UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines how Russophone cultural production from the late Soviet period to the early twenty-first century mediates and renders legible the experience of historical time under conditions of global capitalist transformation. Focusing on late Soviet cinema, post-Soviet prose, and contemporary multimedia art, it asks how aesthetic forms organize and make perceptible the temporal contradictions associated with the decline of state socialism and its aftermath. I argue that these works are best understood not as responses to discrete historical breaks, but rather as situated within and expressive of a single, uneven temporal formation that I call the “Long Contemporary.” Emerging from the global reorganization of capitalism beginning in the 1970s, this formation is structured by abstract, socially necessary labor time and produces a totalizing yet internally differentiated experience of the present.I advance both a historical and a logical claim that must be understood together but not conflated, and whose coupling becomes visible through attention to aesthetic form. Historically, I argue that late socialism, postsocialist transformation, and the consolidation of authoritarian neoliberalism form a coherent phase of global restructuring, within which the former socialist world occupies a structurally significant position. Logically, it argues that contemporaneity names the temporal form adequate to this phase: a totalizing yet differentiated structure that organizes social life through abstraction while generating multiple, asynchronous experiences of time. Aesthetic form provides the medium through which these two dimensions—historical process and temporal logic—are mediated and rendered intelligible.Rather than treating cultural works as passive reflections of historical change, I examine how their formal organization—narrative temporality, abstraction, allegory, genre, etc.—makes perceptible the temporal structure of the Long Contemporary. Cultural production thus offers a privileged site for apprehending a social totality that is unified at the level of value while fractured in lived experience. The argument proceeds through a periodization of three historically specific moments within this broader formation: late-Soviet stagnation, post-Soviet peripheralization, and Putin-era belatedness, each associated with distinct aesthetic problems and formal strategies.At the same time, the dissertation intervenes in broader accounts of globalization and contemporaneity by insisting on the centrality of the former socialist world to both. Dominant narratives both in scholarship and popular culture have tended to marginalize or omit the Soviet and post-Soviet experience, treating it as derivative of developments in the capitalist “core” or subsuming it within a Global North/Global South framework that renders the Second World conceptually invisible. Against this tendency, I argue that the trajectory from late socialism through postsocialist transformation is not external to globalization but constitutive of it. The Long Contemporary names a global condition whose contradictions become particularly legible in the cultural forms of the former socialist world.The argument unfolds through three case studies. Chapter One examines late Soviet cinema, especially the work of Gleb Panfilov, whose aesthetics of animated suspension mediate the experience of stagnation in late socialism. Chapter Two turns to the prose of Aleksandr Prokhanov and Viktor Pelevin, where abstraction, allegory, and imperial fantasy organize the experience of rapid peripheralization in the 1990s. Chapter Three analyzes the work of the Chto Delat? art collective, whose hybrid theatrical and pedagogical forms confront the conditions of neoliberal authoritarianism and historical belatedness in the 2000s and early 2010s. By tracing how cultural production renders the temporal structure of the Long Contemporary intelligible across its distinct moments, the project repositions the former Soviet world as central to theorizing globalization, contemporaneity, and the politics of aesthetic form.