Please join the Harriman Institute for an 80th Anniversary Lecture by Mark Lipovetsky. Moderated by Valentina Izmirlieva.
Stealing is the key principle of the “patriotic style” as the core of the official culture of Russia in the 2000s-2020s. Stealing may take the form of cultural appropriation, cosplay and plagiarism, or postmodernist irony. It is hardly surprising that so many of the large-scale projects discussed above are also driven by theft and corruption. In all these examples, stealing is not concealed; quite the contrary, it is flaunted and turned into a spectacle of political, economic and symbolic power. This style suggests a new type of postmodernist hyperreality of simulacra. Infused with the rhetoric of Russia’s and the Russian people’s cultural and political superiority, this style creates a simulacrum of the Russian Great Tradition – of the totalizing orientation toward the past that absorbs the present and the future. This tradition is able to unite the ancient and the modern, the global and the local. Within its magical context, “borrowings” become authentic and “ours”; they all signify an imaginary Russian state spreading from Rurik to Putin, without any significant changes.
Mark Lipovetsky is Professor and Chair, Department of Slavic Languages at Columbia University. His research interests include Russian postmodernism, New Drama, Soviet literary and cinematic tricksters, Soviet underground culture as well as various aspects of post-Soviet culture. He is the author of twelve monographs and two hundred articles. He is one of coauthors of the Oxford History of Russian Literature (2018). In 2022, Lipovetsky published a monograph A Guerilla Logos: The Project of Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov (co-authored with Ilya Kukulin); he also curated the publication of Prigov’s five-volume collected works at NLO Press in Moscow. He also co-edited twenty collections of articles on Russian literature and culture of the 20th-21st centuries, including volumes on Dmitry Prigov, Vladimir Sorokin, Vladimir Sharov, and the Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture (2024). Lipovetsky is a recipient of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages award for the outstanding contribution to scholarship (2014) and Andrey Belyi Prize (2019). At Columbia University, Lipovetsky runs the Contemporary Culture Series that includes talks, conversations and symposia on most significant aspects of contemporary Russophone culture.
