Authors

Discussion

Since long before the 1980s, when it was at the height of recognition, writers and filmmakers were contributing to chernukha, a revolutionary artistic and literary movement whose aim was to unmask the grim subjects that pervaded Russia and the Soviet Union for decades, but which were repressed by political authorities. One such issue was drug and alcohol addiction. Despite there being several works that address substance abuse, from Crime and Punishment in 1866 to Little Vera in 1988, there is a gap in scholarship regarding its intersections with chernukha. In this essay, I examine some of the most insurgent addiction literature and films from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, which provide a cultural foundation underlining chernukha’s resistance to Socialist realist demands, as well as its impact on those struggling with addiction in a heavily censored society. While many scholars explore the consequences and psychological effects of addiction in Russian literature, particularly that of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I am interested in how chernukha brutally but boldly represents the suffering of Soviet addicts as a direct opposition to Socialist Realism and the ensuing banal representations under Putin’s regime.