Authors

Nataliia Fedorenko¹;  ¹ University of Bremen, Germany

Discussion

In the second half of the 1960s, Anna Tarshis and Sergei Sigov had fragmented contact with Leningrad, either by studying at university, as Tarshis did in 1965-1967, or by serving in the army, as Sigov did in 1968-1970. The rest of the time the couple lived in various peripheral locations such as Sverdlovsk, Taganrog and Rostov. During this period, decadent aesthetics were relevant to both Tarshis and Sigov as a source of role models, ideas and values, reflected in their repertoire of self-fashioning patterns; imagined lifestyles; subversive writings on gender and sexuality; declared attitudes to work, education and art. Their reflections on private and public or the individual and the collective were also often formulated in a decadent manner. This alternative language came to life through their limited access to Western modernism, Russian fin-de-siecle culture and officially published Western literature of the 19th century. Universities, as sites of Thaw in both the center and the periphery, were also important factors in the development of alternative modes of self-expression and patterns of cultural consumption. By exploring the ways in which the performance of decadence emerged and played out in the periphery, and how it interacted with and differed from trends from the cultural center, this paper aims to enrich our understanding of the repertoire of Soviet dissent. By tracing the gap between subversive speech and everyday Soviet practice, it also aims to suggest why fin-de-siecle modes of self-fashioning were relevant in the post-Khrushchev 1960s and how they interacted with Soviet contemporaneity.