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Introduction to Featured Russian Poets
The reception and legitimacy of free verse is very much an ongoing process that is being negotiated in Russia. Polish poetry for example, to paraphrase Czeslaw Milosz, had managed to liberate itself from the tyranny of rhyme long ago, but Pushkin's hexameters remain an ingrained Russian cultural standard to this day. It is within this context that my introduction to this group publication of six Russian minimalist poets must be framed. In a tiny nutshell, this is a condensed history of Russian minimalist poetry, minus the Moscow Conceptualist poets Dmitri Prigov (1940-2007) and Lev Rubinstein (b. 1947) and, beside Jan Satunovsky who is represented here, the other members of the so-called Lianozovo School – Igor Kholin (b.1920-1999), Genrikh Sapgir (b. 1928-1999), Vsevolod Nekrasov (b.1934-2009), and their “teacher,” Yevgeny Kropivnitsky (b.1893-1979). As Sol LeWitt put it, “Minimalism is not really an idea. It ended before it started.” For that reason, it is probably fitting to spell “minimalist” with a lower-case “m,” an adjective. Quite appropriate to its spirit, Minimalism was not a movement, nor had any of its practitioners ever identified as part of a group or school, so that Minimalism with a capital “M” can only refer to a historical moment that dates roughly to the mid-60s (very close in time to the paradigm shift to Pop Art, identified as the post-modernist divide, the Russian equivalent being Sots Art that comments ironically on the kitsch of Socialist Realism.) In this context, it should be noted that minimalist is not necessarily synonymous with miniature, as short work can be maximally dense, and a conceptual minimalist piece can be serially extended to great lengths, as Prigov's and Rubinstein's poems often are. P and R are also very much performance poets. Prigov's plan to complete 40,000 poems was interrupted only by his premature death from a heart attack; Rubinstein's work is characterized by an accumulation of subject-related material on hundreds of index cards. I don't think it would be an over-generalization to say that the poets gathered here trace their roots to the great Russian modernist Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922,) their spiritual and aesthetic grandfather. The lineage runs through the second generation of modernists, the so-called Russian Absurdists or Oberiu, particularly Daniil Kharms (1905-1942), whose rediscovery and publication in Russia is closely linked with the reconstitution of the poetic avant-garde wiped out under Stalin, beginning after the tyrant's death in 1953, and which included the members of the generation listed above. While a summary of this 60s process is outside the scope of our discussion, the avant-garde within this context has been defined as mostly, though not entirely, experimental, and always “unofficial,” “non-conformist” artists, as nearly all free verse poets remained; even though Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930) had been the acknowledged model Soviet poet, a few of the poems of the recently deceased Andrey Voznesensky (1933-2010) were practically the only exclusion to this rule. Many of the unofficial poets owed their survival to recognized, and thus paid, work as children's poets and/or translators. We have time here for one paragraph to note some stylistic similarities, influences, and historical developments. In short: concreteness, attention to daily minutia, pre-eminence of the speech act, essential humaneness. Some though not much awareness of Western and Eastern models, including 19th C. French verse libre, 20th C. American poetry (Imagism, etc.,) Walt Whitman as precursor, Ginsberg and the Beats as contemporary practitioners, Japanese haiku poetry. A value shift from poetic genius to simple, direct observation of what is. Fragmentation or fragmentary stream of consciousness. A quiet resistance to established modes and so divorce from structures of power and the power of structures, and from unambiguously complete narratives. An establishment of a domain for a private language, yet combined with a degree of depersonalization or anonymity (rarely if at all biographical in a confessional sense and very much in the public sphere.) Lastly, an influence that in the American context has been termed ethnopoetic, so that some early practitioners were ethnically “Other,” for example Gennady Aygi (1934-2006; Chuvash) and Arvo Metz (1937-1997; Estonian). I would close by quoting, in their entirety, two poems, the first by Yevgeny Kropivnitsky, whose quite example served as a model for the poets of Lianozovo. “Advice to Poets”: Long poems are/Difficult to read/and breed boredom.//Write shorter poems./They contain less excess/And can be read quickly (1965). And the second by the Lianozovo poet Jan Satunovsky, with whom our selection begins and who ironically titled his posthumously published collected poems Chopped Prose: “Above all the gall to know this is poetry.” Links:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velimir_Khlebnikov http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayakovsky http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniil_Kharms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Nonconformist_Art (Lianozovo, Moscow Conceptualism, etc.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genrikh_Sapgir http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Voznesensky http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gennady_Aygi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitri_Prigov
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