This formidable 1,044–page–long volume presents a major problem for any reviewer. How does one approach an edited collection of forty–four individual essays commissioned and compiled by five–coeditors from four countries? When it takes six full pages only to provide (short) bios of the contributors, does it make sense to discuss the volume’s methodological coherence, conceptual clarity, or interpretive consistency? Hardly, I would say. The criteria should come from elsewhere. In this case, I believe, the value of this impressive and impactful collection lies not in its thematic harmony or theoretical unity, but in the kaleidoscopic diversity of actors, trends, places, and movements that the Handbook has assembled. It is a map, a guide, and a dictionary all in one.

It is thus not surprising that the editorial collective embraced the inevitable. The conceptual introduction to the Handbook amplified the structural heterogeneity of the volume even more by offering a very diffused understanding of its subject matter: Soviet Underground Culture (SUC hereafter). The editors insisted on moving beyond the dominant dichotomizing view of late Soviet cultural production, which habitually contrasts the official, censored, and dogmatic world of socialist realism with the experimental, sophisticated, and politically and aesthetically unrestrained underworld of cultural resistance (1). As an alternative, the collective presented a hybrid solution of sorts. The bipolar spatial vision shaped by the Cold War was somewhat retained yet significantly softened and complicated. While keeping the foundational logic of opposition intact, the editors reframed the SUC as “a counter-utopia.” However, this counter-utopia had no single dominant thread or direction. Unlike the monolith of the official, communist, utopia, the “counter-utopia” was constituted by “a whole archipelago of interconnected and isolated “islands” inhabited by underground circles and groups, each with its own aesthetics, ethics, and politics” (3).

I find this metaphorical pixelation of SUC quite helpful. It highlights the distinctive ecosystems nurtured within each “island,” and creates plenty of metaphorical possibilities for discovering gaps and distances between them. Yet I am mindful of the obfuscation that this approach creates. Archipelago, as we all remember, initially meant chief sea in Greek, with multiple islands being its most characteristic feature. Put another way: by shifting the focus to the islands, we tend to overlook the sea that in fact “hosts,” “surrounds,” and eventually “erodes” them.

In his contribution to the volume, Dirk Uffelmann attempted to rephrase this nissological (island-centered) approach to SUC by offering a mycological interpretation instead. In his reading, SUC’s “diffuse milieu ‘under the surface’” can be seen as both: “overlapping rhizomatic root systems” and “a center-less fungal tissue structure.” “When a mushroom breaks through the ground, this does not yet constitute an underground event”; similarly, “the incisive “removal” … of a single mushroom does not destroy its mycological feeding basis’’ (142).

Uffelmann’s “rephrasing” adds an important dimension of volatility and decentered directionality lacking in the nissological approach. Whether seen as an island formation (above/below the water) or a mushroom colony (above/below the ground), these spatial interpretations of SUC foreground the same key problem that reappears in almost every contribution: Namely, where and how should SUC be located? Consequently, throughout the Handbook, cultural analysis often assumes the logic of a topographic endeavor (a map and a guide), and much analytical energy is invested in attempts to determine the precise coordinates of various “islands” (or “mushrooms”).

Predictably, many SUC groups are defined geographically. Their aesthetic activity is not just situated, it acquires a propiska—the official residence—below, above, or “in-between” the domains of official culture. In fact, the geographic propiska functions as the main clue for describing cultural phenomena: “the Ukrainian Underground,” “Belarusian Underground Culture,” “the Ferghana School of Poetry,” “the Lianozovo School,” “the Leningrad School,” and so on. This geographic treatment of aesthetic trends is as prevalent as it is puzzling. There are no obvious conceptual or historical reasons for identifying aesthetic movements by the places of their origin. True, a few contributors have built their narratives around sexual, gender, or ethnic identities. However, their interventions do not change the overall epistemic dilemma: Why should the study of the SUC assume a form of identity––given by place, body, or blood–as its default background? Or to inverse it: What is it about the artistic and ideological aspects of SUC that activates rather essentializing frameworks of belonging and locatedness again and again? Could clustering the same material around aesthetic methods, philosophical inclinations, or historical sensitivity (to name just a few) produce a very different map of SUC, where identitarian distinctions–between, for example, Belarusian seekers of national authenticity, Jewish revivalist, and the “occulturists” from the Iuzhinskii circle––would be not only unnoticeable, but also analytically irrelevant and aesthetically meaningless?

Undoubtedly, the emergence of such “cross-cultural” comparisons is only a matter of time. Within the volume itself, the topographic endeavors proceeded in very different directions–mostly along two key lines. The chapters in Part V (Lifeworlds) focus on the internal characteristics of individual “islands” or “island formations” to examine their unique flora and fauna. The other four parts–Precursors, Institutions, Mapping, Forms and Media–provide a more panoramic view by situating the various “islands” in their relation to the troika of “seas”: the Soviet system at large, socialist realism, and Russophone culture. In some cases, these “seas” could be grouped together; in others, the engagement could be more discerning. Despite these minor differences, this three-dimensional space seems to shape the internal and external dynamics of SUC: Being “underground” largely meant going against the already established canons. The following quote from Ilja Kukuj’s essay refers to Leningrad poets, but I think his comments could easily describe SUC authors and practitioners as a whole: “They were forced to enter the unofficial literary field because they were unwilling to live with the official canonical framework” (654).

