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 expands on Vaingurt’s thesis by tracing late Soviet cultural resistance back to a rejection at the turn of the twentieth century of vulgarized Nietzscheanism, an ideology that fused with Marxism to promote a cult of willpower, heroic self-sacrifice, and masculine dominance. The author argues that this historical embrace of softness serves as a vital resource for resisting contemporary militarism and the global resurgence of anti-liberal, cynical cults of strength.