Feminizing the Slavic Avant-Garde: Embodied Writing and a Fluid Self in Nina Khabias and Mila Elin

• In Event: Reframing Gender and Sexuality in Slavic Literary Modernisms and Avant-Gardes

Abstract

My presentation explores the poetics of sexuality in the works of two overlooked female poets of the historical avant-garde in Russia and Poland: Nina Khabias (1892–c. 1943) and Mila Elin (c. 1907–c. 1942). Reading Khabias’s 1922 collection “Stikhetty” (“Poemettas”), I demonstrate how her fractured syntax serves not merely as a formal experiment but as a means of embodying erotic experience. Khabias’s deliberate disruption of grammatical norms—particularly the rejection of case agreement and the ambiguity of subject positions—creates a porous textual space where the boundaries between the body and surrounding objects dissolve, allowing for an interplay of physicality and environment driven by sexual energy. Her poetics exemplifies what Catherine Malabou terms “clitoridian writing,” constructing autonomous female pleasure as a gateway to subjectivity and feminist resistance. Mila Elin (Elinówna), the only female poet published in the prominent Kraków avant-garde magazine “Zwrotnica” (1927), was writing within a different context, as Polish avant-garde poetry was generally less focused on radical formal experiments. However, a crucial point of intersection between Khabias and Elin lies in their representations of sexuality through a dissolution of boundaries—between the body and objects, between the self and the world. In both poets, permeability and fluidity become structuring principles, shaping an erotic poetics that resists fixed identity and stable meaning.

Author

• Tatiana Krasilnikova, Columbia U