The research introduced a novel approach to understanding and analysing creative practices that arise in response to symbolic boundaries within specific political, social, and historical contexts. Drawing upon various phases of Soviet history, it established a framework for analysing and comparing creative expressions that resulted from repression, censorship, and restrictions on self-expression caused by traumatic experience. A key contribution is the expansion of the concept of ellipsis within the framework of Border Studies, moving beyond its traditional linguistic and structuralist definitions so as to understand it as a broader cultural and socio-political phenomenon. By exploring how artistic expression adapts to political and social constraints, it provided new methodologies applicable across disciplines such as literary studies, art history, cultural studies, memory studies, and trauma studies. Boundaries, whether socially or politically constructed, shape artistic and cultural expression in diverse ways, and the responses to these restrictions vary significantly. While retrospective perspectives often weave together complex historical and cultural layers, the immediate presence of boundaries tends to provoke more subversive forms of expression.
During the Soviet period in particular, ellipsis was frequently employed as a creative device in order to circumvent official narratives, using indirect expression, coded language and creative subversion to challenge the restrictions imposed by the prevailing doctrine. The research, however, also extends into contemporary contexts, where ellipsis continues to function as a pivotal strategy in negotiating imposed limitations. In view of Russia’s ongoing war of aggression against Ukraine, the persistent role of ellipsis in societies facing political repression and unfreedom of speech is evident. Strategies of implicit resistance, traceable back to the Soviet experience, continue to shape artistic and cultural responses in the present day.
The research has thus shed light on historical practices of challenging boundaries and highlighted their continued relevance in contemporary efforts to assert voice, while making an important contribution to understanding manifestations of cultural resistance to authoritarian regimes.
