kirill medvedev

Among the generation of Russian writers who have come of age since the fall of the ussr, the poet Kirill Medvedev seems at once representative of his cohort and a case apart. He was born in Moscow in 1975 to a Soviet intelligentsia familyhis father a journalist who gained renown during perestroika; his mother an editor at a major publishing housewhose fortunes nosedived in the 1990s: his fathers gambling debts meant they moved constantly to avoid maa enforcers, and Medvedev was at one point taken hostage. His personal experience of the Yeltsin era was bleak: around me, he has written, on the one hand there reigned an unhealthy, entrepreneurial chaos; on the other, poverty, hunger, cynicism, disintegration and agony. After studies at Moscow State University in the early 1990s, then the Gorky Literary Institute from 19962000, Medvedev published two poetry collectionsEverythings Bad and Incursion (both 2002)in which he developed a conversational, free-verse idiom markedly inuenced by Charles Bukowski, whose work he has translated into Russian. But in 2003, Medvedev broke with the literary world, assailing the sickening aesthetic atmosphere of the Putin eraa putrid swamp, half-Soviet, half-bourgeoisand the willing co-optation of so many writers and editors by big money. In 2004, he refused all copyright on his work; since then his output has mainly appeared online or in small selfproduced editions. In a series of penetrating essays on the politics and culture of Putinism, and on the Russian liberal intelligentsias capitulations before it, he has taken a cool distance from literary circles. Medvedevs socialist politics also mark him out from many of his generation; in 2007, he set up the Free Marxist Press, publishing translations of Deutscher, Mandel, Pasolini and others. In his own work, he has sought to blend the emancipatory charge of 1917 with the imaginative breadth of other Marxist traditions. At the same time, Medvedev has been a participant-observer in the wave of social contest ation that has gathered in Russia since the mid-2000s, in which a range of movementsfor housing rights, pensions, education, ecological protection; against corruption and electoral fraudtentatively coalesced; though since mid-2012 they have been experiencing severe repression. Combining poetry with protest actions and musicthrough his folk group, named Arkady Kots after the Russian translator of the InternationaleMedvedev is one of the leading exemplars of the new civic poetry that emerged in Russia during the 2000s, and whose longer lineage, from the creative ferment of the 1920s to the hyper-individualism of the 1990s, he discusses in the essay translated here.

kirill medvedev

BEYOND THE P O E T I C S O F P R I VAT I Z AT I O N

he last few years have brought a resurgence of political poetry in Russia.1 But what is meant by the term today? Amid the mass depoliticization of the post-Soviet period, the dominant stance among writers was to assume an intrinsic incompatibility between poetry and politics, referring back to the Soviet era as a negative example. In the 1990s, the notion that politics and art should be kept separate was based on the idea that the country was moving irreversibly towards liberal democracy, leaving poets free to concentrate on their art. In the mid-2000s, however, it became clear that the regime was developing in an entirely different direction, prompting a reassessment of the traditions of civic and political poetry in Russia. This has involved, on the one hand, a struggle to redene political art in positive terms, and to dethrone apoliticism as a self-evident norm or even virtue; and on the other hand, a broad reconsideration of the Soviet project, in which the deciencies of earlier, over-simplied and ideologized views have become apparentas has the need for a new, more complex understanding of it. In Soviet times, of course, the politicization of literature was expressed in a variety of forms. A 1925 Politburo resolution On Party Policy in the Sphere of Literature laid out the Bolsheviks position. While committing the Party to identifying the social-class content of literary trends, the resolution insisted on equidistance from all literary groups: the Party as a whole cannot prematurely tie itself to any one tendency in the area of literary form. It would exercise only the most general form of ideological supervision, merely sifting out anti-proletarian and antirevolutionary elements. This stance rested above all on the assumption that the formation of a new Soviet literary stylemuch like the question new left review 82 july aug 2013 65

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of new forms of the family and so onwas a matter for the future, which it would be impossible to bring any nearer by decree.
A style appropriate to the epoch will be created, but it will be created by other means, and the solution to this question has still not taken shape . . . Therefore, the Party must declare itself in favour of the free competition among various groups and trends in this given sphere of activity. Any other solution to the question would be an ofcial, bureaucratic pseudo-solution.2

