Between reflective nostalgia and counter-memory: The reception of Brodsky by Russian authors after 1996

The reconfiguration of Russian literary canon/s in the 1990s is inseparable from the wide-spread nostalgia. According to Lee Moonyoung, it “has become a popular phenomenon, actualized and concretized across Russian society since the middle of the 1990s” (Moonyoung 2011: 158). Moonyoung suggests that the 1970s became the most popular period as an object for the nostalgic revaluation of Brezhnev’s legacy. Additionally, Moonyoung sees the post-Soviet nostalgia of the 1990s as part of the process of glocalisation. Moonyoung states: “This dynamic process of exchange between the global and the local, which can be called ‘glocalization,’ is the most distinctive feature of the actual process of globalization. Glocalization can prevent the globalizing process from turning into the neo-colonial expansion of a particular predominant culture, and it helps maintain and extend cultural diversity on a global scale by fostering the coexistence and hybridization of heterogeneous cultures” (Moonyoung 2011: 159). Such notions as post-Soviet nostalgia and glocalisation shed a new light on the re-evaluation of Russian contemporary cultural icons, including Joseph Brodsky.