Description: Sots-art, the mock use of the Soviet ideological cliches of mass culture, originated in Soviet nonconformist art of the early 1970s. In literature, Sots-art stands out as one of the most distinct directions in late-twentieth-century Russian culture both in its explicit aesthetic confrontation with Soviet history and in its capacity, after many decades of socialist realism, to integrate Russian literature back into the world literary process. Sots-art has had a profound influence on contemporary Russian literature, figuring both as distinct texts and as a range of citational devices within larger, more diverse works; yet despite its centrality, Sots-art in literature has not been systematically studied, either in Russia or in the West. Endquote: Sots-art Literature and Soviet Grand Style begins that process with an examination of literary Sots-art on several levels.

The book is divided into three parts, the first conceptual, the second on Sots-art poetry, and the third on Sots-art prose. While conceptualism is a vast international movement, Sots-art (with its focus on Soviet cultural history) reworks more local artistic practices and ideological cliches. At the same time, in its reflection of the specific cultural character of Russian conceptualism and Russian postmodernism as a whole, Sots-art articulates the crisis of relations between contemporary Eastern and Western cultural models. Both inside Russia, where the 1991 collapse of communism rendered the cultural landscape difficult to comprehend, and in Western scholarship, with its crisis of traditional Sovietological matrices, the examination of emergent models structuring the contemporary literary process is a task central to anunderstanding of Russian culture since the collapse of the "Great Utopia." Endquote provides original and informative guidance in this attempt.

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