Avant-Gardes at the Iron Curtain: A Transnational Reading of Allen Ginsberg and the Soviet Estradny Movement

Abstract

“Avant-Gardes at the Iron Curtain” uncovers how Ginsberg’s family connections to Russia, his interest in Russian Futurist and Estradny poetry, his travels to the Soviet Union and other Soviet Bloc countries in 1965, as well as his collaborations and friendships with Russian poets Andrei Voznesensky and Yevgeny Yevtushenko profoundly shaped his shift in the late sixties to a new style of aural composition and excursions into new genres and modes of performance. Because of his complex position between two cultures at war, Ginsberg is able to satirically critique both the American and the Soviet governments from a politically neutral yet activist transnational position. Chapter one of this dissertation claims that Ginsberg cultivates, in his early works, a Russian identity based on his family connections to Russia that simultaneous undermines American exceptionalism by drawing parallels between the two countries’ governments while, at the same time, he uses his own conflicted Russian and American identities to channel Whitman’s ideals of American pluralism and their potential restorative powers for American democracy. Chapter two explains how Russian translations of Ginsberg's most famous poems failed as Soviet propaganda while nevertheless succeeding in inspiring young Russian poets of the Estradny movement to introduce subtly dissident politics into official Soviet publications in the form of confessional poetry. This Estradny poetry, in turn, influenced Ginsberg after making its way back to America in the form of Red Cats, a collection of poems conceived of by Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1962. Chapter three argues that Ginsberg’s travels to the Soviet Union in 1965 led to major shifts in his approach to articulating politics in poetry, his method of poetic composition, and his commitment to poetry’s oral tradition and its potential role in popular culture. When we see Ginsberg’s post-1965 poetry in the global context of its inception, poems long thought by US critics to be inert are revealed to be politically and psychologically complex portraits of Vietnam-era Cold War America. Ginsberg’s understanding and often hagiographic appreciation of Estradny poetry’s power as a popular aural art form resulted in his incorporating his own version of their poetics into much of his post-1965 poetry, which transcends the political, cultural, and language barriers that divided the East and West in the 1960s. While language, cultural, and political divisions between the US and Russia have continued to prevent many critics from fully appreciating Ginsberg’s post-1965 shift towards aural composition and overt political intervention, my transnational reading claims that reading these poems in their appropriate global context can help us better understand their political exigence, complex historical origins, aural aesthetics, and their impact on popular American culture and music. This transnational study is intended to improve our understanding of some of Ginsberg’s most frequently undervalued works, but it is also an argument-by-example of the importance of reading across national and linguistic borders as a way of advancing our understanding of the cultures both inside and beyond those borders.