Language as a fact: The new poetry of Nekrasov, Rubinshtein, Aizenberg, Tsvetkov.

Abstract

The theme of this dissertation is Russian contemporary poetry of the 1970s and 1980s, known as new Russian poetry. It focuses on how non-official writers, who had to work privately and clandestinely (in the underground), succeeded in finding a new language for poetry. For them to find a new language meant to fight against the political commercialization of language during the Soviet period, and against a whole tradition of the sacred Word, which had been a mainstay in Russian culture since the Middle Ages. Their new conception of literature, instead, was based on an understanding of the poetic word as something not revealed from above, but accessible to everyone, and perceived as a concrete object. Language as a fact, as a fluid and changeable reality, which renews itself every time in a different context. The thesis explores this issue with particular attention to the Moscow literary scene of the period considered. The first part of the first chapter provides a historical overview of the groups and movements that enlivened the underground environment of the Russian capital in the 1970s and 1980s, both avantgardists and non-avantgardists, i.e. more traditional ones. It also gives an account of the social and cultural circumstances, under which the new poetry was born. The second part of the chapter is a general introduction to the meaning of a new word. The following four chapters are each dedicated to one poet from the Moscow underground. This section of the dissertation explores how a new understanding of art has been interpreted by two avantgardist writers, the Minimalist Vsevolod Nekrasov and the Conceptualist Lev Rubinshtein, and two non-avantgardist writers, Mikhail Aizenberg and Aleksei Tsvetkov. Each chapter analyzes the biobibliographical data for each poet and the characteristics of their poetics and aesthetics in the 1970s and 1980s, illustrated by a critical commentary of their poems taken from the collections that have been published in Russia and abroad, and from unpublished material provided by the poets themselves.