The 1950s

The chapter examines the early unofficial Soviet art and literary groups of the 1950s and early 1960s. After the Stalinist terror, a period in which attempts at collective alternative art-making had been fatally dangerous, and straying from socialist realism had been the bailiwick of lone individuals, a search for collective identity and consolidation of kindred spirits began, primarily among young people. Two groups of poets—the Attic poets and the Philological School—coalesced at tertiary institutions in Moscow and Leningrad, respectively. The aesthetic and political nonconformism of their leaders, Leonid Chertkov and Mikhail Krasilnikov, would end in prison terms for both men. Two art groups, Alexander Arefiev’s Order of Mendicant Painters (aka the Arefiev Circle) and Eli Beliutin’s amateur studio in Moscow, show the different ways in which the official and unofficial cultures diverged and coexisted. The variety of aesthetics and modes of life-creation which emerged in these years established unofficial culture’s trajectories in the following decade, finally leading, in the 1970s, to the emergence of the underground as an independent cultural institution.