Avant‐Garde Post –: Radical Poetics after the Soviet Union by Marijeta Bozovic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2023. 320 pp. 39. 95. ISBN 978‐0‐674‐29062‐4

If you care about poetry, it is dangerous to write about it. The power of poetry often gets lost in the telling. Marijeta Bozovic's Avant-Garde Post –, however, retains something of poetry's force and urgency, making the case for both the political, social, and cultural relevance of poetry today and the gravity of its analysis. While not a book for the casual reader, Avant-Garde Post- accesses the tools of literary analysis and literary history to tell a riveting story about the work of post-Soviet Russian-language poets to build collectivities toward an emancipatory future. Bozovic surveys two decades of post-Soviet poetry, from 1999 to 2022, by writers seeking to harness avant-garde traditions while mitigating the rightward, authoritarian turn avant-gardes have historically taken. "What," the author asks, "does leftist, politically transformative art look like, after state socialism?" (p. x). What does an avant-garde look like without masculinized, militaristic trappings? How might avant-garde poetry foster political solidarity and collective subjectivities? With attention not only to the dynamics of disaster capitalism but also to Russia's increasingly revanchist politics, Bozovic makes the case for poetry's unique capacity to body out "critique, imagination, and struggle" in a "global egalitarian struggle" (p. 34). Necessarily key to her argument is her attention to the ways the diverse poets she studies engage with digital media and its transnational networks. Bozovic brings together seven major contemporary Russian-language poets to paint a picture of a breathtaking shared effort to harness poetry, and its Russian and transnational traditions, to build new communities and foster collective action. In chapter 1, she describes Kirill Medvedev's "weak heroism," a stance that combines courage with vulnerability, a recognition of a call to action and risk with an acknowledgment of the likelihood of failure (p. 31). For Medvedev, poetry, "embedded in life practice," constitutes "a technology of cognition" (pp. 60, 57). As a medium, through performance, digital remediation, and other alternate modes of publishing, it supports political organization and community-building unburdened by established cultural institutions. Bozovic presents Medvedev as laying groundwork for the movement she describes, while it is Pavel Arseniev who founded its key journal, Translit. As Bozovic emphasizes here and elsewhere, the post-Soviet avant-garde is defined in part by its transnational bent. Translit both reveals and fosters the networked relations of its artists—in its publications of new translations of critical theory and international poetry, as well as the original Russian-language work it has published. Meanwhile, both Arseniev and his journal critically engage Web 2.0 as "enemy terrain," affording experimentation but not wholesale faith (p. 76). Of Arseniev's approach to his own poetry, Bozovic notes his skeptical approach to the classic Russian idea of the poet's role in society, building instead a "self-conscious archive of paper utopias" (p. 91). Moving to Aleksander Skidan, Bozovic addresses the work of a poet of a slightly older generation who, nevertheless, has found an aesthetic home with the post-Soviet avant-garde as a mentor and co-laborer. Heir to both the learned Underground writer Arkady Dragomoshchenko and Moscow Conceptualist Dmitry Prigov, Skidan also integrates poetic elements from the leftist Anglo-American Language School to achieve a fabric of bricolage marked by an "extreme citation practice" (pp. 114, 117). Foregrounding experimentation and eschewing traditional lyric subjectivity, Skidan helps imagine, Bozovic asserts, a "new kind of Russian poet" (p. 138). Dmitry Golynko, meanwhile, pioneered, in Bozovic's narrative, "the by now prevalent understanding of Russian poetry as a form of global and contemporary art" (p. 140). With a doctorate in media studies, Golynko is a key media theorist in the Translit collective whose diverse output reflects the anti-Romantic stances that "all is surface" (p. 145). A poet of minimalism, Golynko activates the insights of "monstrology" to foreground the "emancipatory potential of the modern monster," capitalism's unrepresentable Others (pp. 163–64). With particular attention to the meanings and affordances of digital remediation, Roman Osminkin exemplifies, for Bozovic, a poet who deftly moves between the on- and offline worlds, supplementing the "limitations of the digital" with in-person happenings (p. 191). Engaging, albeit ironically, with Aleksandr Pushkin's lofty notion of the poet's sacrificial role in society, Osminkin emphasizes public performance and risk. In her final chapter, Bozovic describes the work of Keti Chukhrov, a Georgian-born poet with looser connections to Translit, as "globally legible," with performances that "tell a story of boundless optimism and local transformation" (p. 209). Through a communist lens, Chukhrov devotes particular attention to the post-Soviet subaltern, in Moscow and beyond, casting doubt on the capacity of the art world to integrate these concerns in substantive ways. She also integrates the feminist strategies of "multiplicity, decreation, empathy, and doubt" (p. 228). In a coda, Bozovic turns to a new generation of poets represented by Galina Rymbu, for whom the post-Soviet avant-garde were, already, classics. Building on their work, if not herself avant-garde in the book's terms, Rymbu has been a leading voice at the intersection of "socioeconomic, decolonial, and gender-based critique" (p. 231). Bozovic comments of Rymbu, and by extension her other poets, "Lyric poetry is avant-garde in a world defined by this late stage of capitalism" (p. 242). The force of Bozovic's argument derives not only from her theoretically informed poetic analysis, but also from the special insight she brings as a researcher long acquainted with the subjects whose work she investigates. Bozovic is a rare U.S.-based scholar with established relationships to the particular figures she studies. Her position not only solidifies her understanding of the evolution of these writers' journeys but gives her special access to their direct commentary and to images of their performances, as well as heightening the drama of the political risks these writers take, again and again. Bozovic recurs frequently to Sianne Ngai's concept of the power of "powerlessness" and shows how, even today, Russian poets remain a force to be reckoned with.