Acknowledgments
Preface

PART I. Typology

The Underground and the City, Pre- and Post-1989:
An Effort to Interweave Concepts

Paranoid Schizophrenia:
Dissent, the Underground, and Cultural Fissure

Subverting Official Claims to Centrality:
Overcity/Undercity, City/Country, East/West

Verticality as Metaphor:
The Romantic Era and the Underground as a Historical Location

PART II. Figures, Works, Groups

Last Exit:
Egon Bondy’s Anti-flâneurs under the Wheels of Madame Prague

Urban Disaffiliation:
The Swan Songs of Ivan Martin Jirous

Disgusted in Bratislava:
Vladimír Archleb’s Lyrically Vulgar Dandyism

Christ Quieted:
Marcin Świetlicki, Kraków, the Underground, and Pop

The Joy of Failure, or Underground and Generation:
Jacek Podsiadło’s Road Story en Route to Bratislava

My City’s Me, It’s Many:
Peter “Firefly” Wawerzinek, the Palaverer of Prenzlauer Berg

Anticolonial Myth, Pop, Punk—and the End of the Underground?
The Topol Brothers’ Dog Soldiers Songs

Romani and Vietnamese in Prague:
Jáchym Topol Bids Farewell to the Tripolis Praga

A Detour to Moscow:
Vladimir Makanin’s Underground Fantasies, or the Snare of the Subterranean

“Cherboslovats, Romongolians, Sweeks”:
Yuri Andrukhovych’s Moscow as a “Junkspace” of Cultures

Planar Cities and Their Urban Devastation:
Andrzej Stasiuk’s Post-Socialist Warsaw

Aggressive Localism:
Andrzej Stasiuk and Yuri Andrukhovych as Secretaries of the Provincial

Backstory “Metropolis, Mass, Meat Factory”:
Tot Art, the Orange Alternative, and Other Chefs of the “Semantic Porridge”

“It All Started in Gdańsk!”:
Berlin’s Club of Polish Losers

Conclusion or, Entropy of the Underground

Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Name Index