This “unwillingness,” however, was a tricky thing, and the volume powerfully illustrates the old psychoanalytic dogma that negation rarely functions as a sign of liberation. More often, it confirms the condition of negative dependency. The Moscow conceptualists arguably embodied this state with particular intensity. As Daniil Leiderman and Mark Lipovetsky explain, “their investigation and usage of Soviet language—the discourses and styles of official Soviet culture … was paradoxically combined with [what Dmitrii Prigov described as] the “rejection of the Soviet system in all its manifestations—its language, its institutions, its representatives” (896). Their incomplete detachment––the interpellation that they could neither reject nor escape––tended to result in various forms of mimetic resistance. Sylvia Sasse described this as “subversive affirmation,” clarifying that it did not merely conceal “actions in the guise of conformity” but also worked “as a trick to make subversive art look like Socialist Realism” (531).

As inventive and successful as this kind of trickstering may have been, it could not hide the central problem underlined in several contributions. Largely, SUC was a culture of retrospection driven by the logic of restoration and retrieval. Depending on the context, this orientation toward the past could be framed as a search for revival, rebirth, or re-animation of lost authenticity or roots, or as “transmission” of repressed traditions and conventions. However, the outcome of this differently expressed “conservative urge” (835) appears to be somewhat similar. The end product is “a sort of ‘memory aesthetics,’” with a greatly diminished role for “the novelty of the artworks,” as Klavdia Smola defines it (855). Developing new cultural frameworks, methods, or languages was considered less important than demonstrating one’s affiliation with a particular tradition, movement, or milieu beyond the familiar socio-temporal Soviet landscape. Josephine von Zitzewitz captured well the sociological importance of this aesthetic strategy: “Anxiety of influence was … not a factor…. By highlighting their filial ties to the Silver Age, the Leningrad school poets undertook a courageous attempt at inscribing themselves into the Russian tradition, tracing their own roots back to a time before Soviet ideology changed the course of literary history by force” (822).

Of course, this creative self-fashioning (at the expense of artistic creativity) was hardly a late Soviet problem. Half a century earlier, Russian formalist Boris Eikhenbaum perceptively observed that in the history of literature “how to write” is sometimes less important than “how to be a writer.”Footnote ¹ In a sense, the volume under review extends and expands the program for the literary sociology that the formalist envisioned but did not quite implement. By closely examining various networks, institutions, and settings, the authors restore the complex and contradictory texture of what could be called (following Eikhenbaum) the cultural byt of the late Soviet underground. In fact, I would argue that the volume as a whole successfully re-casts Soviet underground culture as a form of byt: a routine, daily production, and reproduction of the fundamentals of being. Detailed, informative, and highly nuanced discussions of cultural strategies, exchanges, associations, and authorial self-positioning push the cultural analysis of artifacts themselves into the background. For the first time, perhaps, readers will find important surveys and meticulous reconstructions of the social and institutional infrastructure that enabled the existence of nonofficial art and artists for decades: journals, cafes, performance venues, salons, prizes, collectors, translations, publishers, and so on.

Certainly, such discussions reveal vital missing links; they draw our attention to the overlooked aspects of SUC, too. However, I wonder if this fascination with the cultural byt of SUC is more than a manifestation of the scholarly aspiration to recreate the past in all its meaningful details. Predominantly, the volume exhibits what formalists in the 1920s called “the orientation toward the material” (ustanovka na material). Very few contributors attempted to move beyond the restorative tasks and offer their own conceptualization of the SUC. Their close-up portraits of groups and exhaustive biographies of individuals left no room for potential dialogues between the study of the SUC and structurally similar phenomena. For instance, references to Subaltern studies are almost entirely absent from the volume; as are links to the scholarship on the weapons of the weak inspired by Michel de Certeau and James C. Scott.

The point is not to theorize or compare for the sake of it. The point is to demonstrate the relevance of SUC to the larger scholarly community and to avoid the epistemic pitfalls encountered by others. For instance, I find it telling that, apart from a few cases, the volume’s extensive exploration of underground culture in the USSR did not provoke any analysis of power dynamics. Most contributions surprisingly present power in a pre-Foucauldian and even pre-Gramscian mode: as a hydraulic force of sorts. This “physical” understanding of power directly affects the understanding of subjectivity. Despite all the references to the double-life of SUC actors, their memoirs and ego-documents are nonetheless considered as some ultimate, authentic, and truthful evidence, untouched by the otherwise corroding environment (needless to say, there is no direct dialogue with studies of Soviet subjectivity pioneered by Jochen Hellbeck).

Perhaps this conceptual sensibility was a response to the available sources. After all, this is a collection mostly produced by philologists with a predictable predisposition toward high culture, literary sources, and a powerful presence of the author-producer. A shift toward the cultural consumption of nonofficial literature, a focus on less logocentric forms and media, and attention to more diverse social groups (can Soviet peasants be nonofficial, too?) would generate a very different version of SUC: less metropolitan, less male, and even less educated. Such studies would require different research and conceptual skills, and different professional training. It might take some time, too. For now, The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture offers us an imposing and inspiring foundation in the important process of reclaiming and reconstructing the diverse world of unofficial Soviet culture.