Literary Cultures of 1970s and 1980s Odes(s)a

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Cultures of Decline IV: Economic Downturn and Second World Cultural Production II

Abstract

This paper considers a set of russophone Odes(s)a texts produced in the 70s and 80s, including samizdat poetry, dissident memoir, and "borderline" literary texts like stand-up monologues and diary entries, as signs of a shift in cultural understanding of the opposition of the "high" and the "low" in the period of late-Soviet stagnation. Following Bakhtin's writing on Rabelais, I ask: what took place in Soviet Odes(s)an culture after the high was already brought low in the Stalinist period? The paper considers this conceptual work in relation to Odes(s)a’s anarchist history and to its later association with localist apoliticism.

Author

• Olena Tsykynovska, U of Chicago