Motherland Death

The content cluster below has been put together as a contribution to death and immortality studies (see e.g.Khapaeva 2017), with an East European twist (see e.g.Bernstein 2019;Sofronov 2022; Jianu and Lazar 2023;and Epshtein 2023).The articles in the cluster encompass the period from the 1980s to the present day, i.e., from one global shift, signified by the fall of the USSR, to the next, signalled by COVID, Russa's full-scale invasion in Ukraine, the world's division into increasingly isolated and antagonistic segments, and the return of the threat of a nuclear apocalypse.In the context of East European studies, the topic of death has been primarily explored by anthropologists (see e.g.Mokhov 2021 and the academic journal Arkheologiia russkoi smerti, nos 1-6, 2015-18).Researching necroaesthetics (i.e. a beautification of death in East European culture) is an underdeveloped field.In the 1980s-1990s, necroaesthetics reflected the gradual disintegration of Soviet society and individuals through necrorealism (see Lars Kristensen's article in this cluster), the so-called schizorevolution of St Petersburg art scene (see Khlobystin 2017), the National Bolshevik Party and its Moscow newspaper Limonka (see Fenghi 2020, Chapter 2), the chernukha film genre (see Isakava 2017), songs by the Siberian punk band Grazhdanskaia Oborona (see Chernyi 2014), heroin chic in fashion (which arrived in Russia in the late 1990s, see Kushnir 2021), and so on.During the relatively prosperous 2000s, the chill of afterlife diminished its attraction for authors and artists, yet it made a comeback with the advent of russkii mir ("Russian World"), an intellectual and institutional "attempt at conceptualising the identity of Russia and her place in the post-Soviet space, with strong reference to the spread of Russian language and culture" (Wawrzonek 2021: 19), by force of arms if necessary.According to the cluster's authors, the current revival of necroaesthetics has been prompted by the Kremlin's adoption, in the early 2010s, of conservative values, characterised, in particular, by the development of the cult of Victory (over Nazism, see Walker 2022) and the return of patriotic hero as a principal role model in popular culture