His research interests include Russian poetry of
the nineteenth− twentieth centuries, sociology of contemporary Russian culture,
nationalist trends in contemporary Russian culture, religious images and
traditions in contemporary Russian culture, perspective and impedimenta of
feminist and postcolonial approaches to contemporary Russian culture, and the
Internet as a factor of social and cultural processes in Russia.
Aesthetic Sublime (“Popular” and “Art-House” Variants)
and Its Forms in Post-Imperial Culture and Collective Traumatic Memory
The images of tragic “uncanny sublime” constitute a significant part of the
imagery of literature and art in post-imperial countries. Their source is the
posttraumatic historical experience, caused by the radical rupture with the
bygone mythological “integrity” of the empire. The philosopher F.R. Ankersmit
suggested that personal traumatic experience could be projected in the sphere
of aesthetic expression as the Sublime. Another philosopher, Piotr Rezvykh,
criticized Ankersmit, arguing that a personal attitude to the images of “historic
sublime” has been based on ethical reflection (= dissection of the Self) and
communicative praxis of different selves. In my view, this philosophical
discussion provides a very useful methodological basis for the exploration of
post-imperial art. With some reservations, we may interpret the phenomena of
post-imperial mass culture as being ethically unreflective and directed toward
a “phantasmatic integrity,” while the works of post-imperial “art-house”/radical
art and literature – as being ethically reflective and addressed to a heterogeneous
and internally divided community. But in this latter case, the sublime itself
is radically transformed. In my presentation, I intend to offer different
examples of these types of post-imperial creativity from the post-soviet
cinema, visual art, and literature.
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