'It Finally Happened! The Popular Will Crushed the Nightmare of Violence…': Poetry of the Kronstadt Uprising and Collective Action

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Aesthetics I: Poetry as/and Political Action

Abstract

My paper focuses on working-class poetry written during the Kronstadt Uprising (1921) and published in the local insurgent newspaper Izvestiya, which served as a laboratory of imagining an alternative to the Soviet centralization of power – a libertarian “Third Revolution.” During this short-lived uprising, poems of various genres, from parodies to hymns, often framed as city folklore, appeared in the newspaper among the reports of military advances and losses, thus positioned as immediately relevant to the rebels’ struggle. I will rely on Antonio Negri’s concept of constituent power, which he defines in opposition to inertially self-reproducing constituted power, to discuss how the “raw” poetry of this largely spontaneous rebellion becomes a medium of embodying collective action from below.

Author

• Victoria Buyanovskaya, U of Wisconsin-Madison