Julia Vaingurt’s latest book explores how images of weak male characters are an enduring, complex part of late-Soviet writing and film. Published by Northwestern University Press, one of the leading North American venues, the monograph links the USSR’s banned or unofficial cinema and fiction with western trends via the depiction of masculine characters. As Vaingurt notes, the debate over “soft,” ineffectual men involves larger issues over blurred gender roles, ideological inertia, and a literature attempting to come to terms with these changes (6–8). Soft Matter examines this overarching pattern to give new insights into well-known yet marginal work (by Venedikt Erofeev, Sasha Sokolov, Andrei Bitov) and less-studied works of literature and film, including by Ukrainian director Larisa Shepitko and authors Evgenii Kharitonov and Iulii Kim. Vaingurt convincingly argues that male weakness, while antithetical to socialist dogma as well as pre-1917 conceptions of masculinity, is a liberating and subversive mode of existence. Discussing the west, her work references the characters of Kurt Vonnegut and Ernest Hemingway as antipodes of male behavior. In the era of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, who praise and exacerbate the troubling cult of strength and masculinity, her book is particularly timely (14).

The debate over weakness in late-Soviet literature, she notes, actually begins with the “superfluous man” in nineteenth-century literature. Even Stalinism, which extolled the virile masculine body, repeatedly depicted the damaged and ailing male form, as Lilya Kaganovsky has shown (34–35). The book’s introduction, six chapters, and final section (“In Conclusion: A Manifesto”) cover the last decades of Soviet culture, although the focus is on the period before perestroika. Vaingurt references Serguei Oushakine (a pioneer in Eurasian masculinity studies) as well as Marko Dumančić’s stellar book on men in Soviet film. One of the book’s strengths is an impressive array of images: fifteen cinema stills and other illustrations enhance how Vaingurt contextualizes literature and film within the USSR’s artistic and cultural debates.

Vaingurt’s conclusion is unexpectedly personal. She recounts how the discovery of a serious illness in graduate school changed her own life and how she understood weakness in Soviet culture (191–92). This fusing of the corporeal, intellectual, emotional, and academic is a welcome innovation in our field, which often ignores how scholars’ positionalities influence their analysis. However, this final portion of the book also needs to better tie together the various strands running throughout her study: weakness (physical, spiritual), the impending end of the USSR, the shifting divide between official and opposition culture, the role of the Russian writer, gender politics, and the ties between the Soviet Union and the west.

Perhaps due to its wide-ranging discussion, some portions of the book stray from the main premise (for instance, the discussion of Kurt Vonnegut’s character, Billy Pilgrim, 56; the letter Ю in Erofeev’s novella, 112–14; and Sokolov and St. Vitus’s dance, 126). Some chapters need more of a conclusion to connect their various arguments (see, for example, the end of Ch. 1, 45; the final page of Ch. 6, 185). Vaingurt could have included other writing that depicted male weakness in the 1960s–early 1980s. In her endnotes she mentions the prose of Iurii Trifonov, which straddled the boundary between the permissible and forbidden in mainstream writing. Another source could be the disappointing men whom authors Irina Grekova and Liudmila Petrushevskaia envision. Grekova gives staid, circumspect discussions of moral shortcomings. Petrushevskaia (even before perestroika) more graphically represents male failures through alcoholism, rape, suicide, and so on (as Helena Goscilo has chronicled).

Soft Matter is well-written, with an engaging style that does not sacrifice nuance and rigor. At times the language could be less opaque. The works cited and index are solidly crafted. This monograph is an intriguing, rigorous analysis of a trope in Soviet literature that, to borrow from Gary Saul Morson, is “hidden in plain view” and has eluded sustained analysis. Vaingurt’s work fills this gap, serving as a useful and pertinent study of the fraught relationship between body, intellect, film, and writing in late-Soviet culture.