Essayist, philosopher, art critic, and media theorist Boris Groys refers to himself as a Kulturfilosof (philosopher of culture). Groys's writing combines two seemingly incompatible traditions: French poststructuralism and Russian literary philosophizing about national and religious identity. He engages in dialogue with philosophers and practitioners of postmodernism such as Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, while also continuing the Russian tradition of philosophical literature represented by the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Vasilii Vasil'evich Rozanov, and Andrei Donatovich Siniavsky.

In the late 1970s Groys coined the term "Moscow conceptualism" and introduced conceptualist poetry, prose, and art of the late Soviet period to the West. His Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin (1988; translated as The Total Art of Stalinism, 1992) and its subsequent translations into major European languages familiarized Western readers with Russian postmodernist writers, including Vladimir Georgievich Sorokin and Dmitrii Aleksandrovich Prigov. Soon after becoming a professor of aesthetics and media theory at the...