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 highlights how Vaingurt identifies a unique “middle ground” for the individual, navigating between traditional liberal autonomy and total absorption by state discourse through a rigorous and unpredictable application of queer theory. The author explicates the book’s commitment to ethical nuance over simple historical remediation and demonstration of how fragile, nonbinary identities and unreliable memories functioned as quiet forms of resistance against the rigid certainties of mature socialism.