On the Aughts
The first decade of the new century in Russia formed not only a new standard of everyday behavior, a generally accessible consumer ideal, but also broad possibilities for its application. These years gave us, after all, the desired consensus; it just hasn’t been set up on the territory of taste. It has to do with more basic things: the wish for affluence, the cycle of “I want,” “I can,” and “I get.” This looks the same in the cultural field as in any other shop: we expect attention to our wishes, we require quality, we consider ourselves experts. That explains why for the first time in several decades they’ve started talking about the reader—and we were quickly called on to entertain them without delay; but that’s not all. What’s important is that our own internal reader wants to have a good time, too, feeling that it has a perfect right to do so.
It was enough to start considering oneself a qualified user, proud of one’s own ability to choose goods after one’s own heart, in order to see the formation (with regard to esoteric things such as poetry that resist and evade) of what Susan Sontag calls a new sensibility. Having applied the logic of the supermarket to poetry, we obtain devices familiar from the work of a discount supermarket chain—aggressive promotion of a product, various kinds of the ever-changing most current, overproduction of goods that are more in demand, deep indifference to what is not in demand. Altogether this forms the very poetic mainstream that no one wants to admit belonging to, but that can be fairly easily described in military or sports terms—strength, success, the center, surprise, power, target/hitting accuracy.
The best match for such an understanding are the poems that were abundant precisely in the early 1990s—and which have made a victorious comeback in the last few years: orderly, cheerfully, and neatly made, with devices and tricks that flex like biceps along the line: text-broadcasters of an indefinite lyric ferment. Strictly speaking, these are verses of the late Soviet school (with its particular, dark-unfiltered, drive toward beauty—the best words in the best order), which give a good illustration of the special taste of the aughts.
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.
In a certain sense, what happened to Russian poetry was the same thing that happened to the whole country at that time. A complex and ramified system of institutions had arisen that regulated the consumption of texts. After that, an alternative system arose (the literary internet), which immediately engaged in self-regulation, becoming something like the unofficial reverse side of the existing (“professional”) system. All at once, it became terribly important to know and understand who was speaking in verse and about verse—that is, any statement, regardless of its own pragmatics, wound up getting drawn into a process of constructing hierarchies (this has been going on most openly of all on Live Journal, with its perpetual objection “And so who are you?”). Under these circumstances, a critical conversation about texts became impossible or optional, was crowded out from the usual venues into the blogosphere, so that the status of discourse about poetry became deliberately informal, while the discourse itself wound up oversimplified, fragmentary, coarsely emotional. All of that somehow blindly, unwittingly reproduces what was going on in those years in Russia, and the very accidental quality of this imitation makes the situation inherently absurd. On the other hand, precisely the ability to simplify the complex is now dictated by the milieu. It’s in the air and hangs on your collar; without it, the faculty of unreasoning pleasure might atrophy.