The Letter, the Article, the Subject: Metahistory of Contemporary Poetry in the Texts of Nikita Sungatov

Nikita Sungatov’s poetry is often categorized as postconceptualism-2 or the engaged-conceptualist pole of the Translit magazine community. However, it is worth considering that his poetic language is formed at the intersection of various influences, including the analytical poetics of Arkady Dragomoshchenko, the Prize named after whom Sungatov curated and before that was shortlisted for in 2015. Sungatov can consistently reproduce any style of contemporary poetry in his texts, coupled with their problematic analysis thanks to the intertwining of conceptualist metaposition and Dragomoshchenko’s linguistic analysis. We can see this in the most famous texts of The Young Poet’s Debut Book as well as in the current texts, Imitation of Vl. Khodasevich and a modern poem. The author of this article focuses on this latter poem. The role of the letter and its transformation can already be seen in the first part, which is stylized as zaum and alienated language. Here the intertwining of letters, phonetic signs, and pseudo-grammatical categories appeals to the historical avantgarde and its sound poetry. Another role for the letter in the poem is the indefinite article ‘a’, whose semantics make Sungatov’s poem a statement about ‘contemporary poetry in general’, which, together with the stylization of various poetic languages from the historical avantgarde above to contemporary techniques of direct, neoclassical and opaque statement, turns the poem into a metahistory of contemporary poetry. And if Hayden White’s Metahistory was a discursive analysis of historical narratives, then a modern poem becomes a discursive analysis of both recent poetry and its languages, and its collision with discourses of violence and big history. To all this corresponds an indeterminate subject, following the letter and the article, ‘it’, which nomadizes between languages, narratives, and the elusive modernity.