Professor Tomáš Glanc, a leading scholar of Eastern European literature and art, discusses his latest projects, including a book on Russian culture written during wartime and an exhibition on Soviet kinetic art. He reflects on the evolution of Russian underground culture and contemporary artistic diasporas.

Professor and Senior Fellow at Zurich University Dr. Tomáš Glanc was born in Prague in 1969 and became fascinated with Russian art and culture as a teenager, an interest which later developed into decades long research of Russian and Eastern European literature and arts, unofficial culture and samizdat and Slavic studies. Glanc’s particular area of knowledge is performance art in Eastern Europe. From 2000 till 2003 he was director of the Institute of Slavic and East European Studies in Charles University in Prague and later, while director of the Czech Cultural Centre in Moscow from 2006 to 2007 Glanc witnessed and was part of the rise of the contemporary art scene in Russia. In 2024 Oxford University Press published the Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture in which Glanc was an editor. He spoke with Art Focus Now about his exhibitions, literature, contemporary Eastern European artists and the golden age of exploring Russian-language culture.

Julia Korotkova: Tomáš, what projects are you currently involved in? Could you share your professional plans for 2025?

Tomáš Glanc: I’m just finishing a short book of various insights and observations on ‘Russian Culture at War’ which was commissioned by the Czech university press Karolinum. Additionally, I am working on an exhibition for the Olomouc Museum of Art focussing on Soviet kinetics and cybernetics from the ‘Dvizheniye’ (Movement) group led by Lev Nussberg. I have had the personal privilege of numerous fascinating encounters with Nussberg, and I am looking forward to finally presenting this unique artistic phenomenon. It turns out that there is a lot of undiscovered material on this subject in the Czech Republic. So, it is as much a research project as an exhibition and it aligns both my capabilities and interests. The exhibition will open in June this year. 

JK: The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture was recently published. Could you tell us about your participation in it and how did the project evolve?

TG: As often happens, the idea originated years ago in a restaurant over food and drinks.  There were five of us who all have a long-standing interest in Soviet unofficial or underground culture, and we knew each other from conferences and other projects. But this was the first time we worked together in a group. The Oxford Handbook was written primarily by others: several dozen scholars from across many countries. We wrote only a few chapters each and as well as a common introduction, coordinated by Mark Lipovetsky.

JK: Has the Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture undergone any changes in the constellation since 2022?

TG: The project began before 2022. In early 2023, our editorial team organized a conference in New York, at Columbia University, the Harriman Institute, titled ‘Blind Spots of the Counter-Canon: Soviet Underground Culture Revisited’, which was very important for me. Suddenly, during a discussion with experts on Ukrainian, Lithuanian and Belarusian undergrounds, a lot of analogies and differences surfaced. This conference highlighted, among other things, how the reception of the Soviet underground has been (and to some extent remains) Russified and Russo-centric, although unintentionally. Had we not completed so much of the groundwork in 2022, I guess the final product might have been quite different.

Mark Lipovetsky from Columbia University coordinated our editorial team including Maria Engstrom, Ilja Kukuj, Klavdia Smola, and myself, and he did so with both brilliance and sensitivity to the evolving context in which we were preparing the book. As the only “real foreigner” among the group I was perhaps more attuned to certain conceptual nuances. But in the end we all managed to agree on everything. It was a rewarding job for me and I am immensely grateful that I was allowed to participate. 

JK: How did your interest in Soviet and Russian art and literature arise and evolve? 

