'Choking on a word': Body, Language, and Form in Contemporary Russophone Anti-War Poetry

• In Event: Contemporary Russophone Literature: History, Memory, and Language

Abstract

This paper examines how contemporary anti-war Russophone poets have used verse in order to engage with a moral reckoning through verse. I argue that these poets’ anxieties about the war are mapped on to a peculiar dysphoric use of language, which sit alongside a distrust of conventional poetic form, as well as a representation of their own body as dysfunctional or failing. Ol’ga Zondberg’s image of “choking on a word” brings these three concerns together: the uneasy relationship to one’s own poetic voice, the sense of estrangement from one’s own mother tongue, and the sense that one’s own body is failing. My paper highlights interconnections within this triad of language, form, and body: the poems themselves are bodies that bear the imprint of war, testimonials that bear witness to their own failures to rescue the Russian language from the current regime. Poets to be discussed, in addition to Zondberg, may include Vera Pavlova, Liudmila Khersonka, and Sergei Shereshevskii.

Author

• Connor Brian Doak, U of Bristol (UK)