Academic literature on the topic 'Unofficial Russian poets'

The article deals with one of the most important unofficial imperial symbols of Russia - the Russian bayonet. For quite a long historical period, 1790-1945, the bayonet remained a metaphor for military, state, and national power. In the historical perspective, it had three main meanings: 1) the glory of the Russian Army, and then the Red Army; 2) the greatness and strength of the Russian Empire; 3) courage, determination, and the Russian man’s contempt for death. The cult of Suvorov and the myth of the Russian bayonet were formed in Russian poetry at the same time - at the end of the XVIII century, and they supported each other. Suvorov’s bayonet charge training remained relevant in the tactics and military theory of the Russian Army until the end of the 19th century. The idea of the mythical Suvorov’s “bogatyr”, a Russian soldier, was poeticized by the commander himself in The Science of Victory (1795) and was continued primarily in the patriotic poetry of the 1830s. The mythologization of the Russian bayonet in Russian poetry and battle prose reached its apotheosis in the early 1830s, at the time of Russia’s confrontation with Europe over the Polish Uprising. The literary myth of the bayonet is presented in its most complete form in Pyotr Yershov’s poem “The Russian Bayonet”. Patriotic lyrics with their collective lyrical subject and nationwide sublime pathos and the battle prose of the 1830s both played a decisive role in the creation of the myth. The hyperbolization of the Russian hero wielding the bayonet in the prose of the 1830s is usually linked with the motif of national superiority. The ideological imperial myth of the invincible and all-powerful Russian bayonet was used primarily within Russia itself. During the Crimean War, the poetical hope that the bayonet would help to win the war with the most well-armed armies in Europe was in vain. In addition, the destruction of the myth was influenced by the spread of the personal point of view in the psychological prose of Leo Tolstoy and Vsevolod Garshin. In Tolstoy’s battle prose, the war rhetoric and the valorization of war are devalued, this “demythologization” also includes an unusual description of the Russian bayonet charge. This trend continues in the prose of Garshin, who gained the experience of an ordinary volunteer soldier in the Russian-Turkish War. In the last third of the 19th century and before the beginning of the First World War, the bayonet in Russian unofficial literature became a metaphor for the repressive state apparatus. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the war, the suppressed national semantics of the bayonet was actualized again. The same thing happened at the very beginning of the Great Patriotic War when the very existence of Russians as an ethnic group was called into question. Soviet poets once again turned to the myth of the all-conquering Suvorov’s Russian bayonet.

The article deals with one of the most important unofficial imperial symbols of Russia - the Russian bayonet. For quite a long historical period, 1790-1945, the bayonet remained a metaphor for military, state, and national power. In the historical perspective, it had three main meanings: 1) the glory of the Russian Army, and then the Red Army; 2) the greatness and strength of the Russian Empire; 3) courage, determination, and the Russian man’s contempt for death. The cult of Suvorov and the myth of the Russian bayonet were formed in Russian poetry at the same time - at the end of the XVIII century, and they supported each other. Suvorov’s bayonet charge training remained relevant in the tactics and military theory of the Russian Army until the end of the 19th century. The idea of the mythical Suvorov’s “bogatyr”, a Russian soldier, was poeticized by the commander himself in The Science of Victory (1795) and was continued primarily in the patriotic poetry of the 1830s. The mythologization of the Russian bayonet in Russian poetry and battle prose reached its apotheosis in the early 1830s, at the time of Russia’s confrontation with Europe over the Polish Uprising. The literary myth of the bayonet is presented in its most complete form in Pyotr Yershov’s poem “The Russian Bayonet”. Patriotic lyrics with their collective lyrical subject and nationwide sublime pathos and the battle prose of the 1830s both played a decisive role in the creation of the myth. The hyperbolization of the Russian hero wielding the bayonet in the prose of the 1830s is usually linked with the motif of national superiority. The ideological imperial myth of the invincible and all-powerful Russian bayonet was used primarily within Russia itself. During the Crimean War, the poetical hope that the bayonet would help to win the war with the most well-armed armies in Europe was in vain. In addition, the destruction of the myth was influenced by the spread of the personal point of view in the psychological prose of Leo Tolstoy and Vsevolod Garshin. In Tolstoy’s battle prose, the war rhetoric and the valorization of war are devalued, this “demythologization” also includes an unusual description of the Russian bayonet charge. This trend continues in the prose of Garshin, who gained the experience of an ordinary volunteer soldier in the Russian-Turkish War. In the last third of the 19th century and before the beginning of the First World War, the bayonet in Russian unofficial literature became a metaphor for the repressive state apparatus. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the war, the suppressed national semantics of the bayonet was actualized again. The same thing happened at the very beginning of the Great Patriotic War when the very existence of Russians as an ethnic group was called into question. Soviet poets once again turned to the myth of the all-conquering Suvorov’s Russian bayonet.

