Nina Barkovskaja

• As an object, the last three books of N. Romanova’s poems are considered: “Atrocity” («Зверство»), “Cannibalism” («Людоедство» –both 2015), “Textbook of literature for morons” («Учебник литературы для придурков», 2019). Her works can be attributed to the St. Petersburg branch of the counterculture. Performative, transgressive “trash poetry” of Romanova is a speech gesture of illocutionary nature. Her “offensive art” violates the norms of decency, common sense, tolerance, and poetic canon. The texts are built as a collage of fragments of discursive practices: fake news, ideological clichés, allusions to the classics, youth jargon of hipsters, vulgarisms and obscene vocabulary. Romanova’s poetry demonstrates the devastation of cultural signs, the grotesque idiocy of the overwhelming mass of consumer society.