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. However, this essay complicates Vaingurt’s optimistic reading by arguing that weakness is ethically ambivalent, not only functioning as a strategic aesthetic choice but also potentially leading to alienation, despair, or even collaboration with the regime.