Russian Uncensored Poetry and German Concretism: Between Creative Reception and Reflection

Information about the author:

Mikhail G. Pavlovets, PhD in Philology, Associate Professor of School of Philological Studies, Faculty of Humanities, HSE University. Myasnitskaya 20, 101000 Moscow, Russia.

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ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7246-1787

Abstract:

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).