Irina Chiaburu

• Despite Leonid Brezhnev's efforts to undo the consequences of his predecessor's more tolerant cultural policies, many trends in art, literature, social and political thought that had begun during Nikita Khrushchev's 'Thaw' continued into Brezhnev's 'Stagnation.' And not only did they, according to Stephen Lowell and Rosalind Marsh, continue, but they intensified, following the bifurcation of the Soviet cultural realm into official and unofficial spheres. Despite what the dichotomy of official/unofficial suggests, the two realms were not completely separate from each other. The official artists, who were both familiar with and sympathetic towards the ideas, themes and forms explored in the unofficial realm of Soviet culture, could not ignore these if they wanted their work to possess some cultural relevance. Working under the conditions of censorship, however, they could not express their creative ideas as openly as the unofficial artists; therefore, they had to develop strategies and devices that would allow them to preserve their personal integrity and artistic reputation and, at the same time, avoid confrontation with the Soviet censorship apparatus. This project is about such strategies and devices, the people who resorted to using them and, consequently, the people whose job it was to not be fooled by them. In the first three chapters I explore the historical context within which anti-censorship practices developed; the fourth chapter deals with the notion of subversion and the reasons for theorizing anti-censorship practices as subversive. In the final chapter, using a method of Aesopian analysis developed from Lev Loseff's model of Aesopian language, I analyze Andrei Khrzhanovsky's trilogy about the famous Russian poet Alexander Pushkin and argue that the films, which appear to be biographical essays, are as much about life and work of Pushkin as they are about the conflict between the creative intelligentsia and the Brezhnev's regime.