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

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

All four presentations on this panel consider poetry as a politicized mode of creativity or poetry alongside political action in Russia in the first decades of the 20th century. Each speaks to the conference theme of liberation by considering how political freedom from government oppression, whether Tsarist or Bolshevik, interacts with aesthetic form. Victoria Buyanovskaya explores how working-class poetry became one of the main agents of change in the Kronstadt Uprising (1921) and a medium of both developing alternative revolutionary imagination and setting it in motion through collective action. Carlotta Chenoweth addresses Vladimir Mayakovsky’s primers for the Soviet literacy campaign to explore how his laddered verse can serve as a pedagogical tool and call for political action. Irina Denischenko’s presentation treats the avant-garde’s responses to major cataclysm of the age, World War I, focusing on how not only content, including the artists’ ideological positions, but also artistic forms for representing war become part of pacifist activism. Zach Rewinski considers Boris Pasternak’s poetry of 1927 in the context of the ten-year anniversary of the October Revolution, arguing that it follows contemporary norms of narrating the revolution only in part.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• Ludmila Shleyfer Lavine, Bucknell U

Papers

• 'It Finally Happened! The Popular Will Crushed the Nightmare of Violence…': Poetry of the Kronstadt Uprising and Collective Action - Victoria Buyanovskaya, U of Wisconsin-Madison

• Az/bu/ka: Mayakovsky and the Soviet Literacy Project - Carlotta Chenoweth, U.S. Military Academy, West Point

• Voina i mir: Avant-Garde Responses to the First World War and the Politics of Form - Irina Denischenko, Georgetown U

• Boris Pasternak as Revolutionary Narrator in the 1927 Anniversary of the October Revolution - Zachary Rewinski, College of Wooster

Discussant

• Ludmila Shleyfer Lavine, Bucknell U