Avant-Garde Post–: Radical Poetics after the Soviet Union

Contemporary poetry around the world has witnessed a proliferation of new forms and uses in the past two decades. From Cairo to Kyiv, from street slogans to Black Twitter, poetry has reemerged as a powerful and agile technology for political subjectivization and the conjuring of new collectivities. It is a radically revitalized Russian—or more accurately, Russophone—dissident poetry that is the subject of Avant-Garde Post–: Radical Poetics after the Soviet Union. Marijeta Bozovic studies the work of a group of experimental poets united by their overt political engagement and explicitly Marxist orientation. They occupy a fraught position in post-socialist time and space, pitched against Putin-era Russian culture and politics and “Western” formations alike. Bozovic conceptualizes this circle of Russian, Jewish, Ukrainian, and Georgian poets as the contemporary Russian-language avant-garde: hence the use of prefixes in my title, which gestures at the temporal paradoxes of a revived futurism. She argues that contemporary Russian-language poets seek in the legacies of historical avant-gardes an undetonated alternative to both the neoliberal global present and to the discredited institutionalized left of the Communist Party.

Refreshments will be provided.