The Unofficial Field of Late Soviet Culture

This article proposes a new interdisciplinary model for investigating unofficial culture and dissident social activity in the post-Stalin period. Although binary oppositions like art versus politics and unofficial versus official are recognized today to be ideologically implicated and critically out...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Slavic review 2007, Vol.66 (4), p.605-629
Main Author: Komaromi, Ann
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Art Works
Bourdieu, Pierre (1930-2002)
Communist Societies
Culture
Dissent
Esenin-Volpin, Alexander
Genealogies of Soviet Dissent
Historical analysis
Ideology
Informal groups
Interdisciplinary Approach
Liberalism
Literary criticism
Lyric poetry
Poetry
Political conditions
Political freedom
Political opposition
Politics
Romantic poetry
Russian culture
Russian history
Russian literature
Russian politics
Siniavsky, Andrei (1925-1997)
Slavic literature
Social participation
Soviet studies
Theory of culture
U.S.S.R
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
Writers
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Summary:This article proposes a new interdisciplinary model for investigating unofficial culture and dissident social activity in the post-Stalin period. Although binary oppositions like art versus politics and unofficial versus official are recognized today to be ideologically implicated and critically outmoded, Ann Komaromi argues that they have a certain usefulness when reconceived as structural components of an autonomous unofficial field. This critical model is developed with polemical reference to Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the field of culture. The late Soviet opposition between art and politics is explored through Andrei Siniavskii's struggle with editors over the 1965 edition of Boris Pasternak's poetry and via the organization of the famous 5 December 1965 “Meeting of Openness” coordinated by Aleksandr Esenin-Vol'pin. The critical model proposed emphasizes the material history of conceptions of autonomy fundamental to the field, profiling dynamic binaries and permeable boundaries as sites of critical interest.
ISSN:0037-6779
2325-7784
DOI:10.2307/20060375