Julia Vaingurt | Spring 2026 Book Talk Series: 'Soft Matter: The Poetics of Weakness in Late Soviet Socialism'

Artists of the late Soviet era sought new, nonconformist ways of approaching literary fiction, arriving at weakness as 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.

Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies | View More Events
Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies, Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (OWNER), Slavic Languages & Literatures

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