Archiving the Life World: Memorial Practices of the Late Soviet Underground and Afterward

In this chapter I analyze the practices of preserving not artifacts but rather the life world of the Soviet underground culture—the performative behavior of artists and poets, their lifestyle and material environment, their communication, and ultimately everything that can be brought together under the concept of life creation (zhiznetvorchestvo). Central to my interest, on the one hand, are the forms of self-archiving of the life world used by the participants and creatives of the unofficial culture themselves. On the other hand, I focus on the forms of the afterlife of this culture. I ask: How is it memorialized in art events and popular knowledge today, and why is it that its life world is resurrected more than its artifacts? Both aspects raise a question about the correlation between today’s memory culture and the archive: the archive as an isolated space of accumulated knowledge is studied in the context of—and, in a certain sense, in epistemological contradiction to—the communicative memory of “live” transmission of knowledge.