Groys on Groys. Berlin Conversations with Svetlana Baskova

This book could be called a manual on dissent. Art critic, philosopher, and journalist Boris Efimovich Groys discusses significant moments in the cultural history of Russia and Europe in the 20th century in conversations with film director, artist, and curator Svetlana Baskova. The dual nature of Soviet anti-Semitism under the guise of "struggle against cosmopolitanism,” which the future author of the book "Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin" encountered in early childhood, serves as the first lessons in social psychology. Koktebel of the 60s, a meeting place for the creative bohemia, the characters of the Silver Age aging, and Soviet intellectuals, serves as one of the centers of alternative culture. Moscow conceptualism and samizdat as part of the global cultural process of the 60s and 70s, and as an escape from Soviet reality. KGB methods of the 80s, emigration, the cultural and university environment of Europe in the 90s... Fear, resistance, freedom. The personal and the social. Chance and necessity. What do Dmitry Prigov and Taylor Swift have in common? How does ideology manage emotions? How does culture turn garbage into metaphysics? How does the word become a form of resistance? Boris Groys talks about this and much more "both in jest and in earnest."