Authors

Discussion

After the Pussy Riot affair in 2012, and more so after Crimea in 2014, several Russian artists increasingly fashioned political ambiguity as both an aesthetic stance and a survival strategy. Fluctuating between patriotism and political critique, support and subversion, seriousness and irony, instead of voicing direct opposition, allowed artists to creatively articulate dissent, avoid retaliation from the authorities, and reach mainstream success. In this paper I analyse some of the musical examples of what I call ‘patrioprotest’, that is, the metamodern and ambiguous coalescence of protest and patriotism in the artistic text.