[Guest Lecture] You Crucify Freedom, but… the Mind Is Indomitable: The Pragmatics of Yulii Rybakov’s and Oleg Volkov’s Artistic Action of 1976

This presentation will be devoted to Yulii Rybakov’s and Oleg Volkov’s artistic action “You crucify freedom, but the human soul knows no fetters” in August 1976 in Leningrad. Rybakov/Volkov’s lifestyle and the historical, political and cultural contexts evoked by a long and difficult-to-perceive phrase written on the walls of the Peter and Paul Fortress have prompted largely diverging interpretations of the action. A consistent description of Rybakov/Volkov’s references—ranging from the Soviet school canon, which includes romantic freedom-loving lyrics, the history of the Russian revolutionary movements of the nineteenth century, to dissident and religious ones—allows us to outline the pragmatics of unofficial artistic expression in the late Soviet period. An important feature of the action is that its authorized documentation took place more than twenty years after the fact (when Rybokov received his court file), while the content of the phrase had varied depending on the source that reported on the 1976 event. This textual instability and the scarcity of knowledge about the artistic action gave rise to a myth, so that each new mention of the action acquired the status of an event in its own right.

The lecture will be in Russian, the discussion in Russian and English.

Zoom link: uni-bamberg.zoom-x.de/j/68382471122

Im Rahmen des Oberseminars der Slavischen Literatur-, Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaft.

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