Within Soviet literature of the 1920s, three main class tendencies could be identied: peasant, proletarian and intelligentsia (fellowtravellers)though this by no means exhausted the periods literary diversity. Adherents of almost every current believed that their projects not only possessed aesthetic meaning, but also embodied a political truth, capable of serving as a corner-stone of the new society. As a consequence, they also believed that their project would in the end emerge as the dominant one. Indeed, although the revolutionary years undoubtedly witnessed a politicization of many spheres of life from abovewhether deliberate or spontaneousin literature the politicizing impulse came principally from below, from within the literary sphere itself. This was precisely why the Bolshevik leadership, wary of any excessive political claims that literary groups might make, preferred to maintain a certain distance. The ussrs single, unied political framework presupposed the possibility of almost unlimited aesthetic freedom within its boundsgiving rise to an aesthetic competition that was interwoven with factional struggles in the political sphere, yet without allowing any single tendency to seize hold of the overall cultural agenda. From the second half of the 1920s onwards, a gradual shift took place. The epoch of industrialization began in 1928, with the advent of the First Five Year Plan, followed by the collectivization of agriculture projects demanding total mobilization and allowing for no internal disagreements or open discussion. The new proletarian culture, which was supposed to take shape organically in the process of socialist construction, was now to be handed down from above in the form of the
An earlier version of this essay was published in Russian in Translit 1011, 2012. The notes here are by nlr. 2 Resolution of the Central Committee, On Party Policy in the Sphere of Literature, 18 June 1925, published in Pravda, 1 July 1925.
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Socialist Realist canon. Starting in the late 20s, all the fellow-travellers, peasant, proletarian and other poets were transformed into a homogeneous ensemble of Soviet writers. Any self-willed aesthetic quest was in practice equated with political betrayal. Over the next quarter of a century, the only overt politicization of art that was permitted consisted of artistic renderings of the enthusiasm of the masses.

Reawakenings
The ideas of aesthetic competition, formal experimentation and other elements of a liberal approach to literature returned with the post-56 Thaw, which reproducedalbeit in more neutral formmany of the features of the avant-garde culture of the 1920s, as Vladimir Paperny has argued.3 Though they took place within certain limits, developments in ofcial literature of the 1950s and early 60s nonetheless restored the value of formal experimentation, while also making reference to the revolutionary 1920s on the level of content. The appearance of books by poets who had been barred from publishing in the 1930s and 40s, such as Vladimir Lugovskoi or Leonid Martynov, were major cultural events.4 A new avant-garde also emerged from among philology students in Leningrad, who looked to the poetry of the pre- and post-revolutionary experimentalists; later known as the Philological School, it included poets such as Sergei Kulle, Vladimir Uiand, Mikhail Eremin, Lev Lifshits and others.5 These aesthete-philologists were closer to the linguistically creative side of futurism, associated with Velimir Khlebnikov.6
3 In his Kultura Dva, the architectural historian Vladimir Paperny identied a binary pattern in Soviet culture, in which the post-Revolutionary egalitarian ferment, dubbed Culture One, gave way to a hierarchical, conservative Culture Two in the Stalinist epoch, before returning with the Khrushchev Thaw; the Brezhnevite stagnation represented a recurrence of Culture Two. See Kultura Dva, Ann Arbor, mi 1985; Eng. trans. Architecture in the Age of Stalin, Cambridge 2002. 4 Vladimir Lugovskoi (19011957): Constructivist poet whose work was declared harmful by the Writers Union in 1937, and could not appear in print until 1953. Leonid Martynov (190580): Siberian poet, imprisoned for anti-Soviet activity in 193235; subjected to harsh criticism in 1946, he was unable to publish for another decade. 5 Sergei Kulle (193684), Vladimir Uiand (19372007), Mikhail Eremin (b. 1936) and Lev Lifshits (19372009) all entered the Philological Faculty of Leningrad State University in 1954, and soon formed an unofcial poetic group; Lifshits later adopted the pseudonym Lev Losev, and emigrated to the us in 1976. 6 Velimir Khlebnikov (18851922): leading futurist poet, best known for his linguistic experiments and development of transrational poetry.

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But another strand of futurismthe Mayakovskian line of Soviet civic poetryalso gained fresh impetus during the Thaw, opening up the possibility for poets to take part in the political renewal of society. It was this that gave rise to the phenomenon of the Sixties poetsgures such as Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Andrei Voznesenskii, Bella Akhmadulina and Robert Rozhdestvenskiiwhose public readings to large crowds were focal points of the cultural scene during the Thaw. It is important to note that in the ussr of the late 1950s and early 60s, there was no strict division between ofcial and underground culture: many future participants in the latter published in the ofcial press, or expected to do so. The whole conjuncture bore within it a real political and cultural charge, much as the early 1920s did. Among other things, there was widespread hope that experimentation and freedom of poetic expression would again be legitimized as a political factor, as organic and necessary elements of socialist construction. However, the general crisis of politics under Khrushchev led to a curbing of the Thaws enthusiasms. In the cultural sphere, the most striking early symptom of crisis was the General Secretarys famous outburst against Andrei Voznesenskii at a meeting with the intelligentsia in 1963, when Khrushchev instructed the poet to emigrate and join his masters.7 The same year, Joseph Brodskys work was denounced as pornographic and anti-Soviet, and months later the author was sentenced to hard labour for parasitism.8 The 1965 trial of Andrei Siniavskii and Yuli Daniel for publishing anti-Soviet material abroad marked a denitive and public end to the Thaw in culture. Henceforth, the avant-gardists and citizen-tribunes of ofcial literature were increasingly obliged to adapt their positions to the demands of the authorities. The resultant tacking with the political winds in many respects neutralized both the artistic and the political potential of their work. In this context, the Sixties poets came to form a kind of negative canon. It was precisely in the early to mid-1960s, as the trials of Brodsky, Siniavskii, Daniel and others were unfolding, that the aesthetic and political self-consciousness of non-censored literaturethat is, works
7 Voznesenskii had gained an international audience through speaking tours in the West. 8 Brodskys sentence was commuted to 18 months after protests from gures including Jean-Paul Sartre, Anna Akhmatova and, ironically, Yevtushenko; but he was still persecuted by the Soviet authorities, and eventually expelled from the ussr in 1972.

