Russian Poetic Neo-avant-garde of the 2nd Half of the 20th Century: On Issue of the Term’s Use Boundaries

Abstract

The article is devoted to the neo-avant-garde literary trend that emerged in the Soviet underground of the 2nd half of the 20th century. The paper states that the use of the term “neo-avant-garde” with respect to post-war avant-garde has already become conventional in European art and art studies, however it has not yet established in the Russian scientific vocabulary. Moreover, in the field of literary study a significant amount of research material has been collected, which allows us to indicate the existence of Russian poetic neo-avant-garde in the 2nd half of the 20th century. Its authors primarily were either localized within the uncensored literary underground, or abroad as emigres. The article concludes that the Russian neo-avant-garde differed from historical avant-garde (1900–1930s) in the same ways Western neo-avant-garde did: it rejected the socio-political utopianism in favor of an aesthetical utopia that implied the avoidance of any ideology with a virtually escapist concentration on solving solely art tasks. In addition, neo-avant-garde was interested in the issues of revival, continuation and completion of traditions of historical avant-garde, which in its own times manifested declaratively the breakup with every single tradition. Neo-avantgardists mainly inherited the most radical searches of historical avant-garde authors, who often converged their poetry with the boundaries of art as a whole or with zones of visual, acoustic, performative or other art that adjoin verbal poetry.