Russian postmodernism

Artistic and literary origins

In art, postmodernism entered the Soviet Union in the 1950s after the end of the Stalinist move toward liberalization with the advent of the Russian conceptualist movement. Beginning as an underground political-artistic move against the use of Socialist realism as a method of social control and becoming a full-fledged movement with the Moscow Conceptualists, Russian conceptualism used the symbolism of Socialist realism against the Soviet government. Its representatives were artists Ilya Kabakov, Irina Nakhova, Viktor Pivovarov, Eric Bulatov, Andrei Monastyrski, Komar and Melamid, poets Vsevolod Nekrasov, Dmitri Prigov, Lev Rubinstein, Timur Kibirov, and writer Vladimir Sorokin.

The members of Lianozovo Group formed in 1958 and named after the small village Lianozovo outside Moscow, were its leader, the artist and poet Evgenii Kropivnitsky, the artists Olga Potapova, Oscar Rabin, Lidia Masterkova, Vladimir Nemukhin, Nikolai Vechtomov, and the poets Igor Kholin, Vsevolod Nekrasov, and Genrikh Sapgir.

The Metarealists, namely metaphysical realists, in the 1970s–90s unofficial postmodern Soviet and Russian poetry, who all used complex metaphors which they called meta-metaphors. Their representatives are Konstantin Kedrov, Elena Katsyuba, Elena Shvarts, Ivan Zhdanov, Vladimir Aristov, Aleksandr Yeryomenko, Yuri Arabov, and Alexei Parshchikov.