‘Be ready to come back’

Poetry has always been political in Russia, but whereas civic-minded poets were once lionized as towering moral authorities, their present-day heirs are more or less confined to the margins of culture. Relative obscurity does not, however, preclude good poetry or good politics, as Marijeta Bozovic argues in Avant-Garde Post–: Radical poetics after the Soviet Union. Shunning both the liberal opposition and conventional publishing as complicit with the regime, the six contemporary poets at the centre of her study have spent the past two decades using a variety of genres and autonomous projects to “forge communities of resistance” that push back against Putinism and other pathologies of late capitalism.

Given a chapter apiece, each poet emerges as an individual: the activist Kirill Medvedev, purveyor of plain-speaking reportage; Pavel Arseniev, a historically conscious ironist and impresario of collective projects; Alexander Skidan, a living link to the experimental poetics of the late-twentieth-century Russian underground that are one of the group’s chief inspirations; Dmitry Golynko, the “unassuming poet-scholar [who] was patient zero” for a radical shift away from the lyric hero; the charismatic Roman Osminkin, unpicking patriarchy in the flesh and on Facebook; and Keti Chukhrov, who, unlike the others, is neither a man nor ethnically Russian, and who works across media to unsettle assumptions about class, sex and nation. A coda introduces Galina Rymbu as the standard-bearer of a new generation who builds on the others’ breakthroughs to achieve an unprecedented lyrical vulnerability.

Bozovic makes a convincing case that these poets constitute a “new avant-garde”, not just in their ends, but also in their means, echoing both the political engagement and the collective spirit of early Soviet modernism. They collaborate, citing each other and sharing institutions (notably Arseniev’s journal [Translit]), geographies (the city of St Petersburg has been both a home and a theme for several of them) and a common intellectual sensibility. All are curious about the potential of other media, all combine the traditions of Russian radicalism with a cosmopolitan outlook, and all leaven their considerable erudition with occasional humour.

Bozovic is part of this network and shares its qualities of intelligence and internationalism. This is one of the book’s strengths, but, as a fellow traveller, is she too hopeful when she suggests that these quiet initiatives in cultivating “new and revolutionary subjectivities” and “imagining a global egalitarian future” really make a difference, politically as well as poetically? After all, the work of these poets is unknown outside of narrow circles, and Russia’s lamentable condition is proof enough of the failures of any fightback.

So self-evident is this critique, however, that subverting its logic is central to both the book and the movement it describes. All these poets, Bozovic suggests, seek to turn poetry’s weakness into a strength by celebrating marginality and the deconstruction of the grandiose traditions of Russian poethood. This paradox is often convincing – as, for instance, when Skidan has proposed that it is precisely because of its unpopularity that poetry is the ideal remedy for an era dizzied by ubiquitous visual media. At other times weakness just seems like weakness, and the poets’ seizure of “the opportunity to theorize powerlessness” seems more like a consolation in defeat than a counterstrike against capital.

Such pessimism regarding these poetic “weapons of the weak” is perhaps inevitable given that Bozovic’s project, begun a decade ago, has been overtaken by events: first the seizure of Crimea, then the inexorable “tightening of the screws” in Russia, then the pandemic and finally the epochal moral catastrophe of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. These disasters have been deftly integrated into the argument – they all vindicated the group’s critical positions – but they still cast a pall over the book’s occasional outbreaks of optimism.

Marijeta Bozovic finishes on an ambivalent note, quoting Kirill Medvedev leaving Russia in February 2022. “If we all do not perish, we will have a chance to build a new country and a new society”, he wrote on Facebook. “So be ready to come back, and get your children ready too.” This burst of rhetoric suggests that, despite their allegiance to both early Soviet modernist ambition and late Soviet postmodernist irony, these poets are most reminiscent of those nineteenth-century radicals who, more in hope than expectation, tended the revolutionary flame through decades of reaction and exile. For those true believers the day of reckoning did come, and they returned to remake Russia. Whether or not that long-awaited moment ever arrives for their contemporary counterparts, they have at least found a fitting champion for their cause.

James Rann teaches Russian at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of The Unlikely Futurist: Pushkin and the invention of originality in Russian modernism, 2020

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

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