The Art of the Leningrad Underground

Please join us for a lecture by Alexander V. Markov, Professor and Deputy Dean, Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow. This talk will be in Russian.

Russian literary theory holds that the Petersburg/Leningrad text in Russian culture plays a vital role in the creative arts. The international recognition of Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky points us toward an understanding of the Leningrad text, which is always replete with paradoxes, allusions, socially significant projects and philological reflections. The prominent poets of Leningrad’s “second culture”—Leonid Aronzon and Elena Shvarts, for instance—or the representatives of the philological school have shown that any and all poetic texts have an aesthetic and metaphysical dimension. Photography, cinema, and art collections served not only as inspiration but are an integral part of their neo-modernist project.