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not submitted to the literary authoritiestook shape. In the rst instance, it was a reaction against the aesthetic and political compromises of the Sixties generation. The phrase attributed to Brodsky, If Yevtushenko is against collective farms then Im in favour, reects the enormous aesthetic and moral antipathy provokedto an almost absurd degreeby the gure of Yevtushenko.9 In a sense, the latter served as a kind of negative inspiration for non-censored poets: the hatred that spurred them to write differently from him turned out to be very productive. The political compromises of the Sixties poets melded naturally with aesthetic onesself-censorship, overly Aesopian language, intoned repetitions, and so on. Paradoxically, however, this in itself testied to the politicized nature of their positions, and thus to a certain delity to the legacy of the 1920s. Their collective platform was clearly based both on a shared sense of belonging to the same poetic tendency, and on a common understanding of their roleand that of the intelligentsia more generallyin Soviet political history. The problem was that the Brezhnevite stagnationin combination, probably, with certain subjective qualities of the Sixties poets themselvesprevented them from converting this understanding into a genuinely political reection on their milieu, into a dynamic reinterpretation of its role in the Soviet historical and cultural context. The repudiation of the Sixties generations positions in favour of aesthetic radicalism and political indifference led to an extreme depol iticization of non-censored literature. More or less any appeal to civic feeling or to political realities began to be seen as a compromise with Soviet power, which imposed political discourse (or pseudo-political; in this case the distinction is unimportant) as the everyday form. With the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, the liberal tendency within the dissident movement came to the fore, together with a corresponding poetic culturetraditional in form, anti-Soviet in contentwhose political commitments were interpreted by members of the underground as being the obverse of the Soviet. This set of ideas, which had shaped
9

Yevtushenko had become a prominent voice of the Thaw thanks to poems such as Stalins Heirs (1962), warning against the return of Stalinism, and most famously Babii Yar (1961), on the Nazi Judeocide and Soviet anti-Semitism; though often critical of the authorities, he nonetheless continued to profess allegiance to Marxism-Leninism.

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non-censored poetry between 1963 and 68, persisted more or less until the end of the ussr.

Private spheres
The dramatic re-politicization of society that began with perestroika also affected poetry, of course. Non-censored poets gradually began to surface: in Moscow, gures linked to avant-garde artistic circles such as Genrikh Sapgir, Vsevolod Nekrasov and Mikhail Aizenberg, and in Leningrad poets such as Viktor Krivulin, Sergei Stratanovskii and Elena Shvarts.10 However, despite the presence of overt or latent civic motifs in some of their work, and despite the undoubted civic component of the majority of poetic events in Moscow during the late 1980s, it was the Sixties poets who continued to convey the political mood of the masses. This was the situation that prompted the journalist Aleksandr Minkin to remark that 1956 raised up the idealists, 1986 exposed the cynics. Cynics dont make poetsat best, they make parodists. (By parody he presumably meant Sots-Art and Conceptualism.) It is signicant that for a public newly freed from Soviet restrictions, it was the recently rediscovered poetry of the Silver Agethe works of Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva or Vladislav Khodasevichthat seemed most contemporary. Amid the political vicissitudes of the early 1990s, contemporary poetry itself seemed incapable of generating new political meaningsunlike the poetry of the post-revolutionary period or the Thaw. On the other hand, it rapidly and naturally ceased to be of interest to the authorities, either as a possible relay for its interests or as an opponent. Poetry thus found itself left to its own devices. In the early 1990s, the non-censored writers of the Soviet era were joined by a younger generation who shared their broadly anti-Soviet orientation, including gures such as Stanislav Lvovskii and Dmitri Kuzmin.11 Amid
Sapgir (19281999), Nekrasov (19342009) formed part of the Lianozovo School of artists, poets and writers, named for the village on the edge of Moscow where they met; Aizenberg (b. 1948) was close to Conceptualist circles but worked in a more lyrical vein. Krivulin (19442001), Stratanovskii (b. 1944) and Shvarts (19482010) formed part of the Apartment 37 group that gathered in Krivulins at, a hub for Leningrads underground culture of the 1970s and 80s. 11 Kuzmin (b. 1968) became a crucial gure in the Russian poetry scenenotably as publishing impresario, putting out journals and books by a huge range of authors. For a critical portrait, see Medvedev, Dmitry Kuzmin, n+1, 13, Winter 2012. Lvovskii (b. 1972) was, along with Kuzmin, among the founders of Babylon, the Union of Young Writers, set up in 1997.
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the general depoliticization of the Yeltsin era, these post-underground writers rmly dened themselves as a gathering of private persons, connected to each other above all by their shared interest in formal poetic experimentation, and by their conception of the private character of their own poetic projects. This conception descended from the non-censored tradition as it developed in the mid-60s; but in this new historical phase, its foundation was the authority of Brodsky, who in his Nobel lecture of 1987 had insisted on the private character of the literary endeavour, in the context of a broader anti-authoritarian message:
If art teaches anything (to the artist, in the rst place), it is the privateness of the human condition . . . It is for this reason that art in general, literature especially, and poetry in particular, is not exactly favoured by the champions of the common good, masters of the masses, heralds of historical necessity. For there, where art has stepped, where a poem has been read, they discover, in place of the anticipated consent and unanimity, indifference and polyphony.12

