Conclusion: Sincerity Dreams

This conclusion reflects on today's dreams of renewing or revitalizing sincerity and rejects the notion that they are outdated or do not deserve any of our attention. It cites the work of several scholars to show that sincerity is anything but obsolete in twenty-first-century popular culture. Indeed, today's strivings to renew sincerity have not been neglected by scholars such as R. Jay Magill Jr., Epstein, and Yurchak. The rhetoric on new sincerity has been addressed in thoughtful analyses of contemporary culture that have helped the author in crafting a comprehensive and geographically inclusive analysis of present-day sincerity rhetoric. In post-Communist Russia, debates on a shift to late or post-postmodern cultural paradigms are thriving with at least as much fervor as—and possibly more than—in Western Europe or the United States. This conclusion discusses the newly gained insights which the author's sincerity study offers.

“So New Sincerity”

This chapter examines the relationship between sincerity and digitization and how sincerity relates to such central concepts in the sincerity-and-media debate as amateurism, imperfection, and craft. It considers the many online “produsers”—media expert Axel Bruns's term for denoting that, online, “distinctions between producers and users of content have faded into comparative insignificance”—who use online self-publishing tools to publicly share their views on sincerity. The chapter problematizes existing notions of mediatization and authenticity and discusses current debates about our “mediated” world. It calls for a move beyond Western paradigms and more transcultural sensitiveness in the academic debate on new media, reality, and honesty. It also looks at existing studies' near-exclusive emphasis on authenticity, sincerity's conceptual twin. It shows that in post-Soviet space, those who reflect on the impact of new media on our lives show a special interest not in authenticity but in sincerity.

“I Cried Twice”

This chapter examines the controversy surrounding Vladimir Sorokin's “sincere turn” in order to elucidate post-Communist thinking about artistic self-expression and commodification. Having gained fame as a nonconformist writer in the late Soviet era, Sorokin had acquired the status of a postmodernist Russian classic by the turn of the twenty-first century. At this point he astounded his public with a prose trilogy that revolved wholly around the need for human sincerity and for “speaking with the heart.” From an outright dismissal of socioethical commitment, Sorokin now moved to classic literary self-fashioning models to which openness and truth telling are imperative. The chapter proposes a nonessentialist approach— one that is inspired by recent theorizations of sincerity by Rosenbaum and like-minded scholars, who advocate a reading of the concept that accepts the tension between sincerity's moral charge and an artist's inevitable involvement in market mechanisms. It considers how sincerity rhetoric works in Sorokin's public self-fashioning and reception and describes thinking on post-Soviet creative life.

“But I Want Sincerity So Badly!”

This chapter examines the genesis and development of a trend that interprets (post-)postmodern paradigms as vehicles for coping with cultural trauma, and how that trend plays out in contemporary sincerity rhetoric. It first considers the simultaneous emergence of North American and Russian new-sincerity discourses in the 1980s before discussing the trauma thread that permeates its Russian pendant from the very beginning. Central to the chapter's argument is poet-cum-performer and undisputed classic of recent Russian literature Dmitrii Prigov, and his personal creative story is interwoven into a wider narrative of sincerity and collective remembering. The story of Prigov and his contemporaries challenges the view, proposed by Mieke Bal and others, that sincerity rhetoric flourishes specifically in times of intercultural conflict. The chapter also explores existing notions of post-Soviet memory and post-Soviet Russia's insistence not on remembering but on a collective forgetting of the gloomier pages of Soviet history.

History

This chapter traces the transnational history of sincerity rhetoric, with particular emphasis on those traditions within older debates that inform and shape today's sincerity concerns. Linking Henri Peyre and Lionel Trilling's classical studies to recent research into sincerity rhetoric, the chapter considers discursive historical threads that prevail in contemporary readings of the term especially (although not only) in Russia. It explores the historical roots of the three thematic interconnections that dominate contemporary sincerity talk: sincerity and memory, sincerity and commodification, and sincerity and media. It also discusses the notion that contemporary views of sincerity are sociopolitically defined, skeptical by default, and media specific; how idiosyncratic they are for post-Soviet Russia; and how post-Soviet takes on sincerity use and revise historical and non-Russian readings of sincerity. Finally, it describes how sincerity emerged as a concern for cultural critics in mid-twentieth-century Western Europe and the United States, especially after World War II.

Introduction: Sincerity, Memory, Marketing, Media

This book examines present-day sincerity rhetoric and its global outlines by focusing on Russia, a country that has historically maintained an excessive interest in the concept of sincerity. Over the past few years, the phrase novaia iskrennost'—the Russian equivalent of “new sincerity”—has been used by bloggers, politicians, and cultural critics to explain nostalgia for the Soviet era, Vladimir Putin's media policy, and the Russian interventions in Ukraine. Internationally renowned artist Oleg Kulik, for example, places a “new sincerity” at the heart of a new phase in contemporary Russian art and praises it in the work of Alla Esipovich, among others. Using the analytical perspective of a cultural historian, this book argues that in today's Russia, debates on sincerity and its inevitable contemporary twin, postmodernism, are always and inevitably debates on sincerity after Communism. It focuses on one social stratum within Russian society, cultural workers or creative professionals, with special attention to those working in the fields of Russian new media, cultural criticism, and literature.