Cultural recycling
Metamodern flows in Russia’s culture
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
In contemporary Russian film, music and fashion, a recycling of protagonists, aesthetics and ideas from the late Soviet underground and the post-Soviet years during the 1990s can be observed. What at that time were utopias of a Russian ideological and aesthetic alternative to the West are now becoming increasingly mainstream. The artists view the world through meta-modern eyes. They fluctuate between hope and melancholy, empathy and apathy, between the modern search for meaning and the post-modern doubt about the meaning of everything. Their cultural practice is the harmless, commercially attractive imitation of a revolution. The culture of the metamodern fits in with the current central political theme in Russia: “Globalisation without westernisation”, incorporation into the global market, while at the same time turning its back on the norms of the “first world”.
(Osteuropa 5/2019, pp. 55–72)