A Detour to Moscow: Vladimir Makanin’s Underground, or the Snare of the Subterranean

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. Acknowledgements vii
4. Notes on Translation and Transliteration viii
5. Preface xi
6. Part I Typology
7. The Underground and the City, Pre- and Post-1989: An Effort to Interweave Concepts 1
8. Paranoid Schizophrenia: Dissent, the Underground, and Cultural Fissure 21
9. Subverting Official Claims to Centrality: Overcity/Undercity, City/Country, East/West 37
10. Verticality as Metaphor: The Romantic Era and the Underground as a Historical Location 49
11. Part II Figures, Works, Groups
12. Last Exit: Egon Bondy’s Anti-flâneurs under the Wheels of Madame Prague 59
13. Urban Disaffiliation: The Swan Songs of Ivan Martin Jirous 79
14. Disgusted in Bratislava: Vladimír Archleb’s Lyrically Vulgar Dandyism 101
15. Christ Quieted: Marcin Świetlicki, Kraków, the Underground, and Pop 115
16. The Joy of Failure, or Underground and Generation: Jacek Podsiadło’s Road Story en Route to Bratislava 133
17. My City’s Me, It’s Many: Peter “Firefly” Wawerzinek, the Palaverer of Prenzlauer Berg 143
18. Anticolonial Myth, Pop, Punk—and the End of the Underground? The Topol Brothers’ Psí vojáci Songs 165
19. Romani and Vietnamese in Prague: Jáchym Topol Bids Farewell to the Tripolis Praga 183
20. A Detour to Moscow: Vladimir Makanin’s Underground, or the Snare of the Subterranean 195
21. “Cherboslovats, Romongolians, Sweeks”: Yuri Andrukhovych’s Moscow as a “Junkspace” of Cultures 209
22. Planar Cities and Their Urban Devastation: Andrzej Stasiuk’s Post-Socialist Warsaw 227
23. Aggressive Localism: Stasiuk and Andrukhovych as Secretaries of the Provincial 241
24. Backstory “Metropolis, Mass, Meat Factory”: Tot Art and the Orange Alternative as Chefs of the “Semantic Porridge” 253
25. “It All Started in Gdańsk!”: Berlin’s Club of Polish Losers 265
26. Conclusion or, Entropy of the Underground 281
27. Bibliography 289
28. Index of Illustrations 317
29. Name Index 319