ABSTRACT

In response to a questionnaire on mass culture distributed among prominent Soviet writers, artists, and intellectuals, Tat'iana Tolstaia wrote that mass culture is "by defmition not culture." "Mass culture," in other words, is a contradiction in terms, and Tolstaia dismisses its Soviet variant as "kitsch" (Iskusstvo kino 6 [1990]: 69-70). Yet elements of "mass culture" and of what at various moments in history has been considered kitsch, banality, bad taste, and petit-bourgeois poshlost' are woven into the artistic texture of many works and creatively reinterpreted in Tolstaia's own artistic works as well as in the works of many other contemporary women artists, fIlmmakers, and writers.