Authors
Katerina Pavlidi1; 1 University College Dublin, Ireland Discussion
The remarkable revival of interest in religion, occultism and creation myths of ancient civilisations during the late Soviet era captured the imagination of artists as well as art critics and philosophers who participated in the late Soviet underground art worlds. This paper analyses a product of such imagination: a text titled New Sectarianism (Novoe sektanstvo, 1985) which purports to be a scientific study conducted by the Institute of Atheism about the emergence of new sects in Russia during the 1970s and 1980s. This text, which in reality was written by the literary critic and philosopher Mikhail Epstein, exemplifies through its own content and form a return to, what artists and philosophers of the late Soviet underground perceived as, a pre-modern conceptualisation of the inseparability of literature and art, on the one hand, and religion, on the other. Reading Epstein’s text alongside contemporaneous essays by his fellow art critic and philosopher Boris Groys, I reconstruct the conceptual framework that underlay the religious and occult re-turn in the artistic and literary production of the late Soviet underground. I finally ponder the significance of the emergence of the aesthetics of return then and there, when and where the personal but also the collective experience of time and space lacks that which gave rise to modernity: an outlook on the future. 
