This dissertation investigates the representation of the human body in postmodern Russian literature and visual culture, including painting, sculpture, performance, and film. As Russia has gone through political and social change from Khruschev’s thaw to Putin’s rise, the image of the body in literature and art has shifted, with an increasing emphasis on the body as an object in flux. Faced with advances in technology, new theoretical approaches, and the fragmentation of identity in postmodern culture, artists have brought into question what it means to be human. Bodies expand, multiply, and transcend boundaries. They blur the lines between male and female, single and multiple, partial and whole, human and animal, human and machine, and subhuman and superhuman. The image of the fragmented, multiple, and contradictory postmodern body challenges authoritative discourse and cultural myths, while, at the same time, artists reuse, cite, and quote the art and literature of official culture.

This study will place Russian postmodernism within the context of global and historic trends in literature and art, while emphasizing the influence of the Russian avant-garde and formalist criticism on postmodern aesthetics. Viewing literary and artistic practice together will yield a more complete picture of the postmodern attitude towards the body at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the new millennium. My intent is not to give a comprehensive overview of the body in Russian literature and art, but to show the scope and application of the imagery of bodily transformation.