This presentation will address the cultural recycling of the 1990s in Russian popular culture. Dr. Engström argues that the phenomenon of the ‘returning 1990s’ should be considered within the framework of the meta-modernist paradigm. An important characteristic of meta-modernism as a new cultural paradigm is the coexistence of various ideological positions that seek neither conflict nor synthesis. The 1990s, a time that has diametrically opposing perceptions in Russian society and culture, is an era well suited to meta-modernist oscillation, simultaneous acceptance and rejection.
Presenter:
Dr. Maria Engström is Professor of Russian at Uppsala University, Sweden. Her research focuses on Russian neoconservative intellectual milieu, imperial aesthetics in contemporary Russian literature and art, late Soviet underground culture, post-Soviet utopian imagination, and the role of the Orthodox Church in contemporary Russian politics. She co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture, Oxford University Press (2023) and Digital Orthodoxy: Mediating Post-Secularity in Russia (2015). Engström’s publications include articles ‘Re-imagining antiquity: The conservative discourse of ‘Russia as the true Europe’ and Kremlin’s new cultural policy’ (2020), ‘Visualizing the Conservative Revolution: Alternative Globalization and Aesthetic Utopia of ‘Novorossiia’’ (2018), and 'Contemporary Russian Messianism and New Russian Foreign Policy' (2014). Her current project ‘No(w)stalgia of Modernity: Neo-Soviet Myth in Contemporary Russian Culture’ (2020-2024) is supported by the Swedish Research Council.
Moderator:
Dr. Marlene Laruelle is a Director and Research Professor at the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES). At IERES, she is also Director of the Illiberalism Studies Program and the Russia Program, and Co-Director of PONARS (Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia).
This event is on record and open to the media.
The Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES)
Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University
1957 E Street, NW / Suite 412 / Washington, DC 20052
