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 a poetics of 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’s author connects Vaingurt’s analysis to her own research on marginalized writers who used naivete and insignificance as a subversive tool to navigate a society obsessed with overachievement and rigid masculinity. These creators often performed a double underground existence while remaining deeply rooted in the broader Russian literary tradition. While praising the book, the essay offers a critical intervention regarding the exclusion of women from these all-male intellectual circles, questioning whether a philosophy of weakness can be truly transformative if it continues to reinforce gendered hierarchies.