The Lives and Afterlives of a Soviet Misfit
Volodymyr Ivasiuk, the Emotional Crisis of Late Socialism and the Anti-Soviet Turn in Ukrainian Popular Culture
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12269727 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Zbigniew Wojnowski (0000-0001-7135-4699, University of Roehampton, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 32 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 61-78 |
| Publication date | 2022-03-29 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Contemporary European History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0960-7773 • E-ISSN: 1469-2171 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0960777321000709 |
| OpenAlex | W3185700204 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 23 |
This article examines how Soviet Ukrainian cultural artefacts acquired anti-Soviet meanings between the 1970s and the 1990s. It explores the life and posthumous commemoration of the pop composer Volodymyr Ivasiuk through the prism of the history of emotion. Although Ivasiuk promoted his Ukrainian-language music on Soviet radio and television in the 1970s, he turned into a symbol of Ukrainian resistance to Soviet rule after his premature death. The article frames this anti-Soviet turn in Ukrainian popular culture as a rebellion against state-sponsored emotional norms. In contrast to the more widely studied nonconformist circles, Ivasiuk's life and afterlives illuminate the experiences of misfits who tried but failed to find happiness and self-fulfilment within the boundaries of mainstream Soviet society. For a brief moment in the late 1980s, memories of Ivasiuk fuelled new visions of Ukrainian identity which underpinned attempts to push the limits of permissible emotional expression in the Soviet Union
Political science · Sociology · Ukrainian · Vision · Anthropology · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · Gender Studies · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · History · Philosophy · Soviet and Russian History
The Zero Hour
What Is Ukrainian about Ukraine's Pop Culture
Religion and Language in Post-Soviet Russia
The Ukrainian West
The Greengrocer and His TV
War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus
Queer Theory
The “Soviet Way of Life” as a Way of Feeling
Commemorating the Future in Post-War Chernivtsi
Worlds of Dissent
Regional Identities and the Limits of Democratic Centralism in the GDR
The Communist Culture Industry
You can't rid a song of its words
The Fire Burns On? The "Fiery Revolutionaries" Biographical Series and the Rethinking of Propaganda in the Brezhnev Era
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |