Soviet writers find in the samizdat text an ambivalent marker of their specifically Soviet identity beyond geographical and temporal boundaries of the Soviet empire.

The Material Existence of Soviet Samizdat

This article analyses 178 essays written in April 1997, in which Siberian students (15-22-year-olds) described their understandings of Soviet and post-Soviet realities. The main change between the two regimes is perceived in these essays as the change in patterns of consumption. Moreover, as the essays indicate, the new Russian style of consumption, usually associated with the style of the new rich classes in Russia, finds its fullest representation in the figure of the 'new Russian' man. The article suggests that students' attempts to envision unfamiliar patterns of wealthy consumption bring with them the reproduction of their own cultural dispositions and habits. Being unable to easily come up with adequate cultural signifiers that could homologically represent the distinctive economic location of the new rich, students chose to follow the path of quantitative rather than qualitative representation, expressing the taste of luxury' in terms of the taste of necessity'. Along with this subjective factor, that is, the students' own cultural dispositions, the prominence of the quantitative factor in their descriptions of the new Russian style of consumption is determined by the absence of a developed field of post-Soviet cultural production, which could have provided the new Russian style with distinctive status symbols

The Quantity of Style Imaginary Consumption in the New Russia

The collective historical amnesia that reigns in contemporary Russia demands an explanation. In the first part of my article I will analyze the mechanisms that suppress historical memory. I will focus my attention on two historical representations of critical relevance for this matter. First, I will discuss the Western-oriented ideology of the post-Soviet intelligentsia. Second, I will analyze the functioning of the myth of the "Great Patriotic War." In the second part of my paper I will address the influence of historical amnesia on contemporary Russian society. Deep distortions in moral judgments and social relations resulting from suppressed memory will be studied through an analysis of contemporary Russian fiction, especially fantasy. Finally, I will consider Russian Gothic society, which originates in historical amnesia

Historical Memory in Post-Soviet Gothic Society

When religious institutions engage the secular emotively and publicly, they can foster an affective atmosphere of religiosity, which potentially has motivational power, even for non-believers, because it shapes the sensorium of those who circulate in public space. When individuals appeal to “places animated with prayer” for the transformative energy that resides there through ritualized practices, they reaffirm an affective atmosphere of religiosity. In Orthodox Eastern Europe and elsewhere, a confessional tradition is allied with state borders, further normativizing this affective atmosphere and giving it pronounced political implications. When an affective atmosphere of religiosity inspires practices that are intentionally designed to prompt experiences rendered meaningful in otherworldly terms, over time such performativity can create mimetic instincts that become second nature. This is an essential step to religion becoming an expedient political resource and to the emergence of religious nationalism or a confessional state.

An Affective Atmosphere of Religiosity: Animated Places, Public Spaces, and the Politics of Attachment in Ukraine and Beyond

Sites of memory: Soviet myths in post-Soviet culture

The last couple of decades have been decisive for Russia not only in the political sphere; the period has also seen the rise and crystallization of Russian postmodernism. The essays, manifestos, and articles gathered here investigate various manifestations of this crucial cultural trend in: Russian fiction, poetry, art, and spirituality, offering both a point of departure and valuable guide to an area of contemporary literary-cultural studies insufficiently represented in English-language scholarship. A brief but useful "Who's Who in Russian Postmodernism" serves as an appendix.

Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture

Russian Postmodernism

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Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture

Russian Postmodernism