The culture of Soviet nonconformism increasingly became the object of (pop-) cultural, academic and political revival after the fall of the Soviet Union. Poems, ego fiction, rock songs and paintings of the Soviet “second culture” were reappropriated in the 1990s and up through the present under different political slogans and in different subcultural niches. Moreover, former underground poets, artists and musicians became cult figures and the focus of commemorative practices. These canonization processes can take place both in liberal and conservative communities, but they can also merely mirror the mainstream of cultural entertainment apart from political agendas.  In her talk, Klavdia Smola asks, if and how the re-appropriation of the unofficial Soviet artistic and life worlds is linked to different forms of distancing from or being-outside official politics in Russia in the 2000s and 2010s. In addition, she is interested in how the Soviet underground participates (or does not participate) in the formation of alternative cultural memory, a kind of mnemonic resistance. About the Speaker: Klavdia Smola is professor and chair of Slavic Literatures at Technische Universität Dresden (Germany) and a visiting scholar at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University. Her latest book, Reinventing Tradition: Russian-Jewish Literature between Soviet Underground and Post-Soviet Deconstruction, has been published in German (2019), Russian (2021) and English (2023). She (co-)edited a number of books and special issues of journals, among them are The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture (2022); (Multi)national Faces of Socialist Realism: Beyond the Russian Literary Canon (special issue of Slavic Review, 2022), Russia–Culture of (Non-)Conformity: From the Late Soviet Era to the Present (special issue of Russian Literature, 2018), Jewish Underground Culture in the late Soviet Union (special issue of the journal East European Jewish Affairs, 2018), Postcolonial Slavic Literatures after Communism (2016); Jewish Spaces and Topographies in East-Central Europe: Constructions in Literature and Culture (2014, in German), and Eastern European Jewish Literatures of the 20th and 21st Centuries: Identity and Poetics (2013). Professor Smola was born in Moscow to a literary family and has been living and working in Germany since 1997.