This paper discusses the reinvention of the humanist ideas and values in the Soviet post-World War II and post-Stalinist culture (the 1950s and the1960s) with the help of Renaissance plots and images in Soviet semi-official art, the main examples being Pavel Antokolsky’s poem Hieronymus Bosch (1957), the Strugatsky brothers’ novel Hard to Be a God (1963), and Grigory Kozintsev’s films based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1964) and King Lear (1970), as well as David Samoilov’s poem Bertold Schwarz: A Monologue, set in the late Middle Ages. The paper isolates an aesthetic movement that developed in the Soviet culture of those decades; I propose to call this movement “posttraumatic humanism.” It was based on the new aesthetic idiom of “gloomy Renaissance,” including images of conflagration, ruins, violence. The works of this movement did not use the Aesopian language — or, at least, did not use it as a primary or only tool. Rather, it involves a covert comparison of the Soviet present with the European pre-Enlightenment past and aesthetical valorization and sublimation of 20^th-century catastrophic experience. Images of “gloomy Renaissance” conveyed the erosion the Soviet belief in progress and moral modernization as inevitable consequences of Bolsheviks’ revolution. One of the earliest mature works of posttraumatic humanism in Soviet culture was Vasily Grossman’s essay The Sistine Madonna (1955). Alexei German Sr.’s film Hard to Be a God (2013) can be regarded as the concluding and summarizing work in this movement.

June 2017: Ilya Kukulin received his PhD in literary theory at the Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow. His monograph Machines of the Noisy Time: How the Soviet Montage Became an Aesthetic Method of the Unofficial Culture (Moscow, 2015, in Russian) was awarded the Andrei Bely Prize. He has co-edited six volumes focused on topics from the history of schooling in the 20^th Century Eastern Europe to the cultural practices of the internal colonization in Russia. He is also the author of a number of articles on Russian literature, unofficial social thought in 20^th-century Russia, and political discourses of the Russian social media, published in Russia, Germany, Norway, China, Lithuania, Armenia, and the USA. At present he is Associate Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies of the National Research University – Higher School of Economics (HSE, Moscow), Senior Researcher at the International Center for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences (HSE), and Senior Researcher at the School of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (Moscow).