Presentations by Streams

The panel will discuss several important trends in Russian literature and culture of the 2000s-2020s related to the emergence of the ethical turn in literary texts and in performances. It will analyse how the impact of social media on Russian writers and performers in the last thirty years has enabled them to reinvent themselves as public intellectuals who are eager to reach new transnational audiences. As Odile Heynders writes, “Today’s public intellectual operates in a media-saturated society and has to be visible in order to communicate to a broad public”. (Odile Heynders. Writers as Public Intellectuals: Literature, Celebrity, Democracy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 3.) One of the main communicative strategies of Russian postmodernist authors and performers is related to the deconstruction of myths pertaining to communist ideology, history, and Russian classical canon. The panel will develop Mark Lipovetsky’s view of Russian contemporary culture as a space of deconstruction and restructuring “along different counter-mythological principles”. (M. Lipovetsky. “The Aesthetic Code of Russian Postmodernism”, Russian culture, 2012, 1-36; https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/russian_culture/19)