Authors

Discussion

Leaders of the late Soviet nonconformist community from the 1960s onward have persistently discussed, and continue to discuss, the rupture between pre-Soviet culture and the neo-avant-garde/neo-modernism of the Thaw era. For Poland, Czechoslovakia, or Hungary, the primary cause of this rupture was the Sovietization of these countries after World War II. In the USSR, the pressure of the state-imposed official culture, which began in the late 1920s, played a key role. The postwar generation of nonconformists described their experience in various ways as a “new beginning”, and their situation, at the start of their creative path, as a “tabula rasa”. Joseph Brodsky stated: “We all came into literature from God knows where”. Ilya Kabakov remarked: “Our generation started from absolute zero”. There are many similar testimonies. Without a doubt, the avant-garde and modernism were marginalized by Soviet official culture, but this does not mean they disappeared. The statements of the nonconformists undoubtedly reflect their self-perception. However, the rhetoric of a rupture in tradition developed simultaneously with intense interaction with representatives of this tradition. In the late Soviet period, contemporaries who had taken part in pre-Soviet avant-garde/modernist activity—poets, artists, and intellectuals—were especially valued. Brodsky and poets in his circle had the opportunity to frequently communicate with A. Akhmatova. Another leader of the underground—poet, artist, and theater director Alexei Khvostenko—was the son of Lev Khvostenko, a renowned translator and one of the founders of the first English school in Leningrad, which opened after the war to educate the Soviet elite. Numerous artistic circles were formed around the modernists and avant-gardists of the older generation, such as N. Aseev,  L. Ginzburg, V. Favorsky, R. Falk, N. Khardzhiev, and others. We can assert that while there was talk of a rupture, the avant-garde and modernism displayed many instances of continuity and of passing the torch. This paper analyzes this contradiction between the discourse of rupture and the determined engagement with tradition as a significant component of the nonconformist community and its activities. Interpreting this contradiction allows for three hypotheses that clarify some characteristic features of the nonconformist artistic experience. First, the discourse of rupture may primarily point to the lack of institutionalization of artistic circles, which existed as amateur collectives. Second, the non-involvement of nonconformists in Soviet society radicalized their artistic projects, at least in a social sense. Third, the restoration and archiving of pre-Soviet literature and art as an independent aesthetic experiment, without the expectation of institutionalization, became a new, relevant form of neo-modernist innovation—one that was sometimes existentially very risky.