Authors

James Rann¹;  ¹ University of Glasgow, UK

Discussion

For all its murderousness and enforcement of monocultural mediocrity, Stalinism did not entirely efface the legacy of modernism in Russophone poetry and, as recent scholarship has shown, it was the survival not only of texts but of individuals that helped to seed new poetic creativity in the Thaw and the late Soviet underground (see Maurizio 2021, Brooks 2006). This paper seeks to shed more light on this process of historical cultural transfer, and to contribute to the problematization of reductive histories of Russophone poetry in the twentieth century, by examining how, in their poetry of the 1960s and 1970s, two of these survivors constructed their biographical connection to a modernist past that had ambivalent significance in the Soviet cultural memory. 

Although not obvious poetic bedfellows, the lives of Gnedov and Martynov took a similar shape: early provincial promise followed by a move to the metropole and the adoption of a ‘Futurist’ identity, then punishment and exile under Stalin leading to final decades of demonstrative formal and political orthodoxy. Without overlooking the important differences between them – Gnedov was, in his day, much more experimental than Martynov (or, indeed, anyone) and has a certain global reputation; Martynov is little discussed now but enjoyed considerable success in later life, while Gnedov went unpublished – this paper builds on explorations of the afterlives of the avant-garde (see Rann 2017) by using a close-reading of the two poets’ engagement withs the emblematic figure of Velimir Khlebnikov to show, in miniature, how poetry is capable of narrating its own history. 

Works Cited

Brooks, Crispin (2006). ‘On One Ancestor: Vasilisk Gnedov in the Work of Sergej Sigej and Ry Nikonova.’ Russian Literature, 59 (2-4), pp. 177-223.

Maurizio, Massimo (2021). 'Between Modernism and the Underground During the Thaw: A Look at “Transitional Poets”', in Mark Lipovetsky, and others (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture (online edn, Oxford Academic, 14 July 2021). 

Rann, James (2017). ‘Living as a Legend: Modernist Theatricality and Stalinist Self-fashioning in the Lifewriting of Vasilii Kamenskii.’ Modern Language Review, 112(4), pp. 953-980.