Russian Poetry Today : A Contemporary Sampler By A. DMITRIJANOV -- AN EXCERPT

An EXCERPT from  the Cover Story of Pratik’s Current Issue

The strangely seductive power of Russian literature and language is so well known and widely attested as to be almost a cliché. Russian poetry, like all major poetic traditions, is rooted in its language, and yet does not exist in isolation. It lives and functions within an unending flow of intersecting influences, including European (English, French, Spanish, German, etc.), and Eastern (Persian, Chinese, Japanese, etc.) poetry. It is also nourished and renewed by contact with folklore and the living language of the people. This is one of many sources its current remarkably diverse range of forms and voices.

Established tradition breaks Russian literature down into clearly demarcated periods. The first of these to gain international prominence was the so-called Golden Age, referring to the first third of the nineteenth century. Golden Age poetry was dominated by syllabic-accentual verse, with relatively strict and well-established patterns of rhyme as well as meter. In the first third of twentieth century, the so-called Silver Age, however, those poetic forms began to break down and the formal range available to Russian poets was correspondingly vastly expanded.

Now, in the early stages of the twenty-first century, no particular formal requirements are expected of a poetic act. The result is a blinding variety of literary techniques and devices makes the poetic space multidimensional and colorful. This is very much the case in European and world poetry today, except that in the West, this situation is the result of long-term evolution. Especially after the fall of the Soviet Union, formal diversity exploded upon the scene as Russian poetry raced at lightning speed through its own version of a century of literary history. As experienced from within, it was a genuine and stunning revolution.
This unusual historical arc has led to a unique feature of Russian poetry today – alongside the poetry we recognize as contemporary, there is a large and active school of poets continuing to write in metrically regular rhymed verse, in styles reminiscent of the early twentieth or even nineteenth century. Given this broad diversity, what stand out are individual, unique, and powerful individual authors’ styles (Russian literary criticism has a term for these – they are called idiostyles).
There has always been a tension in Russian poetry between tradition and innovation: on the one hand, those tensions arise from forces at work in the literatures of other (generally European) countries, which have tended to erode established Russian poetic traditions; on the other, they frequently arise from within, the impact of historically crucial poetic idiostyles – think of Pushkin, Khlebnikov, Tsvetaeva, Brodsky, Prigov and Dragomoshchenko, to name just a few.

The 70s-80s of XX century were also characterized by powerful tensions, of which the friction between “official” Soviet poetry and the swiftly developing underground poetry is only the most obvious source. Many new trends and tendencies appeared in this period: conceptualism (in particular, a group called the Moscow Conceptualists), for instance, poked fun at Soviet cliché and inherited views of art and culture; metarealism expanded the idea of a metaphor, and drawing new realities from that linguistic practice; and so forth. Each generation absorbed the previous experiences, but at the same time denied past achievements, thus creating a great number of “electrical discharges” inside the language. Today, as poet and critic Lev Oborin justly notes, “numerous options are possible – there is no mainstream in the developing context [of Russian verse], a state of affairs whose roots go back to the modernist splintering of poetic movements. Even now the scene continues to veer towards still greater individualization.”

Continued...

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