Early Writings, 1976–1990

To celebrate Boris Groys’s seventieth anniversary, Garage and Ad Marginem Press have published his essays on aesthetics and philosophy written from 1976 to 1990 and previously available only to a very limited readership of samizdat.

The 500-page collection includes articles and essays written for the journals 37 and Chasy, and in particular, The Spectator’s View on the Spiritual in Art—Groys’s first ever article published when he was still living in Leningrad—as well as his later post-emigration texts published in Sintaksis and Beseda in Paris.

Writing under a variety of pen names, including the provocative Igor Suicidov, Groys comments on subjects ranging from postmodernism to apocalypse and authors such as Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Malevich, Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard. His writing is as incisive and poetic as in the more recent and better known texts on Moscow ‘Romantic’ Conceptualism and Soviet cultural utopia, however, his area of interest is much broader and the aesthetic, philosophical and political connections he makes are between phenomena of different cultures and eras. With articles comparing the ideas of Immanuel Kant to those of the Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Fyodorov and the French post-structuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida, this collection will be useful to anyone interested in cultural analysis—from the ideas of Enlightenment to the contemporary Western concepts of the 1970s and 1980s.