Luminous Heroes for Dark Times: Transculturation, Cosmopolitanism, and the Go-Between as a Double Agent in Channel 'Russia-1' Minseries 'The Optimists'

This article focuses on the Channel ‘Russia-1’ Miniseries ‘The Optimists’, shown in two seasons in 2017 and 2021. It analyses the miniseries to demonstrate how, even within the highly restricted authoritarian media environment that persists under Putin, television drama can play a subliminal political role in foregrounding modes of transculturation that bring Soviet and post-Soviet identities into productive dialogue with the Western Other against which they are habitually defined. This dialogue is conducted across several axes – temporal, spatial and representational – and navigates a complex and oscillating path between the value zones of diplomacy, patriotic/treacherous double agency, and cosmopolitan universalism. The framing context of the current war in Ukraine adds new relevance to the future potential of such phenomena to restore mutual engagement between Russia and a Western world from which it is presently alienated.