Yuz Aleshkovsky wrote the novel „Nikolai Nikolaevich” in the 1970s. For a long time, the work was disseminated in samizdat and it appeared in print for the first time only in 1980. Composed under the censorship conditions of socialist realism dominant in the arts, this work violates strict taboos imposed on subjects related to sexuality and stylistic solutions which exclude sub-normative vocabulary. In many aspects, the composition of the novel resembles the pattern of the production novel. At the same time, the writer negate the values propagated in the art of socialist realism: the main character is a former pickpocket, who built a comfortable life for himself as a sperm donor in a laboratory and talks about his professional achievements in a language saturated with profanity and elements of criminal jargon. The plot of the work is based on an amalgamation of components characteristic of ideologized literary texts with elements that were unacceptable in such texts. The introduction into the novel of the theme of corporality, and human sexuality, which was a taboo topic in socialist realist literature, introduces a major dissonance and induces produces a comic effect.

Studies of protest cannot but remain relevant and topical: the world is full of protesters and protests. The importance of studies of protests in 20th-cetnury Russia is not only historical but also ethical. Protest in literature chiefly manifests itself in the creation of a work that is not censored. An ideal medium for this kind of literary activity is folklore, samizdat and, nowadays, blogging. In his article, Aleksandr Borisovich Bushev discusses contemporary forms of folklore and the contemporary reception of samizdat literature; he also offers reflections on these, with a special focus on education. Bushev refers to works by samizdat writers and pays special attention to the topic of self-censorship on the example of Soviet writers and their attempts to overcome it through “writing for the drawer” (in the hope for a posthumous publication). Bushev examines also the aesthetic form of artworks exposed to censorship and suppression. The majority of the forms of protest, and the accompanying responses of the authorities, are now of historical importance. Nowadays, literary protest manifests itself differently than in the past: today, the medium is the internet, and blogging is the source of alternative discourse, the discourse of counterculture, and minority discourse.

This article discusses images of protest against authoritarian forms of power in Alexei Polarinov’s fiction, considered here in light of the ethical-political and anthropological turn. While in the novel Центр тяжести the issue of protest is firmly rooted in the socio-political situation of contemporary Russia, Риф offers general insight into psychological factors that make people accept despotic individuals as their leaders. Stryjakowska’s examination of the novels leads to the conclusion that only a comprehensive resistance to inertia can be the driving force of social change.

This article refers to the public biography of the recent years in the life of Boris Akunin, one of the most widely read among contemporary Russian writers. As part of his political activity, Akunin, or Grigori Chkhartishvili, acted under his own name and actively supported the anti-Putin movement during the 2011–2012 protests. The experience gained there and the political events of the last 10 years have left him disappointed and resulted in him becoming an expat. However, mobilized by the circumstances, Akunin launched a new literary project called История Российского Государвства (History of the Russian State), which is conceived as his original attempt to answer some of the perennial questions about Russia.

One evening… in 2217, a short story by Nikolai Fyodorov, was published in 1906. In the history of the Russian literature, this story has the status of a pioneering anti-utopian text. From this point of view, it is interesting to examine the text as a literary experiment in which the author presents to his readers his vision of a new world seen from the distance of three-hundred-years. What does the author find especially worrying about a future world in which the values of the present no longer exist? Who is the author rebelling against and why? Why does his text reference Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy? What made his story a source of inspiration for Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We? Why does Fyodorov continue to inspire Russian anti-utopian writers of the 20th and 21st century who use this genre to voice their opinions on topical and socially significant issues?

In his article, Artur Sadecki analyses the theme of protest in Anton Chekhov’s short story An Encounter. This story belongs to a cycle of stories in which Chekhov refers to Leo Tolstoy’s thoughts, chiefly to the principle of nonresistance: the refusal to violently resist evil. Sadecki shows how this idea has affected the lives of two ordinary people: the peasant Ephraim and the thief Kuzma. Ephraim’s refusal to use violence after the theft influences Kuzma, but the latter takes a long time to regret his deed and soon returns to his former life. In Chekhov’s fiction, this form of protest turns out to be incomplete; it causes people to act unnaturally and fails to create strong interpersonal ties in a society that offers individuals no educational, medical or moral-religious support.

In August 2020, mass protests in Belarus against the rigging of the presidential elections, which, according to the official resources, were once again won by Alexander Lukashenko, began. The opposition took to the streets under the traditional white-red-white flag. In many Russian publicists’ opinion, this combination has become the colors of the next “color revolution”. According to them, the “housewife” Svetlana Tikhanovskaya is a modern False Dmitry, who, with the help of the Polish special services, tried to carry out a coup d’etat in order to wrest Belarus from the “Russian world” and subordinate it to the modern analogue of the imperial project of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The image of the “white- red-white revolution” in the mirror of Russian journalism is described using imagological terminology developed by Valery Zemskov.

This article is an attempt to identify the protest potential of the literary community in Russia. Special attention is dedicated to writers and critics who, in their creative activity, implicitly and explicitly express their protest against particular phenomena, actions or ideas. In the literary community, there also appear voices commenting on public feelings. Writers who speak approvingly about social protests strengthen the protest potential, which is confirmed by the number of comments that refer to their speeches. In recent years, cyberspace has created conditions that intensely stimulate protest behavior, especially among the younger generation. It is also a place where popular writers and critics publish provocative speeches and texts which contain a strong emotional charge.

This article is an attempt to analyze Polina Zherebtsova’s artistic and socio-political activity as a form of protest. In her diary, which covered a decade, we can observe the author’s accelerated maturation (the first notes, drawings and poems are by a girl of less than nine years, the last ones by a nineteen-year-old). Along with this maturation, enforced by the circumstances of war, in the diaries we can observe changes in her perception of reality. Zherebtsova remains focused on her personal problems: chiefly on the worsening conflict with her mother, whose symptoms of the post-traumatic stress disorder are becoming more and more visible and whose condition translates into hostility towards her daughter and her notes, resulting in verbal and physical violence and emotional blackmail. Over time, Zherebtsova’s diary becomes more and more clearly an indictment of the participants in the Russian-Chechen conflict, containing details inconvenient for many people. These details confirm that Chechnya, once a republic where before the war representatives of different nations and faiths lived in peaceful coexistence, has become an arena for barbaric acts of terror, hatred, rape, torture, and corruption, with life depraved and with customs and norms replaced by savagery. Zherebtsova’s diary confirms that the greatest victims of the conflict are the civilians of Chechnya, deprived of material aid and spiritual support. It also draws attention to the nightmarish existence of refugees, often physically and psychologically maimed, who, alone and often unsuccessfully, fight for the right to compensation and a dignified life in the post-war reality.