Authors

Valentina Parisi¹;  ¹ University of Macerata, Italy

Discussion

In my paper, I will propose a comparison between Ry Nikonova (Anna Tarshis, 1942-2014) and Elizaveta Mnatsakanova (Netzkowa, 1922-2019), with a special focus on their self-positioning in the discourses of Soviet underground and emigrant milieu. While being both fierce opponents of the Acmeist line in Russian neo-modernist poetry, they developed different approaches to what they perceived as the “true” avant-garde alternative to it, i. e. Velimir Chlebnikov’s neglected legacy. On the one hand, in an essay published in “Sintaksis” (Paris) in 1983, Mnatsakanova situated Chlebnikov at the roots of the Malerpoesie movement (“Painted Poetry”) to whom she belonged together with her beloved poets of the “Viennese School”, H. C. Artmann and Gerhard Rühm, both being translators of Chlebnikov into German. In her perspective, Chlebnikov, as an initiator of a poetry made out of “written, visible or simply tangible […] signs”, represented the most relevant reference for those poets who wanted to make explicit “all the potential that is hidden into a specific language” [italics mine]. Ry Nikonova’s dream of “esperantism”, i.e. of an “untranslatable”, “abstract”, “absolute” poetry, was much more radical: namely she drew on a specific part of Chlebnikov’s oeuvre, which served her as a source of inspiration for her own conceptual projects related to the idea of a “word superfluous as such.” As she wrote in 1999, “Velimir Chlebnikov is good, but what I like most about him are the architectural and numerical projects.”