Mark Lipovetsky 
Postmodern Crises 
From Lolita to Pussy Riot

Postmodern Crises collects previously published and yet unpublished Mark Lipovetsky’s articles on Russian literature and film. Written in different years, they focus on cultural and aesthetic crises that, taken together, constitute the postmodern condition of Russian culture. The reader will find here articles about classic subversive texts (such as Nabokov’s
Lolita), performances (Pussy Riot), and recent, but also subversive, films. Other articles discuss such authors as Vladimir Sorokin, such sociocultural discourses as the discourse of scientific intelligentsia; post-Soviet adaptations of Socialist Realism, and contemporary trends of “complex” literature, as well as literary characters turned into cultural tropes (the Strugatsky’s progressors). The book will be interesting for teachers and scholars of contemporary Russian literature and culture; it can be used both in undergraduate and graduate courses.

Cuprins

Preface

LITERATURE

The War of Discourses: Lolita and the Failure of a Transcendental Project

The Poetics of the ITR Discourse: In the 1960s and Today

The Progressor between the Imperial and the Colonial

Cycles and Continuities in Contemporary Russian Literature

Flеshing/Flashing the Discourse: Sorokin’s Master Trope

Pussy Riot as the Trickstar

The Formal Is Political

FILM

Post-Soc: Transformations of Socialist Realism in the Popular Culture of the Late 1990s–Early 2000s

War as the Family Value: My Stepbrother Frankenstein by Valery Todorovsky

A Road of Violence: My Joy by Sergei Loznitsa

In Denial: The Geographer Drank His Globe Away by Aleksandr Veledinsky

Lost in Translation: Short Stories by Mikhail Segal

Works Cited

Despre autor

Mark Lipovetsky is professor and chair of the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Colorado-Boulder. He is the author of more than a hundred articles and eight books, as well as co-editor of fifteen volumes on Russian literature and culture. Currently, Lipovetsky is working on a critical biography of Dmitry Prigov and serves as the editor of the poet’s collected works. In 2014, Lipovetsky received an award of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages for the outstanding contribution to scholarship.