Abstract

This article introduces postmodernist trends in late Soviet thought through the prism of the three generations: the philosopher and writer Aleksandr Zinoviev, the poet, artist, and theorist Dmitrii Prigov, and the youngest Soviet conceptualist artistic group “The Medical Hermeneutics Inspectorate” as represented by Pavel Peppershtein, Sergei Anufriev, and Yurii Leiderman. The article shows how Conceptualism, an influential artistic and intellectual movement of the 1970s–1980–s, used the Soviet ideological system as a material for philosophical parody and pastiche, often characterized also by a lyrical and nostalgic attitude. Conceptualism was not merely an artistic trend: its metaphysical significance is revealed in Aleksander Zinoviev's “satirical” treatises, in Dmitrii Prigov's “shimmering” aesthetics, and in “heremeneutic” performances of younger artists who demonstrate the emptiness of all existing canons and the canon of emptiness itself.