In the 1990s, perhaps the most consequential and thoughtful formulation of these ideas was made by the poet Aleksandr Ulanov in his essay The Author as Private.13 He supported his argumentssignicantly, for the present discussionby reference to his own creative and existential practice of keeping his distance from any literary groups, interests or power centres. What seems convincing about Ulanovs position comes across as false in the cases of Brodsky or the post-underground of Moscow or St Petersburg. Brodskys declaration of the private role of the writer atly contradicts the overall position he adopted in exile, partly out of necessity but partly by conscious choice, and which very much included a political role. The members of the post-underground, for their part, while they insisted on the private character of their own literary endeavours, nonetheless took part in a collective struggle for inuence within literature, and therefore within the socio-cultural process as a whole. In other words, the private character of literary activity became an ideo logeme that allowed literary gures who were in one way or another engaged in collective productionincluding the production of political meaningssimultaneously to deny the character of this activity.
Joseph Brodsky, Uncommon Visage: The Nobel Lecture (1987), in On Grief and Reason: Essays, London 1997, p. 40. 13 Aleksandr Ulanov, Avtor kak private, Chernovik 12, 1997; available online at vavilon.ru. Ulanov (b. 1963): poet, translator and jet-engine specialist based in Samara.
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By contrast with the 1930s or 1950s, it was not an actual absence of political struggles within the literary eld that lay behind the post-Soviet depoliticization. Rather, it was the possibility opened up by the ussrs collapse of positioning any idea of commitment as ideologicalany, that is, except the one that assumes the private character of literary activity. This was often accompanied by the notion of the poet as an instrument of language, capable of transmitting meanings somehow cleansed of ideology. On the level of politics, this depoliticizing stance was connected with the belief, common to almost all writers of the post-underground, in the unquestionably progressive historical role of the liberal project in Russia. In the 1920s, writers made a wager on revolutionary progress or at least voiced loyalty to the Party line, despite their silent or public grievances against itin the hope that their work would form part of the new culture and society being constructed. The wager of the postunderground poets, by contrast, was on a separation of poetry from the state: a defence of the political sphere from the utopian demands and provocations of art, and a defence of art from ideological interference on the part of the state. This anti-totalitarian project was in large part based on a supercial and distorted interpretation of the Western experience in the second half of the 20th century; there, the possibilities for poets or intellectuals to make independent public pronouncements were in fact guaranteed not by a refusal of political commitment, but on the contrary by mastery of its various forms.

Poetics of malaise
In the 2000s, with the establishment of the soft Putin dictatorship, poetry found itself in an ambiguous position. On the one hand, the qualities Russian liberals ascribed to literature and to writers did not seem to allow for any direct civic pronouncements. Literature is not destined to full social or political functions. It cannot serve as a medium for instruction or exhortation wrote Stanislav Savitskii in 2002:
The artist of the unofcial circle identies himself as a private person who does not share the values of the collective or follow the laws of society. He is not a herald of state ideas nor a bard of the people, and social and political problems interest him only tangentially. He preaches individualism, the pathos of the liberty of the individual. In the majority of cases, for the unofcial writer literature is a private, domestic, chamber pursuit.14 Stanislav Savitskii, Lichnoe delo: Leningradskaia neotsialnaia literatura kak privatnost, Slavica Tergestina 10, 2002. Savitskii (b. 1971) wrote a phd on the history and myths of Leningrad unofcial literature, published in Moscow in 2002.
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On the other hand, what oppositional niches there were came to be lled by authors of a broadly Soviet-patriotic bent, such as Aleksandr Prokhanov, who were precisely capable of instructing, exhorting, entertaining etc.15 This caused bafement and irritation among the majority of liberals. Recurrent attempts were made to explain this phenomenon as the product of a reawakening of Sovietness; liberal commentators returned time and again to hidden birthmarks of the Soviet regime that lay concealed not only within the new state authoritiesthus prolonging a repressive tendency dating back to Stalinbut within the entire sociopolitical order. In poetry, Stanislav Lvovskii offered one example among many of this trope of a malign, persisting Sovietness:
sometimes as a child youd get on the metro unclench your hand on some ve-kopeck coins, and when you looked more closelyfrom each of them grinned a tiny radek like a monster.16

