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

On Friday, October 12th please join us for a talk with Marijeta Bozovic from Yale University on :Avant-Garde Post– : Radical Poetics after the Soviet Union”.

This study examines the poetic and theoretical output of a constellation of contemporary leftist Russian poets—linked by way of the journal [Translit], Kraft chapbook series, Free Marxist Press, and a number of poetry festivals and events in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Moreover, they are united by their overt political engagement and explicitly Marxist orientation. I aim to bring this new generation of Russian poets to critical attention and to explore what I conceptualize as a contemporary avant-garde; hence the paradoxical use of prefixes in my title, which gestures at the temporal paradoxes of a revived futurism. I focus on the works of several distinctive poets as case studies of neo-avant-garde poetic practices, linking experimental form with radical politics, and finding continuity with the historical Russian avant-garde of the 1910s and 1920s as well as with unofficial poetry throughout the Soviet period to the present day. I read the latest (re)turn of the Russian avant-garde as drawing on powerful local poetic counter-traditions, re-imagined through, reinvigorated by—and in solidarity with—international theory and art practice.

Marijeta Bozovic is an Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, affiliated with Film and Media Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. A specialist in 20th- and 21st-century Russian and East European cultures with broad comparative interests, she is the author of Nabokov’s Canon: From Onegin to Ada (Northwestern University Press, 2016), and the co-editor (with Matthew Miller) of Watersheds: Poetics and Politics of the Danube River (Academic Studies Press, 2016) and (with Brian Boyd) of Nabokov Upside Down (Northwestern University Press, 2017). She is currently working on her second monograph, Avant-Garde Post– : Radical Poetics After the Soviet Union. Bozovic is the co-editor of the academic journal Russian Literature; the co-curator of the “Poetry after Language colloquy for Stanford University’s ARCADE digital salon; and a contemporary film and literature reviewer for The Los Angeles Review of Books.