Two major poets of the Russian Neo-Avant-Garde—Gennady Aygi and Elizaveta Mnatsakanova—created textual works that transgressed the limits of language and the borders between the arts. Each pursued their own method of the visualization and musicalization of verbal matter, yet both share a particular musical sensibility, which guarantees the integrity of the linguistic structure of their verse, despite the fragmentation and logical incoherence of its elements. The atonal (serial) musical tradition has a special significance for these experimental poetics of minimalism. Mnatsakanova, herself a musicologist, who was friends with Dmitri Shostakovich, not only used the techniques of contemporary music composition in her visual and sound poetry, but also collaborated with electronic musicians in her recorded poetry performances. Aygi experimented with language, not only crossing the boundaries between music and poetry, but also between sound and silence. For him, music was a way of expressing pre-verbal subjectivity and reproducing signs of meaning that are hidden from ordinary perception. In his poems, Aygi brought together Chuvash folk music with experimental techniques of minimalism, correlating his own work with such Soviet unofficial composers as Andrey Volkonsky and Sofia Gubaidulina. This paper will address the issues of transmutation between verbal, visual, and sound art in poetic minimalism of the Soviet-era underground.

Among the poets of the Third Emigration are a few who were officially recognized and published in the Soviet Union. The vast majority of them, though, hardly published anything in that country; sometimes because they were denied access and more often because they did not seek publication in the Soviet Union, preferring samizdat or publication abroad. Lev Loseff is a unique figure who falls into neither of these categories. He was a professional journalist and writer for children until he left the Soviet Union in 1976, but, although he was a popular figure in Leningrad's unofficial literary life, he was not known to be a poet. In fact, Loseff began as a serious poet in 1974 at an age—thirty-seven—that by any standards is very late and by Russian standards is something like the beginning of the afterlife: It is the age at which Pushkin was killed.

The results of a research of literary critical works devoted to the study of Soviet under-ground poetry in the 1960s and 70s are presented in the review article. It is shown how the process of liberation of unofficial poetic culture from the collectivist attitudes of Soviet ideology and the search by its representatives for the spiritual and moral foundations of life and creativity was highlighted in the sam- and tamizdat periodicals. Special attention in the review is payed to the reflection of uncensored criticism in relation to the problems of restoring the connection with the literary tradition of the Silver Age by nonconformist poets and the formation of new principles of artistic writing in their work. In the context of these processes, the value nature of the phenomenon of “Christian Renaissance” in underground poetry, its role in the development of modernist poetic culture in the second half of the 20th century is revealed. In the light of literary-critical reception, the concept of “cultural movement” is considered as a strategy for uniting creative forces in the literary underground, which determines the value horizons of unofficial poetry. It is substantiated that the “cultural movement” was interpreted by uncensored criticism from the standpoint of its ideological and institutional self-sufficiency, the ability to be an active subject of Russian and world culture.

The article reviews the corpus of previously unknown documents from the A. M. Gorky Archive of the A. M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow on the history of the cultural and educational department of the Dmitrov Correctional Labour Camp (Dmitlag), created for the construction of the Moscow—Volga Canal. The official Soviet rhetoric of the 1920s–30s declared that Soviet penitentiary system was to reform convicts, to “rehabilitate” them through communal labour, civic education, and communist agitation. The core of this ideological construct was the concept of perekovka (“reforging”), which the writer Maxim Gorky imbued with personal socio-philosophical meaning. The reviewed corpus of documents includes the following categories. A. M. Gorky Archive contains manuscripts of M. Gorky's greetings to the canal builders. The writer visited the canal twice and sent six messages to the workers, which were published in both the central and the camp press. Four letters from Gorky to the head of the labour camp, S. G. Firin, discuss the involvement of Soviet writers in the propaganda and two projects of the former: “Two Five-Year Plans” and “History of Factories and Plants.” Nineteen letters from S. G. Firin to Gorky and nine letters to the writer's secretary, P. P. Kryuchkov, form a historically valuable and rare collection of ego-documents that shed light on private attitudes and interactions between Gorky and Firin. The official letters of the Dmitlag prisoners to Gorky highlight agitation activities in the penitentiaries and mechanism of the labour camp communication with the outside world. The prisoners’ unofficial letters/appeals provide data on the Soviet justice system and on the social composition of the Dmitlag. These letters also contain some personal stories of the canal builders. Other documents have been discovered in the archive: letters, publications from “The Bibliotheca of “Perekovka” series, etc. This documents complex provides additional data on the different aspects of Soviet history in the 1930s: chronicle of Dmitlag and of the canal construction, agitation activities in the Gulag. The documents help to reconstruct the biographies of writers, poets and artists sent to the Dmitlag, not to mention ordinary construction workers of the canal. In addition, these materials shed light on M. Gorky status of this period when a person became an institution. They provide a better understanding of Gorky’s role in the shaping of Soviet ideology and of the role of Soviet writers in the propaganda of perekovka. Gorky's letters, editorial plans, and reviews supplement the knowledge on his projects “History of Factories and Plants” and “Two Five-Year Plans.”