Deformities such as these have, apparently, prevented Russian history from nally nding resolution in a normal capitalist society. Of course, the lack of reection on the Soviet inheritance is indeed a problem. However, the subjective emphasis on a concealed truth, locked away like Koshcheis needle,17 not only left undisturbed the opposition between Soviet and non-Soviet; it also did not allow us to identifyor rather, allowed us not to identifythe specicities of the post-Soviet bourgeoisbureaucratic dictatorship, its cultural and ideological properties. At the same time, it enabled the intelligentsia, including the poets of its liberal wing, to avoid any reection on their own role in the formation of the post-Soviet order. In the mid-2000s, a new civic poetry began to emerge on the tide of the subjective orientation noted above, yet which at the same time looked nervously beyond it to the social totality. For the Sixties poets, a sense of civic engagement came naturally; for their successors in the 2000s, however, civic themes are something inorganic, imposed upon them by the evident derailment of the intelligentsias hopes for a liberal capitalist
Prokhanov (b. 1938): nicknamed Songbird of the General Staff, editor of the nationalist weekly Zavtra; his bestselling 2001 novel Mr Hexogen depicts Putins ascent to power as the outcome of a sinister conspiracy. 16 Lvovskii, Karl Schlegel: medlennoe chtenie [slow reading]. 17 Koshchei the Deathless: menacing gure in Slavic folklore, whose soul is hidden inside a needle which is inside an egg, inside a duck that is in turn inside a hare, itself enclosed in an iron chest, and so on.
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Russia. Knowledge that such themes could not now be avoided was accompanied by disorientation and uncertainty as to what civic poetry should be. An early example of the post-undergrounds response to the changed conjuncture of Putinism came in 2000, with Mikhail Sukhotins Verses on the First Chechen Campaign, a searing long poem written at the time of Putins ascent to power.18 Much of the poem is devoted to the brutalities meted out during Russias two invasions of Chechnya, for instance in the ltration camps set up by the occupiers:
Thousands of people were deliberately tortured in the lters: they were beaten, pretend-executed, had dogs set on them, were given electric shocks, this was not done accidentally but systematically and methodically, imaginesystematically and methodically. Dogs just ate chunks out of people, and with the electricity it would go like this: theyd blindfold you and sit you in a chair, apply the electrodes and give the order: Throw the switch!, a switch would be thrown and a powerful burst of electricity would ow. People like this, blindfolded and with their hands tied, would be thrown into common graves, every night in Karpinskii Kurgan they would bury 5080 people minus their golden teeth, minus their heads, nails would be sticking out of the bodies, heres another way theyd cover their tracks: theyd burn the bodies, then pour acid over them, gather up the bones (what they lacked, actually, were the ovens of Auschwitz), then theyd crush up the bones and pack them into artillery shell-casings. The lm director Govorukhin inspected one such casing and declared before the Russia he lost that they were dogs bones, the dog, and the matter was hushed up.19

Other passages address the murky political manoeuvrings that brought Putin into the Kremlin, and predict the authoritarian trajectory his rule would subsequently takesomething many considered absurd at the time.
Mikhail Sukhotin (b. 1957): Moscow-based poet, active in non-censored literary circles since the turn of the 1980s. 19 Karpinskii Kurgan: neighbourhood of Grozny. Stanislav Govorukhin: nationalist lm director and politician, chaired a Duma Commission on Chechnya whose 1996 report denied Russian soldiers had committed war crimes; his documentary The Russia We Lost presented Tsarism in a rosy light.
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Do you know why the future president is so fearlessly silent about the economy? People say Thats his weak spot. But in fact economics is his strength, and of course he presented himself as a businessman. Soon hell show us: the economy will be economical when the industry of murder becomes the honourable duty of citizens with guaranteed salaries, with reliable demand, a ready market, with large-scale employment in almost all branches, lifting our compatriots out of a deep depression in order to turn us into, quote, a great power, I add on my own account: of cannibals. For the prisoners, the unemployed, the damaged and dissenting, or indeed for anyone at all, they will build prison camps, prison camps, prison camps, prison camps . . .20

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Among the other post-underground poets who have taken up civic themes, Elena Fanailova has perhaps developed them most substantially.21 In her work, the authors personal backgroundnotably her professional activities as a journalist, which cast her into turbulent social situationscombines with the atmosphere of everyday collaborationism of the Putin era, to produce a poetics of malaise, of anguished and emotional citizenship. A 2011 poem itemizes acts the nation performs on her behalf, producing a melancholy collective portrait:
On my behalf the nation Drinks Baltika beer, smokes Winston cigarettes . . . Eats in Rostiks and McDonalds Travels to Egypt and Turkey Goes to the ofce Gets a pension Toils in gardens Steals government funds Drives new cars, bought on credit, Collected in Uzbekistan, And old cars, stolen in Germany and Japan. Trades in Polish and Chinese junk Serves out time at train stations and in prisons Learns and heals
20 21

