Bakhtin and Artaud's Theories Illuminate Post-Soviet Performance Art's Body-Oriented Practices

Jurij Murasov's 2001 article analyzes Mikhail Bakhtin and Antonin Artaud's theatrical theories as frameworks for understanding late Soviet and Post-Soviet performance art. Bakhtin's concept of the marketplace-theater, emphasizing the grotesque body and oral culture's communal ethos, contrasts with Artaud's theater of cruelty, which confronts the irreversibility of literacy's separation of body and mind. The article examines these theories through ancient Greek theater's origins in alphabetization, which created autonomous visuality and divided semantics from somatics. Modern theater movements, including those by August Strindberg, Vsevolod Mejerhol'd, Bertolt Brecht, and Artaud, sought to subvert these constitutional elements. Three Post-Soviet examples illustrate the spectrum: Nikita Michalkov's 1989 film "Urga" embodies Bakhtinian collectivity through a tattooed body; Andrej Monastyrskij's 1985 performance "Talk with a Lamp" satirizes academic discourse with bodily inscription; and Oleg Kulik's "Two Kuliks" performance stages a painful self-confrontation echoing Artaud's wounded body. The analysis connects these performances to the conflict between visuality and verbality, tracing a media-discourse on individualization within Post-Soviet art.