SUMMARY:

The article looks at the ways in which different forms of imperialism and neo-Eurasianism in contemporary Russian art and politics have combined geopolitical notions with a neoclassical aesthetics and, at the same time, with a vision of the Soviet past and the late Soviet underground as a closed space untainted by consumerism and globalization. It focuses, in particular, on the work of the postmodern imperialist writer Pavel Krusanov and the public performances of the group he led, the Petersburg Fundamentalists. By looking at the sources of this group’s artistic strategies, to be found in the work of the cult underground artists and performers Timur Novikov and Sergey Kuryokhin, the article argues that, among some nationalist circles, perestroika and the 1990s are associated with the disaster produced by a “Western cultural colonization” of Russia – but are also seen, nostalgically, as a time of intellectual freedom, creativity, and radicalism not yet contaminated by the boredom and conformism of the neoliberal world order. The paradoxical combination of conservatism and postmodern irony informing the Fundamentalists’ imperial imagination is indicative of a transitional moment within post-Soviet literature and public culture, when fringe political ideas move farther and farther into the mainstream, and when the irony, aesthetic provocations, and performativity of the late Soviet underground – originally oriented toward a deconstruction of Soviet grand narratives – develop into new political technologies and forms of mass manipulation. The article concludes that although the Petersburg Fundamentalists anticipated these larger cultural trends, their work should not simply be seen as a symptom of Russia’s decline into populism, but rather as an experiment in political imagination and a reaction to the fundamental disengagement and depoliticization of Russian society after the end of the Soviet Union.