SUMMARY:

This essay is a contribution to the book forum “The Power of Soft Matter” discussing Julia Vaingurt’s book Soft Matter: The Poetics of Weakness in Late Soviet Socialism (2025), which identifies weakness as a defining aesthetic and ethical strategy in late Soviet nonofficial culture. By analyzing authors who intentionally cultivated vulnerability and failure, the book illustrates how these artists rejected the state’s ideological obsession with heroism and power in favor of a shared, tentative humanity. The essay traces a deep genealogy of refusal that connects “holy fools” and the pacifist philosophy of Leo Tolstoy to the “weak” subjects of late socialism, drawing parallels with Daoist concepts of nonaction. The author highlights how this poetics of weakness serves as a transformative methodological model for modern fields like disability and gender studies, proving that fragility can function as a sophisticated form of resilience and moral precision.