The Voice Over

But complex, non-linear poems show up here as well, as long as they conform to some set of external parameters. Complexity is entirely permitted—if it’s well-dressed, swanky, demonstrative, worn to be seen. The new sensibility looks for excess, fullness, emotions that overwhelm your soul, and it reacts to whatever strikes these sparks of emotion. We have already mentioned the demand for entertainment and a plot, with the latter opening an easy path to the reader’s sentimentality. But there are other variations, too—the game of recognition that takes old things out of the storage shed: a child’s Soviet memory, a skeleton key to experience that only pretends to be shared. Or a direct sermon, life lessons, commandments of blessedness, spelled out to a one-two-three beat. There are lots of variations and only one invariant: the new sensibility uses poems as a painkiller, expecting them to provide it with direct and tangible benefit. Poems should be more than poems—in and of themselves, they aren’t needed here.

It is characteristic and important that these distinctive features are often the qualities of very good poems; and they are not at all definitive there. But they’re exactly what the ruling taste marks as “its own,” nourishing, necessary; they’re exactly what determines the reader’s choice. More than that, in some cases it’s as if certain things (intonations, meanings) are conveyed to the text from outside, aside from the author’s intention (that is, the possibility of such a reading isn’t even contained in the poems as such); they’re inscribed there by readers themselves or, more accurately, by a certain mode of reading, which pushes everything that seems superfluous, inessential off the side of the road. This might be called a regulating or redacting kind of reading, which exclusively lifts the froth off the text—the layer of meaning it needs for itself. The context in which a complicated thing is read and understood as a simple thing is an invention of the aughts, their mirthless know-how.

I am intentionally not naming names: my task is not to redraw hierarchies with one “mainstream” taking the place of another but to describe a situation that is tragically shared by everyone.

On the Victory of Strength over Subtlety

But here are some names. In a long-ago article (from 1999), Elena Fanailova cites a phrase from Grigory Dashevsky: “Plenty that’s subtle—little that’s strong.” That time’s need for strength (for a clear authorial position, for explicitness and consistency of poetics, for—in the broad sense—refusal to compromise in what is being done), noted correctly and early, became a general need as time progressed. That is, it became a mass demand. In the early aughts, authorial practices that were based on the application of strength of various kinds turned up in the field of vision and discussion. Radicalism of means and tasks, deformation of language and meaning (or, on the contrary, a pointed scorn for devices), active exploration of traumatic experience, private and all-encompassing, a new narrativity, which by force takes upon itself the duties of prose—all these, let’s face it, are potent substances, and from ten or twelve years’ distance I see how they provoked addiction and repulsion at once—including (or, first and foremost) in authors who worked most actively with these things. Toward the middle of the decade, the intensive course had been completed and texts started to stall, to shed, to seek nourishment from external sources—with greater or lesser success.

As much as the 1990s, their second half, did for poems, with something new being thrown in every minute, so the fortunate aughts turned out to be strange, frozen like a computer. The era of stability turned out to be the same thing for poems, too; but I’ll say in passing that these ten years have hardly given us three or four truly remarkable poetic debuts. And at the same time the poets of complexity fell silent, gave up, or changed their writing. I’ll mention a few names whose absence from the everyday scene seems to me perhaps more significant than the presence of others. Mikhail Gronas and Grigory Dashevsky, whose main corpus of texts took shape in the 1990s, are writing vanishingly little. Vsevolod Zelchenko, Aleksandr Anashevich, Mikhail Sukhotin have fallen silent; Kirill Medvedev has stopped publishing, if not writing. The poetics of Dmitry Vodennikov, Elena Fanailova, Sergei Kruglov have changed radically—and in all three cases with a turn toward a new intelligibility, direct speech, immediate impact. The authorial practices of Mikhail Eremin, Gennady Aigi, Vsevolod Nekrasov, Nikolai Baitov, Andrei Poliakov wound up sidelined by readers’ interest; this list (most important for the understanding of what in point of fact was going on with Russian poems in the last decade) could be continued for a whole page.