Requiem for a Lost Future? A Hauntological Reading of Late-Soviet Underground Rock Through the Lyrics of Viktor Tsoi, Aleksandr Bashlachev and Egor Letov
After graduating in intercultural communication with a thesis on Soviet-Russian realia in the debut novels of Ania Ulinich and Lara Vapniar, Stefania Persano specialised in Italian as a Second Language and taught it in Ireland and Russia. She now teaches English in high school and Italian for foreigners in an NGO. She also works as a freelance translator – among her recent translations is Leonardo da Vinci’s Fables (Progedit, 2025) – and subtitle maker from English and Russian. She has collaborated with the University of Turin as a language tutor. Her research interests include pedagogy, eco-feminism, postcolonial, Soviet and post-Soviet studies. She is part of the transdisciplinary cultural critique collective “Collettivo Trickster” and regularly writes for its website.
In the late Soviet years, a distinctive musical subculture emerged in Russia that fused elements of Western rock with the Russian bard tradition. This article examines the lyrical output of key underground artists Viktor Tsoi, Aleksandr Bashlachev, and Egor Letov, interpreting their songs through the lens of hauntology (Derrida, 1993; Fisher, 2014) and post-Soviet reflective nostalgia (Boym, 2001). Their works are read as expressions of dissent permeated by a postmodern sensibility, at once criticizing the crumbling socialist order and mournfully anticipating the neoliberal future. In their lyrics, nostalgia for a future imagined but never realized triggers a second-order longing in later listeners – the mediated, vicarious form of nostalgia known as armchair nostalgia (Appadurai, 1996). Hovering between protest and introspection, their music gives voice to a generation suspended between two ideological failures, as well as between two polar stances – combative resistance and disenchantment.