The Boris Shchukin Theatre Institute, Moscow, Russian Federation
Employing the methodology of literary pragmatics, this paper analyzes the corpus of Vs. N. Nekrasov’s polemical texts from the 1990s and 2000s to determine their immanent structure and the goals the author sought to achieve. Despite the triumph of unofficial literature during this period, Nekrasov, a member of the Lianozovo group and the Moscow conceptualist movement, maintained a sharply critical stance toward the new post-Soviet cultural hierarchies. Notably, the primary targets of his criticism were most often his former underground associates, rather than authors of mass literature or former representatives of official literature. Nekrasov’s critiques simultaneously address several aspects of post-Soviet culture: the silencing of both himself and his close artistic circle; the disproportionate dominance of theory over practice in cultural studies; the superficiality of literary critics; and the conformism and cronyism (blat) of former unofficial writers. The analysis reveals previously unnoticed reasons for the poet’s harsh ethical stance. Primarily, this stance stems from Nekrasov’s conviction that the relationship between the viewer and the artist must be built on horizontal connections, entirely devoid of intermediaries. Furthermore, the study demonstrates that Nekrasov constructs his polemical texts using the same techniques he employed in his poetry. Ultimately, his primary objective in producing such a substantial volume of critical texts was to purge the sociocultural space of actors whom he deemed superfluous to the artist-viewer relationship.
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