Mihailovich Aleksandar

The Mitki and Art of Postmodern Protest in Russia. 

Novoye Literaturnoye Obozreniye, Moscow, 2021

The Mitki group forms a crucial and under-researched page in the history of Russian art of the 1980s. In their satirical texts, music, films, and performances, the Mitki created politically polyvalent dissident art resembling the European avant-garde and the American counterculture. Apart from literature, journalism, and art criticism, the American scholar Alexandar Mihailovic draws upon his own extensive interviews with the Mitki — Dmitry Shagin, Vladimir Shinkarev, Olga and Alexander Florensky, Viktor Tikhomirov and others — which touch upon state authoritarianism, militarism, and social restrictions from the Brezhnev Era to the present day.

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Born in 1958 in Chicago. Philologist, culturologist, researcher of contemporary Russian cinema, Professor Emeritus of Comparative and Russian Studies at Hofstra University (Hempstead, USA), Visiting Professor of Literature at Brown University (USA). His work includes Corporeal Words: Mikhail Bakhtin’s Theology of Discourse (author), Tchaikovsky and His Contemporaries (editor), articles on cultural relations between the USSR and the USA, and other publications. Lives and works in Bennington, USA.