Soft Matter
The Poetics of Weakness in Late Soviet Socialism

Julia Vaingurt (Author)

9780810148154, Northwestern University Press

Paperback / softback, published 15 January 2025

320 pages, 15 b&w halftones
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.454 kg

“Soft Matter seems all too necessary in a world newly divided and threatened by aggressive populism, military invasions, climate change, and increasing socio-economic inequality. Vaingurt’s study of “weakness” makes an important contribution to ongoing conversations about Soviet culture after Stalin, the challenges of late modernity, the need to reconsider gender categories, and the ethical and political potentials of solidarity based on human vulnerability.” —Ann Komaromi, University of Toronto

"Julia Vaingurt’s Soft Matter brilliantly elucidates a set of attitudes within late Soviet culture that opposed the dominant discourse of heroism and masculinity by embracing “weakness” as a desirable human condition. Not only is this a rich study in the intersection of literary and philosophical ideas, it is especially apt in an era when a Russian regime has once again resorted to masking its own weakness behind grotesque and exaggerated claims of masculinity."—Thomas Seifrid, University of Southern California, Dornsife

Identifies and examines a poetics of weakness in Soviet underground literature

Artists of the late Soviet era sought new, nonconformist ways of approaching literary fiction, arriving at weaknessas a crucial principle of narrative and character formation. Julia Vaingurt argues that this counter-discourse of strategic weakness constituted both an aesthetic strategy and an ethical code, affording like-minded authors a feeling of recognition and commonality and uniting an international community of artists in resistance to the divisiveness of their worlds. Soft Matter: The Poetics of Weakness in Late Soviet Socialism explores the cultivation of weak subjectivity through modes such as gender subversion, queer holy foolishness, intoxication, madness, and writing disorders like graphomania and writer’s block. Identifying the poetics of weakness as formative for Soviet underground literature of the 1960s and ’70s, Vaingurt also traces the inheritance of a far older tradition within Russian culture of salutary weakness. As democratic deliberation continues to be under threat around the world, alternatives to the ubiquitous politics of force are an aesthetic, ethical, and ideological imperative.