Review on: Kaspe I. In Alliance with Utopia. The Semantic Frontiers of Late Soviet Culture. M.: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2018. 432 p.

Abstract. The review analyzes the monograph of cultural historian Irina Kaspe “In union with utopia. The semantic frontiers of late Soviet culture” (2018), which is an attempt to use utopian studies to examine various spaces of late Soviet culture. This interdisciplinary direction has long been developed by scientists from different countries, however, the application of theoretical tools to specific cases is extremely rare. Through video and photo documents, fiction, periodicals and sources of personal origin (interviews), Kaspe tried to demonstrate the features of the reception of the “utopian” and its integration into the experience space of Soviet society in the 1950s and 1980s. Existential optics allowed the author to look at the usual phenomena of Soviet history through the prism of subjectivity and identity. The result of the monograph was the conclusion about the presence within the late Soviet society of various Utopian practices.

Keywords: USSR, utopian studies, late socialism, utopia, culture, reception, meaning, space, subjectivity, identity.