Article

Name: We in Russian Poetry: From Avant-Garde to the Newest Political Agenda

Authors: K. M. Korchagin

Vinogradov Russian Language Institute RAS

Abstract: The paper regards the specific use of pronoun WE in Russian poetry of the last century. This use is related to the deep immersion of a number of poets in the Marxian intellectual project. These poets may share its values (like Eduard Bagritskiy, Boris Slutskiy or, later, Kirill Medvedev) or distance themselves from it (like Viktor Krivulin or, in part, Oksana Vasyakina). In both cases, they exploit Marxian conceptual language and comprehend the poetic subjectivity through the prism of its agenda. For instance, Eduard Bagritskiy in his poetry created a specific WE uniting a tragic feeling of postrevolutionary epoch with enthusiastic impulse for searching the new world. This WE had to associate all the people of the new epoch who can share the importance and urgency of the current governmental construction. In his Problèmes de linguistique générale, Émile Benveniste distinguished two kinds of WE: “inclusive”, which attaches YOU to ME, and “exclusive”, which does THEY to ME. In early Soviet political poetry, there were two significant variants of the first Benvenistian WE, quite opposite to each other. The first one is a WE of (bolsheviks’) party referred to a close circle of individuals: in this case, YOU re-codes as multiplied ME which obtains a quite abstract nature released from the elements of the individual experience. This conception echoes Aleksandr Bogdanov’s study of the collective subjectivity developed in “empiriomonism” theory, which was a doctrine on the collective individual who constitutes himor herself through a kind of shared experience and the organized labor. The Proletkult’s poets led by Bogdanov himself developed the most straightforward interpretation of empiriomonism, although the later Soviet pre-WWII poetry was more delicate with this conception. Eduard Bagritskiy and some his contemporaries found a new basis for the collective experience: not in the organized labor but in the dramatic history of the recent past. Almost a century later, in the political poetry of 2010s, one finds similar trends. After “post-conceptualist” poetry of Kirill Medvedev, Anton Ochirov, and Roman Osminkin, a new generation enters the stage in the late 2010s. These new poets have partially returned to the Bogdanovian conception of the collective subjectivity. While creating a new collective subjectivity, they combine fragments from the WE of shared experience (although it is experience of loss instead of that of labor) and that of the party: they are ready to include every individual in the circle of the WE but tend to defend its borders from the external aggression (like in Oksana Vasyakina’s poems).

Keywords: political agenda, Russian Marxism, Aleksandr Bogdanov, Eduard Bagritskiy, Kirill Medvedev, Oksana Vasyakina, modern poetry, pronoun “we”

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