Authors

Discussion

The purpose of this paper is to discuss Elena Shvarts’ publications in the samizdat journals 37 and Chasy in the context of ecopoetry. There have been many debates over who and what constitute ecopoetry as well as how political the genre is or ought to be. I will not rehearse these debates, but I will include two definitions of ecopoetry that I find particularly productive. The first comes from J. Scott Bryson’s The West Side of Any Mountain: Place, Space, and Ecopoetry wherein he states that ecopoets work to “create place, making a conscious and concerted effort to know the more-than-human world” and the second comes from the editor’s preface to The Ecopoetry Anthology wherein Laura-Gray Street remarks: “I have come to think of ecopoetry not as a particular form or subject or style or school but as a way of thinking within and through all these. Of a way of thinking ecocentrically rather than anthropocentrically.” In this paper I will perform close readings of several of Shvarts’ poems, such as “Zver’-tsvetok,” “Bashnia, v nei kletki,” “Solovei spasaiushchii,” and “Moisei i kust, v kotorom iavilsia bog,” relying on Jane Bennett’s model of ecocritical thought in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things to demonstrate how these works can be characterized as ecopoetic. Afterwards, I will shift my focus to address why it matters that we view these poems as ecopoetic in the broader context of dissidence in Late- and Post-Soviet Russia. In this section, I will examine the motivations for publishing the two journals, focusing specifically on statements made by and about their editors Viktor Krivulin and Boris Ivanov. I will argue that the underground culture’s desire to create an alternative sphere wherein people could find their own, and the democratic nature of Chasy in particular, align with Shvarts’ ecopoetic approach.