Mikhail Sukhotin, Stikhi o pervoi Chechenskoi kampanii. Elena Fanailova (b. 1962): author of four books of poetry; trained and worked as a doctor in Voronezh, since 1995 a correspondent in Moscow for Radio Svoboda, the Russian-language Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

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Rents and hires out Says and does Stupid things . . . Kills and sentences Supervises and punishes Is fruitful and multiplies Buries, buries, buries Gives birth a little . . .22

Fanailovas anguish does not resolve into any clear political positions, in the end retreating into aesthetic experience; yet she does manage, albeit with characteristic reserve, to touch on a very important aspect of politicization. The poet includes her own professional milieu and circle of friends as an organic part of the dismal reality she describes. This bold gambit distinguishes Fanailovas experiment in civic poetry from those who seek to deal in more predictable ways with particular social wounds, historical traumas, the covertly repressive character of social life, and so on. Her 2008 book Black Suits contains some symptomatic examples of this poetic strategy:
I was there, I drank their coffee, Warmed up on their vodka and grub, The money paid for the buffet would have been enough, Pardon the socialist pathos, To pay the salaries of doctors, nurses and cleaners, Geographers, military instructors and technicians, Of a city hospital, A village middle school. I saw the poet Rodionovhe was drinking and laughing. I saw the poet Shulpiakov, he was haughtily Sitting with his back to the stage, but at a table with some food. I saw the poet Gugolev, he turned out to be A friend of the laureate from Tashkent.23 I didnt get to see Lesha Aigi.24 He and his pals Were supposed to entertain Elena Fanailova, Natsiia za menia . . ., in Lena i liudi, Mosow 2011. Andrei Rodionov (b. 1971): former punk musician-turned-poet; Gleb Shulpiakov (b. 1971): poet, novelist and translator of Hughes and Auden; Iulii Gugolev (b. 1964): former medic and tv journalist, also translates from the English. 24 Aleksei Aigi (b. 1971), composer and violinist, son of the Chuvash poet Gennadii Aigi (19342006).
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The Tashkent eminence, And the people in expensive clothes and others, In dirty bohemian gear, All those who were properly drunk, In evening suits, but its the boneheads you need, With little wooden faces like Pinocchios.25

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Fanailovas work makes it possible to reect on a new type of citizenship, on how to reinterpret the relations between the personal, the professional and the political.

