Oil, Far as the Eye Can See: The Petropoetics of Cultural Memory in Alexei Parshchikov’s 'Neft’'

• In Event: Ecocritical Imaginations in Contemporary Russian and Polish Poetry

Abstract

Alexei Parshchikov’s long poem “Neft’” (“Oil”), published in 1998, explores the potential for metaphoric transfigurations mediated through oil as the central conceit. I will draw on Ilya Kalinin’s chapter “Petropoetics” (from Russian Literature Since 1991), along with other contemporary scholarship on Parshchikov’s work, to analyze the function of oil as ubiquitous cultural memory in the poem. Within the transformational space of oil-as-metaphor, Parshchikov reaches out through time and space to history, myth, and cultural references, creating a singular, universal space for the specifics of his lexicon of referents to inhabit. I explore how this space mirrors the cultural space of postmodernism, a place where time is flattened to include past and present simultaneously, all culture existing on the same plane, using Deleuzian analysis as well as posthuman theory to explore oil as an agent which has its own effects on the cultural referents being transmuted through it.

Author

• Sophia Anfinn Tonnessen, U of Michigan