Khelenuktism and Late Soviet Unofficial Culture

This project investigates the Leningrad Khelenukty group, a literary association in the context of the late Soviet underground (Vladimir Erl’, Aleksej Khvostenko, Aleksandr Mironov, and others). The Khelenukty were one of the leading neo-avant-garde groups active in the late Soviet unofficial community from 1965 until around 1970–1971, yet to this day, little is known about them. The project describes Khelenuktism within a framework of traditions of avant-garde and absurdist literature. I will analyze how these writers elaborate the experimental aesthetics of the early twentieth century during the late Thaw and the early Stagnation period. The project brings to light both Futurist and OBERIU sources of Khelenukt aesthetics, as well as connections to works created in the circle of A.K. Tolstoy and the Zhemchuzhnikov brothers, under the name of Kozma Prutkov, and influences of older neo-avant-garde contemporaries (the Verpa group, the Malaia Sadovaia circle, and writers in their orbit). Khelenuktism’s aesthetic foundations are reconstructed to correlate with the group’s active practice of the art of living. Artists’ behavior, which had evolved, via the post-Romantic tradition, Symbolism, the avant-garde and the art of the happening (Alan Kaprow), into a full-fledged artistic experiment, was implemented in “dramagedies,” an experimental genre invented by the Khelenukty. Members of the group followed in the footsteps of Futurism to create an absurdist theater of everyday life at the same time as artists elsewhere were elaborating the aesthetics of the “happening” and managing to free themselves and other participants from the regulatory framework circumscribing Soviet life. My aim is to determine how Khelenuktism forms its own ways of reconstructing the Russian avant-garde tradition, focusing on how these writers are involved in the current international neo-avant-garde context (the beatniks, the Wiener Gruppe) and in the American experimental art of the happening. My project will take into consideration the intellectual history of Soviet culture, the theory of reception, and studies on the art of living. The research project is based on unpublished archival materials and unpublished interviews with protagonists of the epoch. Khelenuktism will be described for the first time not as a local Leningrad experience but as an element of the late Soviet underground, placed within the context of the contemporaneous Soviet, European, and American neo-avant-garde artistic trends. It will be the first book on Khelenuktism to make its artistic experience, both unique to and symptomatic of a particular cultural and historical context, accessible to an international public.