A new paradigm?
Civic poetry has become an increasingly prominent part of Russian cultural lifenotably through public readings and festivals, such as those organized since 2009 by the journal Vozdukh (Air) in Moscow and in St Petersburg by the journal Translit. Yet even as they seek to explain the resurgence of civic motifs, many of the key gures in Russian poetry still wish to draw a clear line between poetry and political statements as such. According to Dmitri Kuzmin, the poet is forbidden to write political poems with an associated political goal.26 Stanislav Lvovskii, meanwhile, has spoken of the need to demarcate the political and the social from one another, including in art, asserting that direct expression of the political in poetry is only possible within a narrow aesthetic range. He connects this to the peculiarities of the post-modern situation, which is only now assuming its mature formand which does not allow for any responsible artistic statements that do not reect on their own foundations.27 Taking a certain distance from this line of thinking, it is worth attempting to dene the space of civic poetry today and to sketch out a possible typology. We can say that the inclusion of this or that social or political reality in a poetic utterance does not of itself give it a civic character. Besides transmitting or recording the authors experience of some aspect of social or political reality, its civic quality presupposes a minimal capacity for interpretation of that reality. But in this case we would be dealing
From ?, in Fanailova, Chernye kostiumy, Moscow 2008. Poetry and Dictatorship, round table discussion at 7th Moscow International Poetry Biennale, 8 October 2011; transcript available at svoboda.org. 27 Vecher Stanislava Lvovskogo v tsikle Oni razgovarivaiut, Novaia literaturnaia karta Rossii, 22 July 2009.
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with a passive citizenship; active civic poetry is that which not only contains a record, experience or interpretation of the given realities, but also takes an unambiguous stance on them. An example would be Dmitri Kuzmins poem respondingcontrary to his own stricturesto the murder of Anna Politkovskaia; it was posted on his LiveJournal blog on 8 October 2006, two days after her death, which took place on Putins birthday, and begins: The vampires birthday / is a red letter day. We might say that the civic content of the poem is inseparable from the political content; indeed in many cases it makes sense to speak not so much of the civic mode as of a new political poetry. The poet and critic Aleksandr Skidan has characterized political poetry as that which, through censorship, alienation, self-reection, fragmentariness and splintering of the narrative, allows us to discover gapsfolds of meaning that have not yet been seized by ideology. This, he continues, would be an art that draws in the viewer and reader through a process of co-creation and becoming, and in doing so leads to an understanding that they are connected with the bodies and consciousnesses of others.28 Politicizing poetry means, apart from anything else, doubting the integrity of ones own conceptions of it; doubt not only at the level of discourse, but also on the level of social functions, distribution, the place of poetry in society. It means opening the poetic text to the contradiction that can only be resolved through actionnot individual, but collective action; the action of history. It is this quality of doubt that has been largely absent from Russias underground and post-underground generations. For all their aesthetic variety, they shareopenly or tacitly, consciously or nota single clear preconception of poetrys role within the new, reformed post-Soviet reality. Their non-contradictory view of the place of the poet and of poetry, together with the notion that poetry-writing has an absolutized, de-ideologizing quality, was rooted in the expectation that a liberal capitalism built to Western specications would take root in Russia. Today, this ideology nds itself in crisis: behind the pretensions of its bearers and ideologues to a timeless value, its character as one ideology among others has been laid bare.
Aleksandr Skidan, Tezisy k politizatsii iskusstva, Vavilon, 12, 2004. Skidan (b. 1965): St Petersburg-based poet, essayist and translator; books include Krasnoe smeshchenie (2005; Eng. trans Red Shifting, 2007), and the essay collection Summa poetiki (2013).
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Breaking barriers
The new political poetry in Russia is characterized by the attempt to combine maximal openness to formal experimentation with a more or less dened political position, whether it be conveyed directly or obliquely, through the poems themselves or through essays, criticisms, slogans, activism. Political discourse and praxis interact with the poetry by means of an erosion of barriers between different spheresbetween art and politics, the personal and the political. The bid to create a single, unied space for a politicized literary practice is precisely what makes this a left paradigm in contemporary Russian conditions: for the liberal tradition, such a breaking down of barriers is impossible, even when a writer is operating in the civic mode. Among the present crop of poets working along these lines, a few examples must sufce to give a sense of the diversity of formal approaches. Pavel Arsenev (b. 1986) is a central gure in this circleboth in literary terms, as founder and editor of the journal Translit, in which many of the new political poets publish, and organizer of poetry festivals in St Petersburg; and as a prominent student activist, who devised one of the best-known slogans of the 201112 anti-Putin protests, Vy nas dazhe ne predstavliaetemeaning both You dont even represent us and You cant even imagine us (the slogan was directed at the entire political establishment, including the opposition itself). His poetic work combines activist performances with found poetry, creatively blurring the boundary between direct utterance and ironic commentary on readymade discourse. One cycle of poems is titled Ready-Written:
A used Mayakovsky is for sale on Runets new trading platform. Advertising links. Add to cart. E-mail this link to a friend. Everyone will be found. Unlimited web trafc. How to spend your free time. Pictures. More.29
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Pavel Arsenev, Prodaetsia Maiakovskii, in Bestsvetnye zelenye idei iarostno spiat, Moscow 2011. The volume is part of a series published jointly by Translit and Medvedevs Free Marxist Press.

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By contrast, Vadim Lungul (b. 1977) seeks to create a new proletarian poetry, taking into account the entire breadth of the left poetic tradition of the 20th century, from Bertolt Brecht to Aleksandr Brener.30 A poem titled Conversation with a Worker gives a sense of the tone and frame of reference of his work:
A railway worker tells me that his hand doesnt work any more he cant work any more with that hand and his ngers are all bent and wont obey him. He says he is now a cripple, a hostage to the misfortune thats befallen him, and he has nothing left to hope for. Because all his hopes of earning a living are on the scrap heap, like he is himself. After all, the production process and bottom line wont tolerate a body thats been rejected by a medical commission, with a twisted hand theres nothing you can do about it . . . I tell him that this very hand, about which he has told me so much, should be removed and ruthlessly thrown into the trash, and in its place another, iron hand should be made. Look herelike the one I have.31

Lungul, based in Kishinev, is a radical left activist, and his poetic work is inseparable from his political praxisreadings at meetings and actions, making activist videos and so on. The same is true of Roman Osminkin (b. 1979), whose project involves attempts to adapt the Conceptual traditionespecially the work of Dmitri Prigovto the needs of direct political statements.32 In some cases this means the adoption of such devices as alliteration or incantatory repetitions:
big mouths say enough tragedies big mouths say it hasnt all been eaten yet Aleksandr Brener (b. 1957): poet, artist and activist, best known for spraying a dollar-sign on a Malevich painting in Amsterdam in 1997. 31 Vadim Lungul, Razgovor s rabochim, in Naemnym rabotnikam, Moscow 2010. 32 Dmitri Prigov (19402007): poet and artist, founder-member of Moscow Conceptualism, briey interned by the kgb in 1986.
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big mouths say the system is in danger big mouths say give us time big mouths say make tracks big mouths say [unclear]33

