Very Old Songs about the Most Important: Parody → Nostalgia → Affirmation → Parody (from D.A. Prigov to Gosha Rubchinskiy)

• In Event: Remembering the Soviet: Un(Mixing) Trauma and Nostalgia

Abstract

The criticism of the Soviet, characteristic of the late Soviet era, turned out to be not very productive and, rather, on the contrary, partly contributed to its return. Looking at the poetics of the Nostalgic Socialist Realism series (early 1980s) by Komar and Melamid in a retrospective of Old Songs About the Most Important (1996), one can see how critical deconstruction paves the way for subsequent positive construction. Similarly, Bruskin’s Fundamental Lexicon (1986) seems to have already cleared the original ideological context and aesthetically mythologized the vocabulary of Soviet culture, preparing it for future patriotic re-actualization (primarily in the space of mass culture).

Author

• Ilya Kalinin, Humboldt U Berlin (Germany)