It takes intellectual fortitude to write about relatively new writers and very recent literary works: literary reputations still have not solidified; nothing is finalized, and apparent trends can later prove illusory. Marijeta Bozovic’s important new monograph represents an excellent example of a successful effort to map new literary territory. Avant-garde Post—explores the work of seven contemporary avant-garde poets who share a connection to the St. Petersburg journal [Translit] and the art collective Chto delatʹ as well as radical leftist political convictions. Although some of the writers whose work Bozovic surveys have attracted a fair amount of attention in the west in recent years (Aleksandr Skidan, Kirill Medvedev, Galina Rymbu), others may be less well known to some readers (Pavel Arseniev, Dmitry Golynko, Roman Osminkin, Keti Chukhrov). Bozovic deserves credit for crafting a monograph about these writers that is clear and accessible and that will make it much easier for faculty to integrate their verse into courses on contemporary Russian literature and culture. Bozovic notes each author’s most obvious intellectual influences and literary genealogy, connecting some to Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and others to Dmitry Prigov, and she compares their work to poetic movements in the west, noting particularly parallels to the American L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, some of whose work was translated into Russian by Skidan. For writers who perform music as well as publish verse (Medvedev is part of the protest-rock band Arkady Kots; Osminkin and Chukhrov also sing) or who create video poetry or in other ways work creatively with social media (Arseniev, Osminkin, Medvedev), Bozovic provides links that will allow readers to locate these resources.

In the preface and introduction to Avant-garde Post—, Bozovic casts the circle of poets that she studies as part of a “new post-Cold War left” that emerged around the globe in the early twenty-first century, finding expression in events as diverse as the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and Russia’s pro-democracy demonstrations. She recounts hearing the Italian labor anthem “Bandiera Rossa” spontaneously and affectingly sung at a St. Petersburg poetry festival and notes the profound interest that most of her poets share in western Marxist/leftist theory including the work of the Frankfurt School, Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière, and Gilles Deleuze (x, 12). Echoing Theodor Adorno, Bozovic casts “lyric forms” as “in an uneasy, dependent relationship to contemporary capitalism” and sees avant-garde poetry as inherently associated with resistance to both the lyric and capitalism more generally (1). As such, she hails the emergence of the new avant-garde poetry that she studies as necessary for international audiences as well as for Russia itself (6). Noting growing inequality in twenty-first-century Russia, Bozovic suggests “Russia has never needed Marxist critique more” (3). Similarly, she argues that the “fairly astonishing popularity” of Medvedev’s verse shows that “decades after the end of the Soviet Union, Russian and international audiences alike desperately needed a revival of Russian leftist poetry,” alluding, seemingly, less to the artistic merit of his work than to its political relevance and, for that matter, to Russia’s status as the site of the first socialist revolution (33).

Bozovic acknowledges criticism of avant-gardism in general and of Russia’s early twentieth-century avant-garde specifically, including Boris Groys’s seminal study, implicating the Russian avant-garde in the emergence of Soviet authoritarianism (17). However, she glances past such critiques quickly: she is not “guided by a hermeneutics of suspicion” but rather by “Ernst Bloch’s midcentury opus The Principle of Hope as well as more contemporary praxes of sympathetic reading: to discover and describe the emancipatory vitality, the aesthetics, and the politics of hope, in each poetic project.” (11). Readers less inclined to, echoing Alain Badiou, identify communism as “the right hypothesis” may wish that Bozovic had written about her subjects with more critical detachment, however, her politically engagement with her material is both considered and principled (13). In the introduction, she notes: “My own aesthetic and political position, after ten years of working closely with this poetry, has been so profoundly shaped by it that to position myself as master rather than student would be to miss the point” (11). Recent events doubtless will complicate the reactions of readers to this aspect of Bozovic’s approach. Although Bozovic lightly updated her manuscript, including specifically her preface and the volume’s coda, to take into account Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the subsequent crackdown on dissent in Russia, her manuscript was conceived of and written, as she notes, under very different circumstances, when, perhaps, leftist political action seemed more infused with “a sense of hope” (ix).

Regardless of how readers respond to Bozovic’s political stance in Avant-garde Post—, they will find much to admire in her treatment of the [Translit] poets. Bozovic does a wonderful job of analyzing the work of each individual writer and of pointing out common themes and stances within the circle. The first chapter of Avant-garde Post—focuses on the work of Medvedev, who, Bozovic notes, practices the “poetics of refusal,” a common position for the [Translit] poets. Consciously “distancing himself first from the literary marketplace and then from the Moscow literary scene,” Medvedev has often rejected commercial opportunities and even, in a 2004 statement, the concept of copyright itself (34). He has engaged in political action with groups such as the Russian Socialist Movement and founded the Free Marxist Press, which issued chapbooks containing translations of key works of western Marxist theory as well as, in conjunction with the journal Translit, poetry (34). Bozovic charts Medvedev’s engagement with the work of Charles Bukowski and provides excellent, nuanced reading of poems like “I recently ran into the poet Lvovsky …,” which she presents as a “critique of cultural capital in its contemporary manifestations,” and the beautiful “On the way to defend the forest …,” which was written in the wake of the Khimki protest.

Chapter 2 considers Arseniev as a poet, the principal motivating force behind the journal [Translit], and also as an active participant in the 2011–12 protest movement, responsible for one of its most important slogans. This chapter adds to the rich vein of research in Slavic literary studies on the role of journals in fostering new literary movements and shaping culture. Ch. 3 considers Skidan, a more senior figure who, Bozovic argues, links the [Translit] circle, with which he actively collaborates, to the last generation of the Soviet underground. Ch. 4 looks at the work of Golynko, who passed away just before the book appeared. Connecting Golynko to Dmitri Prigov, Bozovic argues that he, as a trained academic, “pioneered … the understanding of Russian poetry as a form of global and contemporary art, informed by and in dialogue with critical theory” (140). Many of the [Translit] poets, Bozovic notes, studied literary theory with Golynko. Ch. 5 presents Osminkin, highlighting, in addition to the political message in his work, the effect of his “physicality,” “brash masculinity,” and his “gender-ambiguous voice” in his public readings. Bozovic’s discussion of Osminkin’s video performances of his poems represents one of the highlights of the volume. Ch. 6 looks at Chukhrov and focuses on the long dramatic verse forms that she employs as well as the way in which her work explores the fissures along religious, ethnic, and class lines that define contemporary Russian society. The “Coda” to Bozovic’s manuscript, which looks briefly at the work of Rymbu, arguably reads as something of an after-thought in as much as Rymbu seems, as Bozovic notes, less clearly part of the [Translit] circle, although she did work with the group for a period of time. For Bozovic, Rymbu’s work is emblematic of the likeliest future direction for leftist poetry: it highlights the “increasing centrality of gender-based critique to the aesthetics and politics of the Russophone left” (27). This section also includes discussion of the responses of the [Translit] poets to the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Both Skidan’s poem “too late to scroll through news on facebook …” and a Facebook post by Medvedev are quoted in full.

Overall, Bozovic has provided us with a book that is both provocative and useful. Readers may not agree with every aspect of her monograph, but they will doubtless be impressed by the skill with which she presents and analyzes the work of a remarkably important and interesting circle of contemporary poets. The translations throughout the book are consistently excellent as is the selection of works that Bozovic chooses to highlight. It is hard to imagine a better scholarly treatment of the work of the [Translit] circle as a whole than this.