A Fly in the Soup: Gibberish in Russia as Aesthetic Defiance

Abstract

Unintelligible sequences of letters or words in today’s Russian culture are omnipresent: in slogans, such as “Hair is the best remedy,” “Stop grandma’s merciless feeding!”; on social media, for example #ifnotputinthencat and “LSDUZ and IFIAU9”; in satirical songs and poems; in films by Zvyagintsev, novels by Sorokin, Tolstaya, and Pelevin, etc. The appeal of gibberish and its repression by the Soviet and post-Soviet officialdom is rooted in the belief that art and word have the power to influence people and events. Avant-garde artists who pioneered this belief in the transformative power of art cheered the Bolshevik’s promise to create a new society, but were soon crushed by the Soviet state as dangerous saboteurs. Today, gibberish is again a strategy of aesthetic defiance. Erudite and inventive, gibberish eludes the grasp of state censorship. It builds communities of resistance, and spoils the authoritative discourse like a fly in the soup.