About the Lecture: This lecture explores the trajectory of the Moscow publisher Ad Marginem, a pivotal post-Soviet cultural institution that established itself through editorial decisions steeped in irony, provocation, and an intent to challenge existing cultural and political norms. Ad Marginem was founded in the early 1990s as part of an effort to introduce Western critical theory to Russian readers, beginning with its first title—a collection featuring Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, Deleuze’s Coldness and Cruelty, and Freud’s writings on masochism. Since then, the publisher has engaged with themes of physicality, violence, and marginality through both philosophy and fiction. Its provocative editorial choices often sparked public debates, scandals, and accusations of ideological shifts, particularly in the early 2000s. Notable examples include the canonization of Vladimir Sorokin as a postmodern classic, which was followed by a state-run defamation campaign and a “pornography trial” against the author—as well as the publication of Aleksandr Prokhanov’s Mr. Hexogen, celebrated as a contemporary art masterpiece by some and condemned as a sign of the publisher’s “fascist drift” by others. Drawing on interviews and media analysis, I argue that Ad Marginem’s publishing activity is best understood as performative—a mode of cultural production prioritizing affect and transgression over static ideological positioning. In addition, by blurring the boundaries between canon formation and its deconstruction, the publisher created a space for the articulation of (often traumatic) perspectives and experiences previously excluded from the purview of what the post-Soviet intellectual establishment deemed “high culture.”
About the Speaker: Fabrizio Fenghi is an assistant professor of Slavic studies at Brown University specializing in contemporary Russian culture and politics, with a focus on the relationship between art and literature and the shaping of post-Soviet public culture. His first book, It Will Be Fun and Terrifying: Nationalism and Protest in Post-Soviet Russia (University of Wisconsin Press: 2020), studies the ways in which the aesthetics and culture of Eduard Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party, a radical countercultural movement, has influenced the development of Russian protest culture and the formation of state ideology during the Putin era. The project draws on textual analysis and the discussion of ethnographic material, including over forty interviews with contemporary Russian intellectuals and political activists. Fenghi’s current book project, tentatively entitled “The Revolution Will Be Fictionalized: Postmodern Politics and Radical Literature in Putin’s Russia”, focuses on the shaping of a specific kind of literary public sphere in Putin’s Russia. In contrast with an otherwise widespread depoliticization of society, the Putin era has witnessed a fundamental politicization of literature and literary institutions. Drawing on textual analysis and on ethnographic research to be conducted online in Russia and on site in Germany, Latvia, and Georgia, Fenghi’s project investigates the meanings of this radicalization of the cultural field—which, the book argues, reflects a more or less conscious desire to reevaluate ideology and cling to the possibility of political imagination in the aftermath of the neoliberal disaster of the 1990s.
This event is part of the CREECA lecture series, which is held on Thursdays at 4:00 pm. Coffee, tea, and cookies served starting at 3:45.