Russian Postmodernism was a specific cultural trend that emerged in the late 1940s and early 1950s before gaining prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s due to changing political and economic conditions in the USSR. This chapter assesses the applicability of existing theories of Postmodernism to Soviet culture. According to David Harvey and Fredric Jameson, Postmodernist art is a product of the conditions of late capitalism, yet this designation evidently cannot be applied to the Soviet Union. The chapter therefore outlines the specific historical, economic, and mental conditions that gave rise to Postmodernist cultural transformation in the Soviet context. At the same time, it offers an overview of the main authors and movements within Russian Postmodernism.

The figure of the madman has been invoked in Russian literature from the medieval period to the present day. This chapter investigates the evolution of that tradition with an emphasis on the period from Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953 to the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. It identifies four strains of literary madness: the divine madman, exemplified by the holy fool who tests society’s virtue and speaks truth to power; the creative madman, whose irrational behaviour stems from poetic inspiration and the generative power of the word; the rational madman, who follows a logical system to pathological extremes or inverts that paradigm by revolting against reason; and the political madman, whose sanity is often pathologised by a society that itself has lost its mind. Together, these paradigms of madness constitute an intertextual web of allusions and character types that have been embodied and amended over time.