Cette thèse est consacrée aux problématisations du langage dans la poésie française, nord-américaine et russe de la fin du XXe siècle (1970-2000). En menant un dialogue critique avec la notion de langage poétique, la thèse envisage la relation entre la poésie et son médium dans la perspective de questionnements ou conceptions problématisées du langage qui circulent dans l'histoire de ce genre sous la forme de topoï et s'élaborent dans les dialogues avec les autres arts (telle la peinture) et champs du savoir (philosophie, linguistique, sémiotique). La conférence internationale « Langage – Conscience – Société », qui se tient à Léningrad en 1989, oriente le choix du corpus puisqu'elle réunit des participants particulièrement attentifs à leur médium : les auteurs nord-américains Language (Michael Davidson, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten), les poètes non-officiels russes Dmitri Prigov et Arkadi Dragomochtchenko, ainsi que le poète français Emmanuel Hocquard. La thèse explore la réception des théories du langage wittgensteinienne(s) et post-saussuriennes chez certains auteurs mentionnés et leurs collaborateurs. Elle identifie les écarts, mais également les effets de continuité qui caractérisent leurs questionnements vis-à-vis des problématisations du médium propres à leurs prédécesseurs littéraires (trans-)nationaux. Cette approche comparatiste se prolonge par une étude typologique des corrélations tissées entre les écrits métalinguistiques des poètes des années 1970 et les aspects formels et génériques de leurs oeuvres. Enfin, la thèse révèle les conditions qui favorisent l'écriture poétique et métapoétique sur le thème du langage et identifie les ancrages éditoriaux et les sociabilités littéraires permettant aux auteurs de mener les quêtes réflexives vis-à-vis de leur médium de travail
This dissertation examines the questionings of language in French, Russian, and North American poetry of the late 20th century (1970-2000). Engaging in a critical dialogue with the notion of “poetic language”, the thesis considers the relationship between poetry and its medium in terms of questionings or problematized conceptions of language, which circulate in the history of this genre as topoi and emerge in dialogues with other arts (such as painting) and fields of knowledge (philosophy, linguistics, semiotics). The international conference “Language — Consciousness — Society”, hosted in Leningrad in 1989, shapes the corpus as it brought together participants who were especially attentive to their medium: the US Language poets (Michael Davidson, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten), the Russian unofficial writers Dmitri Prigov and Arkady Dragomoshchenko, and the French poet Emmanuel Hocquard. The thesis explores the reception of Wittgensteinian and post-Saussurean language theories by these authors and their collaborators. It identifies the legacies and deviations that characterize their questioning of the medium in relation to those affirmed by their (trans-)national literary predecessors. The comparative analysis is extended by a typological study correlating the metalinguistic writings of these poets with the formal and generic features of their works. Finally, the thesis reveals the conditions that favor poetic and metapoetic writing on the theme of language, scrutinizing the editorial foundations and literary sociability that enable authors to undertake reflective explorations of their medium

Representatives of the Soviet underground who chose to be autonomous from the censored literary and artistic environment in the USSR, regarded their position as a “double separation” from the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary culture of the Soviet Russia of the 1920s on the one hand and from the world culture on the other hand. According to many of them, their mission was not only to comprehend but also to overcome the separation, to reconnect with the past culture of their country and to get synchronized with the modern artistic and literary processes. An important role in the process of synchronization was played by the fact that the uncensored writers of the second half of the 20th century got acquainted with concrete poetry, especially German poetry, which started penetrating the “Iron Curtain” with the anthologies of concrete poetry and some translations into Russian which were primarily made to discredit “the bourgeois art”. One of the most difficult tasks for the researchers of these processes is to distinguish between the examples of direct influence of concrete poetry texts and manifests in the works of the unofficial Soviet authors and those reflecting their own approach, which was typologically similar to the one used by their Western colleagues and produced similar independent results. The article analyzes various forms of both creative reception and independent search for approaches to concrete poetry used by uncensored poets of the Soviet period, including Leningrad poets of the “Malaya Sadovaya” circle (V. Erl, L. Aronzon) “Lianozovo School” (G. Sapgir, I. Kholin, Vs. Nekrasov) as well as the authors whose works were published in 1985 in the first anthology of Russian concrete poetry (A. Ocheretyanskiy, V. Barskiy, V. Bakhchanyan, A. Kondratov and others).