TG: My interest in Russian culture began in my teens during perestroika. It was a wild mix of impulses and fascination: the Russian classics, interpreted subversively, as opposed to Soviet indoctrination at school, where we collectively hated Russian. I was eager to discover the ´true Russian´, untrammelled by the ideology of the occupiers and their newspeak. For example, existential and psychoanalytic interpretations of 19th-century Dostoevsky and Gogol. Then Vysotsky, Okudzhava, Pasternak, Bulgakov... the Russian avant-garde, of course, Vladimir Yakhontov (my first translation) and the literary stars of perestroika like Aitmatov, Granin, Pristavkin and Petrushevskaya.  At the age of nineteen I translated the novel ‘Sofya Petrovna’ by Lydia Chukovskaya about the atmosphere of Stalin’s terror but written right in that time (still unpublished as the ‘Soviet Literature’ publishing house disappeared after 1989). Every week the magazine ‘Ogonyok’ and newspaper ‘Moskovskiye Novosti’ uncovered new cultural explosions: Mandelstam, Platonov, the truth about Zhdanov, the legacy of the post-revolutionary, but also post-war and late Soviet emigration, literature on terror and the Gulag. This was roughly my introduction to the study of Russian culture, soon followed by discoveries like Gennadiy Aygi, Pavel Pepperstein and the ‘Inspection Medical Hermeneutics’, Viktor Pivovarov and through him the whole of conceptualism and the Lianozovo school, then Limonov, Mamleev and Sorokin, also Rozanov, Florensky, Parshchikov and so on. It was a golden age for exploring Russian-language culture.

JK: When did you first visit Russia? Was it in 1991, during your Czech Translators Union fellowship in Moscow?

TG: My first visit was in autumn 1986, followed by another in summer 1987, both to Leningrad. At the time, it struck me as the most anti-Soviet Russian city. The Cold War narrative romanticised Tsarist Russia, so places like the Hermitage, the Peter and Paul Fortress, and the Alexander Nevsky Lavra felt like a surreal immersion into a cultural heritage that the Bolsheviks had miraculously spared. I used to go with the locals to pick up butter, vodka and cigarettes in exchange for ration coupons, while I also caught screenings of Sokurov's films, as well as Czech Miloš Forman's ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’, which was still banned in Czechoslovakia. Despite the scarcity of goods, the atmosphere was charged with hope for the future, a sentiment I wish Russia could recapture.

JK: You were the director of the Czech Cultural Centre in Moscow from 2006 to 2007, and have since been a regular there. How have you seen the local cultural scene evolve over the years?

TG: Let’s write a book on this! It’s challenging to summarise such a long period, as any generalisation risks being inaccurate and simplistic. I’ve witnessed the art communities in the Furmanyj and Tryokhprudnyj squats, the rise of XL Gallery, Andrei Erofeev’s contemporary art collection in Tsaritsyno in the air-raid shelter depository among some Tajik carpets and Russian samovars… Later on, the collection moved to the Tretyakov Gallery, where the department Erofeev founded has recently been liquidated. I saw Leonid Bazhanov establish the ‘National Centre for Contemporary Art’ and I was with him in Nizhny Tagil for an art festival in the depths of the Urals, where new local cultural institutions were also being founded. I visited exhibitions of Talochkin’s Collection in the Museum of Other Art in the RGGU university building and the Vadim Sidur Museum in Moscow’s periphery. I observed the beginnings of my friend Kolya Sheptulin’s Obscuri Viri art gallery, attended the Moscow Biennale curated by Joseph Backstein and Olga Sviblova’s Photo Biennial, and watched the development of Winzavod, later the Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art, then the Garage. My last visit to Russia was in December 2021 when GES-2 opened. How this phenomenal development of the institutions was related to the country’s sociocultural and political situation and what content the various actors were putting into them would be a question for a thorough and very important debate.

Two points stand out about the diverse developments over the decades. Hundreds of people have put an infinite amount of enthusiasm, will, creativity, passion, diligence, courage, time and faith into the development of post-Soviet art institutions. And the results have been convincing and outstanding. However, once the war and censorship are behind us, a critical examination of the compromises made – the opportunism and the silences – will be essential. Figures like Keti Chukhrov, Ekaterina Degot, Viktor Misiano, and Andrei Erofeev together with other participants and observers of these processes could lead this important discussion. 

JK: Since 2022, many Russian contemporary artists and curators have left the country, seeking to rebuild their careers in Europe. Are you following this émigré community? Have you noticed any standout projects or artists?

