There is a paradox in this book’s subtitle, which declares its subject to be “unbound” but at the same time bracketed between 1991 and 2022, that is, between the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This uneasy intersection of verbal figure and historical events can be read as symptomatic of the fundamental opposition that suffuses Stephanie Sandler’s recent book: the opposition between poetic language, with its capacity to open up spaces of freedom, and the constraining violence practiced by social and political actors.
Sandler’s wide-ranging study is at once an overview of contemporary Russian verse and a celebration of freedom as a poetic value. It draws on decades of engagement with the evolving methods and preoccupations of contemporary Russian poetry. A profound appreciation for poets and poetry is everywhere evident, as is distaste for the venal world of harm that is their foil. One senses a hope, born in the moment of historical possibility that was the fall of the Soviet Union, that the forces of oppression will have given up the field by the time the book has gone to press, but also a rueful acknowledgement that these forces have, instead, become more cruel and manifest. “I am finishing this book at a moment unimaginably unlike the hopeful mood of its inception” (xvii), the author confesses in the preface, acknowledging how a recrudescent totalitarianism haunts her theme.
However bleak things look in the public sphere, Sandler’s faith in freedom as a poetic value remains undiminished. Lurking in the background here is a longstanding and occasionally messianic tradition of belief in Russian literature’s special role as conscience of the nation, its second government, a light of culture kept alive through the long night of tyranny. In a close-minded totalitarian polity, it is poetry that generates new horizons, communities of feeling, and the possibility of dialogue. This is not mere platitude. One of the first poems to receive substantial analysis—and one that underscores the “tradition of unofficial literature … on which all the poets I treat here in some ways rely” (5)—is Vsevolod Nekrasov’s blandly provocative text that ends “freedom is/freedom is/freedom is freedom” (6). The ambiguity between thudding repetition and the expressive spaces opened up by verbal pattern is a formal articulation of simultaneous futility and possibility of poetic freedom.
If this is not the book Sandler had hoped to write, it is nonetheless a timely and a necessary one. The problem of freedom in relation to state power occasioned by recent history draws into relief the more intimate notion of freedom that Sandler elaborates in her introduction. In this account, freedom, or a poem, or a public sphere, involves a discursive space of “participation … engagement, conversation” (8). In framing her central concept Sandler draws on Svetlana Boym’s thinking about co-creation and interacting subjectivities; on Vladimir Bibikhin’s account of conversation as generating open-ended possibility in a regimented world of schedules and expectations; and on Stanley Cavell’s writing on unfinalizability. Following these thinkers, Sandler treats freedom as a historical concept, which comes into being together with modernity, and as an essentially social phenomenon, oriented onto acts of speaking and listening.
Freedom’s objective correlate, as it were, is the element of air—the very emblem of the unbounded and ineffable, which breezes past borders of every kind. As breath, the medium of spoken language, air traverses even the bodily margins that separate selves from others. In its immateriality and its orientation onto the other, poetic speech conjures up a public arena, even a wholly imaginary audience, when circumstances permit no other kind. The zone of attention brought into being by poetic address may be a “bleak space,” Sandler admits, but “to create this space as one’s internalized audience is the fundamental creative gesture of the contemporary poet” (33). Poetic freedom means orientation onto other persons and times, even when the possibility of meaningful dialogue seems foreclosed. It insists on meaningful human connection and articulate values; it is sustained by communication rather than compulsion.
Sandler’s readings of individual poets similarly elevate the values of dialogism, self-conscious participation in poetic tradition, and commitment to humanist principles. Her philosophical definition of freedom thus resonates with a set of aesthetic values and poetic practices. Widely ranging readings make up most of the book and contain its finest and most insightful moments. Sandler’s project has an encyclopedic aspect and represents, not least, a substantial anthology of liberally quoted texts in parallel translation that will be a great resource to teachers of contemporary Russian culture. Its organizing principles, however, are multi-dimensional. Most obvious is a progression from the worldly to the otherworldly, that is, from directly political poems to texts oriented onto the religious or the mystical. The first chapter, entitled “Politics: Writing Poems in a World of Harm,” concerns civically engaged verse such as that by Kirill Medvedev and the more personal poems of principle written by figures like Elena Fanailova, Maria Stepanova, and Galina Rymbu; it discusses the interface between the personal and the political, the vividness of language, and the brutality of state and sexual violence. The concluding chapter, “Freedoms of the Spirit: Poems of Faith after the Fall,” addresses the more abstract values legible in the work of religiously resonant writers like Sergei Magid, Sergei Kruglov, Elena Shvarts, and Olga Sedakova. In this arc the reader traces a passage from the body (as a locus of control, vulnerability, and resistance) to the spirit (as the ground of possibility, transition, and eternal life). Another dimension of organization is offered by the book’s division into two parts, one focused on questions of poetic form and medium (politics, digitality, and magnitude) and the other juxtaposing poetry with a qualitatively different interlocutor (music, photography, and faith).
Sandler’s formal divisions seem meant less to propel an argument than to motivate groupings and limn concerns. The same might be said for the umbrella term of “freedom,” which functions not least to bring into dialogue favorite poets in favorite lineages, particularly the rich poetic culture diffusing downstream of Joseph Brodsky. The productivity of the filter is demonstrated by the astonishing readings it brings out. Certain poets—notably Elena Fanailova, Maria Stepanova, and Elena Shvarts—emerge as something like protagonists, thanks to repeated engagements across multiple sections. The second chapter, which considers Russian poetic culture’s migration onto digital fora and the responsiveness and temporality that result from its new media environment, is a gem. Its centerpiece is a riveting analysis of Nika Skandiaka, the pseudonym that links a fascinating body of unstable texts, often multilingual, and recalling the structure of computer code. Sandler reads Skandiaka’s posts as “a record of thoughts rippling across the mind … as when Skandiaka posts a word or two, then in a few hours, expands still further. Or a larger, complex text might be posted to one blog, and then in another text or set of texts, one finds lexical alternatives, as if different forked paths have been taken” (109). These fort-da games with ephemeral texts construct a digital analogue to orality. “Her existence as an unknowable individual person … who made hundreds of texts unavailable and untraceable intensifies the aura of both poet and text,” Sandler concludes. In her assessment, Skandiaka’s reinterpretation of the figure of the poet and the idea of voice makes for “one of the most distinctive poetic performances in the twenty-first century” (113).
A standout from the last half of the book is the reading of Elena Glazova’s poetic texts alongside her photographs of flowers, a juxtaposition from which emanates a dazzling web of readings. Sandler details a sophisticated problematic of visibility, which comes inevitably to adumbrate shadows and phantoms and photographs themselves: visible traces of things that are not there. By putting the ephemerality of flowers as recorded in artworks at the center of her reading, Sandler makes apprehensible how Glazova’s morbid specters emanate from something like the philosophy of freedom outlined in her introductory chapter. An orientation onto death catalyzes poetry, since “the potential to die, to pass through the boundary between life and death” (253) is the prerequisite for possibility in the first place: the breath leaving the body for some other destination. Here an “unbound” poetry becomes a spiritual phenomenon and segues organically into the final chapter on faith.
If the “fundamental gesture of the contemporary poet,” as quoted above, is to create an imaginary audience, then this constructed space of dialogue that the poetic act brings into being can be read as compensation for the marginalization of poetry itself. The agonistic relationship between artistic form and political structure opens now onto issues of literary history. Memorializing the traditions of the past, but also sustaining them in the present and looking forward to future interlocutors, poetic freedom becomes reminiscent above all of the great tradition of the elegy—a performance that consoles us for loss and promises continuation.
