The Late-Soviet Underground: (Re-)Collecting the Past

In the paper being presented at this colloquium, UDP translator Ainsley Morse argues for collecting—meaning collecting variously ephemeral “things” (words, poems, books, writers, traditions, ways of life), but also “collecting” as a mode of writing—as both a pathology and a creative mode typical of unofficial literature and art of the late Soviet period. She focuses on two late-Soviet writers: the poet and critic Vsevolod Nekrasov and the poet, critic, curator and émigré Kulturtraeger Konstantin Kuzminsky. Both Kuzminsky and Nekrasov were true “children of the Thaw” in their obsession with truth-telling, “straight talk” and bracing expose [razoblachenie]. Along the same lines, they also both had a utopian orientation that reveals itself in their collecting activities.

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