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Elsewhere Osminkin inhabits a variety of personas, as in a poem depicting the Moscow metro:
Im a creature without xed abode trying to get warm or Im a new Anna quasi-Karenina who stares at the rails Im a person of Caucasian nationality without papers or Im Lyubov Sliska, who doesnt take the metro but threatens him from a campaign poster Im the girl with sad eyes who tweaks away at her violin in the connecting passage or Im the coin ying towards her feet but caught in mid-ight by the cop Im the token squeezed in the callused palm of the Moldovan Gastarbeiter or Im the old lady wielding a rucksack who mutters theyve overrun the place34

In the poetic dramas of Keti Chukhrov (b. 1970, as Ketevan Chukhrukidze), a Moscow-based art theoretician and literary scholar, the voices of various subjects collidemarket traders, shop assistants, students, policemen, photojournalists, nurses, refugees, art critics. The interactions, which often create absurd situations and dialogues reminiscent of the 20th-century avant-gardethe example of Daniil Kharms comes to mindpoint to the traumas of the new Russian capitalism: social and gender subjugation, alienation, material frustration and political disillusionment. One such drama, AfghanKuzminki, centres on the recurrent attempts of Hamlet, a wholesale market trader, to have sex with Galia, a saleswoman he employs; she agrees to sleep with him on condition he promote her, but the two continually get interrupted or distracted. Their dialogue, by turns friendly, hostile or indifferent, is recurrently invaded by the words and thoughts of others, whose
33

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From Roman Oskminkin, Zasos volodenkii, Translit 1011, 2012, p. 13. Roman Osminkin, Truba, Translit 4, 2008, p. 18. Lyubov Sliska: deputy chair of the Duma 200011, former member of United Russia party.

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utterances are in turn subjected to a kind of absurdist dtournement. At one point, the image of Putin declaims from a tv screen:
We always stood for organization, we always kept an eye on the situation. Entry into the wto will give fresh impetus to Russias economic development. We are getting closer to realizing this idea. Dear fellow-citizens, our enemies prevent us from understanding the great simplicity of our hearts, they prevent us from loving and believing. They dont understand our joyfulness, the happiness and grace of our victory, with which we are able to die in any trash-heap in our motherland. Dear fellow-citizens, admittedly its on credit but were already in paradise thats why we shine, Moscow shines, why our people ies forward in automobiles. Each of us now looks like a studio portrait.35

The interweaving of different discourses is also central to the work of Anton Ochirov (b. 1978). Within a single overarching political frameworkas in the poem Israel, for example, which relates to the IsraeliPalestinian conictOchirov draws on a vast range of political, cultural, biographical and other allusions, the interconnections between them not always apparent. The aim is to reveal the subterranean, sub conscious mutual penetration of the personal and the political; the formal consequence is a highly personalized, almost hermetic form of collage:
but now I have this voice inside speaking from your grave: I think that its you like

theres a lot of jolly kids here theyre all making a bicycle and one of these mornings someones going to invent gunpowder or its me and I
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speaking like that just invented you

from my grave because you are my death

Keti Chukhrov, AfganKuzminki, in Prosto liudi, Moscow 2010.

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you think this is a poem blood type old music no its white noise the rustle of time our pilotless whisper36

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How does this new paradigm of commitment, shared by an increasing number of young Russian poets, relate to previous phases of politicization in the countrys literature? It is comparable to the situation in the 1920s and the late Soviet literary underground in one key respect: its willingness to accommodate, as a matter of principle, a maximum of formal variety. The difference lies in the fact that the political framework for this is not loyalty to a revolutionary programme, as in the 1920s, nor repudiation of an imposed Soviet politicizationwhich then meant a loyalty to the liberal reforms of the post-Soviet erabut delity to an emancipatory, egalitarian project that has its historical roots in the early Soviet period. The place of the poet within it remains undetermined; and this indeterminacy has today opened up an enormous space. This is a space in which, in principle, neither direct political propaganda nor civic expressions of emotion, neither petty-bourgeois psychologism nor rened formal experiments, are forbidden. The only thing that matters is the refusal to consider one poetic position or another the sole true onewhether it be the position of the poet as individual person, public herald or university intellectual. Naturally, belonging to this emerging paradigm is in itself no guarantee of poetic successnor is not belonging to it. But a crucial change has taken place. Until recently, the project for the privatization of poetry that developed out of the uncensored tradition, and which has predominated since the 1990s, could present itself as the only one for these times, endorsed by the march of history; any alternative was rejected as a dangerous anachronism. Today, it appears as if that phase of the neoliberal era is coming to an end, and with it the movement from the collective towards the individual, and from socialization to privatization. In these conditions, the hegemony of a privatized poetics can no longer be assumed, but needs to be justied once more, in an open contest of ideas.

36

Anton Ochirov, Nekotorye teksty 200708 goda, Translit 5, 2009, p. 29.