TG: The circumstances of artists leaving vary widely, making it difficult to generalise. I’ve been following the important work of Haim Sokol whose art I’ve had the privilege of exhibiting twice in recent years in the Czech Republic. Sokol severed ties with Russian institutions during the war, as far as I know, but at the same time he is a person who spent considerable time in Israel over the last two decades. His situation differs radically from that of, let say, Maxim Evstropov’s ‘Party of the Dead’, an unadulteratedly exiled collective with a politically distinct and aesthetically pure style, with intelligence and even (gallows) humor. I think it will become an icon of the anti-war art of our time. Very important to me in so-called ‘exile’ are the loose community of Feminist Anti-War Resistance or the community around Rodion Kitaev which has found support in France. I’m also trying to follow the incisive work of street artist Philippenzo (Volgograd artist Filipp Kozlov), whose compelling blend of language and visual devices takes seriously poetic principles of language while allowing it to intervene sharply in the public space. These are just a few examples of artists contributing to a new chapter in the history of Russian art outside Russia, one that transcends typical patterns of artistic mobility. 

JK: At the end of 2022 you co-curated an exhibition ‘The Pain of Others’ at DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague, could you say a few words about it?

TG: That exhibition, while initially conceived in response to the war in Ukraine, ultimately held universal significance. A serious challenge for us curators was to avoid normalizing war and giving the impression of its recurrence in history. We showcased a diverse range of artists from various backgrounds and eras, from 16th-century Jacques Callot to contemporary renowned Ukrainian artists Nikita Kadan and Zhanna Kadyrova. There were also Goya, Vereshchagin, Otto Dix, Gerhard Richter, and some unestablished Ukrainian artists. It was important to me that the Ukrainians agreed to exhibit with several artists originally from Russia – on the obvious assumption of shared positions towards the titular “pain of the others”.

JK: One of your largest curatorial projects together with Sabine Hänsgen was ‘Poetry & Performance: The Eastern European Perspective’ exhibition (2017–2024). Are there any features that could define an art piece as ‘Slavic’ as opposed to ‘Western’?

TG: There is certainly nothing Slavic about cultural practices, including those that combine poetry with performative approaches. Especially since Eastern Europe includes a number of cultural communities that have nothing to do with Slavic languages. Nevertheless, we were really interested in the Eastern European perspective, not as some separate world, but indeed as a perspective, that is, an angle, a vector, as certain assumptions. We argue that it is in the environment of socialist states with their unofficial zones and often censorship that performance art is often born in the milieu of poets and their alternative communication with the audience. 

JK: Do artists from the former Eastern Bloc still need to focus on Soviet trauma to gain international recognition? Could you give us some contemporary names we should be watching? 

TG: The Soviet past remains relevant, particularly in countries directly affected by it, even decades after perestroika. In Ukraine, the war inevitably brings historical Soviet imperial policies to mind. Artists like Zhanna Kadyrova and Nikita Kadan, mentioned above, who experienced the Soviet regime as children, now discover it like archaeologists, revealing the enduring impact of the past. However, it’s important to avoid reducing Eastern European art to a mere rehashing of Soviet history. It would be a manifestation of an agreement that the Cold War, Western Orientalism or Russian imperialism has outlived its death. Far more interesting are the individual or group positions of artists who have created strong personal aesthetics in this historically unprivileged cultural space, often fed by local impulses but quite uniquely. From the Czech Republic, Krištof Kintera creates compelling large-scale projects for public spaces, while photographers Markéta Othová and Ivan Pinkava explore universal themes through a distinctly Czech lens. In Slovakia, Dávid Koronczi’s work transcends borders with its astute aesthetics. To name just a few fleeting examples of artists born in Eastern Europe whose language is absolutely universal. 

JK: What are your thoughts on the ongoing reassessment of national identities, such as the debate surrounding whether an artist like Malevich should be considered Ukrainian rather than Russian, given their birthplaces and careers in Ukraine?

TG: Beyond any doubt, we can clearly see today how imperially colonizing – often unconsciously – the construction of the ‘Russian avant-garde’ was. At the same time, its manipulative and Russifying nature was driven not only by Moscow and Leningrad but also by Western museums and academic institutions. In this respect, I appreciate the nuanced approach of the outstanding Ukrainian art historian and curator Konstantin Akinsha. While he’s dedicated to promoting Ukrainian art and its global recognition, he’s also wary of overly simplistic critiques of Russification, which can create new distortions.