Avant‐Garde Post –: Radical Poetics after the Soviet Union by Marijeta Bozovic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2023. 320 pp. $39.95. ISBN 978‐0‐674‐29062‐4
Year: 2024
Type: book-review
Abstract: If you care about poetry, it is dangerous to write about it.The power of poetry often gets lost in the telling.Marijeta Bozovic's Avant-Garde Post -, however, retains something of poetry's force and urgency, making the case for both the political, social, and cultural relevance of poetry today and the gravity of its analysis.While not a book for the casual reader, Avant-Garde Post-accesses the tools of literary analysis and literary history to tell a riveting story about the work of post-Soviet Russian-language poets to build collectivities toward an emancipatory future.Bozovic surveys two decades of post-Soviet poetry, from 1999 to 2022, by writers seeking to harness avant-garde traditions while mitigating the rightward, authoritarian turn avant-gardes have historically taken."What," the author asks, "does leftist, politically transformative art look like, after state socialism?"(p.x).What does an avant-garde look like without masculinized, militaristic trappings?How might avant-garde poetry foster political solidarity and collective subjectivities?With attention not only to the dynamics of disaster capitalism but also to Russia's increasingly revanchist politics, Bozovic makes the case for poetry's unique capacity to body out "critique, imagination, and struggle" in a "global egalitarian struggle" (p.34).Necessarily key to her argument is her attention to the ways the diverse poets she studies engage with digital media and its transnational networks.Bozovic brings together seven major contemporary Russian-language poets to paint a picture of a breathtaking shared effort to harness poetry, and its Russian and transnational traditions, to build new communities and foster collective action.In chapter 1, she describes Kirill Medvedev's "weak heroism," a stance that combines courage with vulnerability, a recognition of a call to action and risk with an acknowledgment of the likelihood of failure (p.31).For Medvedev, poetry, "embedded in life practice," constitutes "a technology of cognition" (pp.60, 57).As a medium, through performance, digital remediation, and other alternate modes of publishing, it supports political organization and community-building unburdened by established cultural institutions.Bozovic presents Medvedev as laying groundwork for the movement she describes, while it is Pavel Arseniev who founded its key journal, [Translit].As Bozovic emphasizes here and elsewhere, the post-Soviet avant-garde is defined in part by its transnational bent.[Translit] both reveals and fosters the networked relations of its artists-in its publications of new translations of critical theory and international poetry, as well as the original Russian-language work it has published.Meanwhile, both Arseniev and his journal critically engage Web 2.0 as "enemy terrain," affording experimentation but not wholesale faith (p.76).Of Arseniev's approach to his own poetry, Bozovic notes his skeptical approach to the classic Russian idea of the poet's role in society, building instead a "self-conscious archive of paper utopias" (p.91).Moving to Aleksander Skidan, Bozovic addresses the work of a poet of a slightly older generation who, nevertheless, has found an aesthetic home with the post-Soviet avant-garde as a mentor
Source: The Russian Review
DOI: 10.1111/russ.12694
Author: Martha M. F. Kelly
Institution: National Humanities Center
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4401748704