Article

Name: An Old Discussion on Free Verse as a Discussion on Collective Experience

Authors: Kirill M. Korchagin

V. V. Vinogradov Russian Language Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russian Federation

Abstract:

The article examines the discussion on free verse that took place in the editorial office of “Voprosy Literatury” in the fall of 1971 and the poetic works of those participants who advocated a wider use of free verse in Russian poetry (Vladimir Burich, Arvo Mets, Vyacheslav Kupriyanov). The discussion had all the hallmarks of a generational dispute: the well-known fifty-year-old poets were confronted with thirty- and forty-year-old poets whose path into Soviet literature had been difficult both because of the non-classical form they had chosen and because of the general slowdown in cultural life at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, after the Prague Spring, which marked the end of the Thaw. An analysis of the poems written by the participants in this dispute, as well as the Russian poems of the Estonian poet Jaan Kaplinski, who is in many ways close to this group, suggests that the question of poetic form, which was the title of the polemic, largely masked another, much deeper question: the question of how collective experience is transmitted through poetry. And while for the “antivers-librists” in this dispute the classical form ultimately remained a means by which individual experience could be scaled up to the experience of all, or at least a significant portion of, human-kind, the “vers-librists” tacitly assumed that the experience of a twentieth-century man, especially one who had lived through a WWII, could be understood without the additional embellishments provided by the traditional form. As this article shows, the dispute was much more existential in nature than is usually assumed.

Keywords: free verse, vers libre, V. Burich, A. Mets, V. Kupriyanov, Ya. Kaplinsky, collective experience, Soviet poetics, post-war generation, 1970s, Voprosy Literatury

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