Alan:

Do you know Mikhail Epstein's fabulous book, After the Future, published a
couple years ago by University of Massachusetts Press? There are a number of
essays there about recent Russian poetry. In addition, there is an interview
I did with Epstein (with Ellen Berry and Anesa Pogacar, who edited
Re-Entering the Sign, a book of recent Russian theory) in the journal Common
Knowledge, which is distributed by Oxford UP, I believe, so you should be
able to get it "over there". Some of the discussion revolves around the new
poetries in context of Epstein's considerations of the meaning of
"postmodernism" in the Russian sense. I think this interview came out in
'95.

But I think I will write Misha and ask him to write something about this
general topic for the list. Maybe he will, and I'll forward it here. By the
way, did you have contact with Epstein, Jackie? Really one of the most
fascinating thinkers around. (point of interest: he has written widely on
the Yasusada affair and has argued emphatically in prominent Russian
journals that Doubled Flowering is the English translation of a work jointly
written by Andrei Bitov --Russia's leading contemporary fiction writer-- and
Dmitri Prigov. For some reason, no one in the English-speaking world, wiht
the exception of Eliot Weinberger, has given this view much credence, but
these things take time...)

A vignette in response to your last question: I once asked Prigov whether he
thought the term "avant-garde" described the new Russian poetries. He said,
roughly, that such a concept was to real poets as the shell of an extinct
species of tortoise is to time unfolding forwards and backwards. I have no
idea what in the world he meant by that.

I'll see if I can get Epstein to comment on this thread. Maybe this interest
here could lead to some revived connections and correspondences. Come to
think of it, I'll ask Misha if he has any ideas for email links between the
Brit-po list and Russian poets and critics? Is that an OK idea in light of
cris cheek's post from today?

Kent


>From: [log in to unmask]
>Reply-To: [log in to unmask]
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: Third Wave & Russian Sea Gulls
>Date: Mon, 11 Dec 2000 16:33:12 EST
>
>Recent remarks by Jackie, Kent, Henry, about contacts with Russian poets
>very interesting to me as someone who knows the language to some extent but
>have no personal acquaintance with and only spotty knowledge of recent
>poets (I try to avoid translations when, in theory, anyway, I could read
>the original - the result is I have this perpetual backlog of neglect. I
>have, however, seen both Jackie's and Kent's admirable anthologies).
>
>Like many my age the first "contemporary" Russian poets I was aware of were
>Yevtushenko and Voznesensky. Their verse seemed to fit in comfortably with
>a certain sixties "mainstream" in the US. Later, when I learned Russian and
>met a number of "third wave" emigres - a term that among them, at least,
>designated the third (Brezhnev era) wave of emigration, the first two being
>right after the revolution and right after WWII  - I found V. and Y. were
>nearly universally scorned as accomodationists and flabby versifiers.The
>emigres' hero was Brodsky, who was certainly "uncompromising" in ways that
>these two were not.
>
>In the context of English-language poetry, of course, Brodsky came to be
>viewed rather differently, as part of the "conservative" mainstream.
>Neither he nor the other members of the Nobel quadrumvirate, Walcott,
>Heaney, and Milosz, are likely to be thought of, by those who habitually
>think in such terms, as particularly "advanced" poets.
>
>I think it was Mikhail Epstein who wrote that in thinking of Russian poetry
>you had to reverse all your assumptions. Maybe not as true now as it once
>was, but there is still arguably some of that mirror-quality left. In the
>early eighties Epstein classified the two main directions in Russian verse
>as “meta-realist” and “conceptualist,” characterizing the division between
>them as an updated version of the realist-nominalist controversy. The
>“meta-realists,” among whom he included Zhdanov, Shvarts, and Sedakova,
>went in for hypersaturated metaphors, trying to put as much meaning as
>possible into each word, while the “conceptualists” went for the opposite,
>that is, words that pointed up their own status as “empty signifiers.”
>While the second tendency seems to fit in with much that was happening in
>English-language poetry, the “meta-realist” direction, which is formally
>conservative but semantically adventurous (and explicitly religious,
>according to Epstein) doesn’t seem to have any real contemporary counterpa
>rt among us.
>
>As I say, this is all very interesting to me, but others undoubtedly know
>more about it than I. Do Henry, Kent or Jackie recall any interesting
>remarks from these poets about how they saw themselves as fitting/not
>fitting into Russian poetic traditions?
>
>Alan

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