'Accursed Poets' across the Socialist Avant-Gardes: Viktor Sosnora in Dialogue with Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński

• In Event: Contacts across Borders: The Literary (Neo-)Avant-Gardes between Central Europe and the USSR

Abstract

Since his encounter with Louis Aragon in Paris in 1965, the Soviet poet Viktor Sosnora (1936–2019) always saw transnationalism as essential to pushing the envelope of the lyric. A neo-avant-gardist straddling the divide between official and unofficial poetry in the USSR, he attracted the attention of communist poets around the world and engaged their work in a productive dialogue. This paper focuses on one specific aspect of Sosnora’s transnationalism in the Slavic context: his engagement in the 1970s with the legacy of the Polish poet Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński (1905–1953). Himself a writer traversing the boundaries between the avant-garde, modernism and socialist realism (as well as a POW under Germans and Soviets alike), Gałczyński was a perfect precursor for the borderline neo-avant-garde developed by Sosnora. In comparing their aesthetics I explore vernacular, or neoromantic trends in the Slavic avant-gardes. I analyse Sosnora’s translations and appropriations of Gałczyński’s lyric and sketch out the traits of “an accursed poet under socialism”—a project whose endurance in such different contexts derived from its emancipatory potential to critique the socialist version of modernity.

Author

• Ivan Sokolov, UC Berkeley