Alexei Yurchak

Alexei Yurchak, Associate Professor of Anthropology at University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of “Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation” which won the Wayne Vucinic Award form Association of Slavic, Eastern European and Eurasian studies for the best book of the year in 2007; the expanded Russian edition of the book won the “Enlightener” award for the best non-fiction book in Russia in 2015. He is currently working on a book on the political, cultural and biochemical history of the preserved bodies of Lenin and other communist leaders.

The Project

Iconoclasm campaigns in French, Bolshevik and Post-Soviet Revolutions

Keywords:

Russia, visual anthropology, the power of images

Selected publications

Books :

2014: “Eto bylo navsegda, poka ne konchilos’: poslednee sovetskoe pokolenie.” Moscow: NLO

2006: “Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: the Last Soviet Generation.” Princeton University Press.

Articles:

2017: «The Canon and the Mushroom: Lenin, Sacredness and Soviet Collapse», HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, vol. 7, no. 2.

2017: “Retouching the Sovereign: Biochemistry of Perpetual Leninism,” in: The Scaffold of Sovereignty: Global and Aesthetic  Perspectives on the History of a Concept. Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, Stefanos Geroulanos, Nicole Jerr, eds. Columbia University Press

2017: “Nekroutopiia: Politika goloi zhizni i vne-sovetskii sub''ekt”, Arkheologiia russkoi smerti, vol. 1, n. 3 (in Russian)

2015: “Bodies of Lenin: the Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty,” Representations, vol.129, n. 1

2015: “Form Versus Matter: Miraculous Relics and Lenin’s Scientific Body,” Collegium: Studies Across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Helsinki, vol. 19: 61-81

2015: “Critical Aesthetics at the Time of Empire Collapse: Prigov's Surgeon and Kuryokhin's Parasite,” Translit, Literary Almanac. Special English Edition

2014: “Little Green Men: Russia, Ukraine and Post-Soviet Sovereignty,” Anthropoliteia

2014: “Revolutions and Their Translators: Maidan, the Conflict in Ukraine and the Russian New Left,” Cultural Anthropology, October

2011: “A Parasite from Outer Space: How Sergei Kurekhin proved that Lenin was a mushroom," Slavic Review, vol. 70, n. 1

2011: “Aesthetic Politics In Saint Petersburg: Skyline at the heart of political opposition," An NCEEER Working Paper, April  

2010: “American Stiob: Or what late-socialist aesthetics of parody can teach us about contemporary political culture in the West," Cultural Anthropology, vol. 25, n. 2 (co-authored with Dominic Boyer)

2009: "Post-Post-Soviet Sincerity: Young pioneers, cosmonauts and other Soviet heroes born today," in What is Soviet Now? Thomas Lahusen and Peter Solomon, eds. LIT Verlag

2008: "Necro-utopia: The politics of indistinction and the art of the non-Soviet," Current Anthropology, vol. 49, n. 2

2008: "Suspending the Political: Late Soviet artistic experiments on the margins of the state," Poetics Today, vol. 29, n. 4, Fall