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Doing Sincerity. Writing and Reading the Self in Post-Soviet Russia
05.01.2010, 18:15 Uhr
Ort: Peter Szondi Institut für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Habelschwerdter Allee 45, 14195 Berlin-Dahlem, Raum JK 28 / 208 (Rostlaube)
Vortrag von Dr. Ellen Rutten (University of Bergen)
Twenty-first century Russia witnesses a prominent trend to define literary, artistic, and other cultural expressions as emblematic of a new Zeitgeist – one encapsulated, in Russian, in the two-worded slogan novaia iskrennost, or “new sincerity.” Such prominent cultural commentators as Mikhail Epstein and Alexei Yurchak single (a renewed) sincerity out as a salient aesthetic mode in perestroika-era and post-Soviet culture. Their observations concur with those of non-Slavist colleagues: in, among other countries, the US, Germany, and China, the phrase “new sincerity” is used to flag an alleged turn away from postmodernism towards a spanking new cultural mentality.
“Doing Sincerity” zooms in post-Soviet “sincerity talk,” with special attention for its outlines in literature and new media. It traces “new-sincere” discourse from the perspective of a cultural historian – one who does not partake in the debates, but does observe their vital role in post-Soviet processes of cultural production and consumpion. One, moreover, who feels that they form a major point of departure for current thinking on such diverging but primary mental categories as selfhood, reality, identity, language, politics, and memory.
My presentation traces “new-sincerity” discourse in its travels from a concept used by a handful of little-read writers, in the mid-1980s, into a catchphrase of post-Soviet mainstream culture in the late 2000s. My special interest have two theoretical questions: first, for participants in the debate, how do artistic and more pragmatic factors interact? In other words, how, in post-Soviet literary debate, is sincerity’s moral charge related to its inevitable involvement in market mechanisms? And second, how does talk on shifts to a “new sincere” condition interrelate with the ongoing debate on the recent Soviet past? I argue that cultural memory looms large over sincerity discourse particularly in post-Soviet Russia, where “new sincerity” is often presented as an artistic strategy for coping with the Soviet trauma.
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