Postirony and Its Embodiments in Post-Soviet Russian Music

In the context of contemporary culture, postirony is a modification of irony, characterizing an intermediate state between irony and sincerity, oscillation (fluctuation) between these modes of feeling. The literary roots of the phenomenon are broad: similar trends were outlined already at the beginning of the 20th century in the poetry of writers grouped around the jounal Satyricon and were developed in the work of “oberiutes” and in the so-called soc-art. The most representative examples of the qualities of postirony are works conceived in the spirit of soc-art. Works by Leonid Desyatnikov (Rite of Winter 1949) and Sergey Berinsky (Tears of the Heraldic Soul) represent different versions of the embodiment of Soviet myth and the poetics of soc-art. The balance between opposite modes of feeling in these works is also different; only the critical-nostalgic stance, the post-ironic author’s gesture, which contains a distanced and at the same time subjectively sincere author’s statement, remains unchanged.