A new avant-garde also emerged from among philology students in Leningrad, who looked to the poetry of the pre- and post-revolutionary experimentalists

whose political commitments were interpreted by members of the underground as being the obverse of ‘the Soviet’

Amid the political vicissitudes of the early 1990s, contemporary poetry itself seemed incapable of generating new political meanings

The dramatic re-politicization of society that began with perestroika also affected poetry, of course.

the ‘private character of literary activity’ became an ideologeme that allowed literary figures who were in one way or another engaged in collective production—including the production of political meanings—simultaneously to deny the character of this activity

The aim is to reveal the subterranean, subconscious mutual penetration of the personal and the political; the formal consequence is a highly personalized, almost hermetic form of collage

This is a space in which, in principle, neither direct political propaganda nor civic expressions of emotion, neither ‘petty-bourgeois’ psychologism nor refined formal experiments, are forbidden