This article investigates the poetry and public life of Alina A. Vitukhnovskaia against the backdrop of her position as a political dissident in Russia. In opposition to most contemporary Russian poets, she considers her writing to be actively “political,” that is directly interfering with governmental politics. The first part of the article introduces methodological concepts in order to consider the relation between Vitukhnovskaia’s poetry and her political activity: distinguishing between the poetic subject, the media-persona (the presentation of the author and the person Alina Vitukhnovskaia to the public), and the political habitus. The subsequent sections investigate her poetic work, her public appearance, and her political activities in relation to these concepts. Vitukhnovskaia’s poetic subject appears to be characterized by provocation with regard to both aesthetic forms and social themes. Formal provocation is carried out by means of disturbing paronomasia, whereas social and thematic provocation involves the negation of traditional, often nationalist, attitudes and the presentation of negative ideological or philosophical terms (nothingness, emptiness, ugliness, evil). While the former has a philosophical appeal (existentialism), the latter is related to the tradition of the demoniacal, such as goth subculture and necro-aesthetics. Vitukhnovskaia turns surrealism upside-down: making artistic ‘reality’ seem less surreal than the reality of the world. The construction of the poetic subject with provocative elements helps Vitukhnovskaia establish a media-persona. This is considered with regard to self-portraits in the book “The Black Icon of Russian Literature” (2017). The combination of aesthetic (beauty), sexuality (domina), and power is interpreted as a provocative dimension of this media-persona. The last part analyzes the political program of Vitukhnovskaia’s application for the 2018 presidential elections as a collection of demands that contain provocative challenges: for instance, the armament of Russian citizens and nuclear disarmament of the state. This incongruity of political demands is a provocation that correlates with an aspiration to unlimited power. Provocation is also considered the main feature of Vitukhnovskaja’s political practice, which she subordinates to the presentation of her media-persona.

In contemporary poetry, transgressive writing – understood as a specific type of social action and discourse that generates new meanings – includes diverse and complex poetic practices and relations between the body and politics, the private and the political. This article focuses on a small selection of texts by German- and Russian-speaking female poets that demonstrate different ways of poetically rethinking the body, its borders, and its connection to the political. Included are poems by Barbara Köhler, Gabriele Kachold-Stötzer, Ann Cotten, Lidia Yusupova, Oksana Vasyakina, Galina Rymbu, and Nika Skandiaka.

Since the mid-2010s, the problem of overcoming individualism and social atomization through group solidarity has been a central motif of Russian political poetry. New responses to this issue primarily employ feminist optics and an intersectional approach: at the crossroads of gender, nation, and society, authors as diverse as Galina Rymbu, Oksana Vasyakina, Elena Fanaylova, and Maria Galina all explore possibilities for linking the poetic subject to the construction of a group consciousness or collective. I propose that a hallmark of this tendency is the increased frequency and ingratiating use of first-person plural pronouns. This “we index” (the ratio of the number of these pronouns to the number of lines in a text) seems to demonstrate a direct correlation to the author’s degree of thematic interest in the problem; meanwhile, the example of Ilya Rissenberg also shows how the solidarity motif functions in political poetry with a low “we index.”

In contemporary Russian poetry, a special movement has emerged that engages in political activism under the feminist banner. This form of political poetry aims less at criticism and subversion than at making a direct social impact. Poems are written as per-formative forms of social action and often with a concrete purpose. They aim to resist power and take the side of the oppressed. The poetic subject opens her voice and her body in solidarity with others or courageously opposes the establishment through provocation — even aggression.

On the “Flowing Movement” and the “Lofty and Ancient” in Gary Snyder’s Poetry Gary Snyder, a renowned 20th century American poet, has been strongly influenced by Eastern cultures, especially Chinese. The philosophical spirit of Eastern culture and its intuitive way of thinking have taken root in Snyder’s mind and directly shaped his perception of nature. Hence, in view of the inadequacy of Western literary criticism in interpreting the Eastern dimensions of Snyder’s poetry, this article takes the classical Chinese literary theory “Twenty-Four Styles of Poetry” as its theoretical perspective and uses its categories of “Flowing Movement” and “Lofty and Ancient” to explore how the dissolved or solitary poetic self achieves the mental state of “emptiness” (kong in Chinese Taoism and sunyata in the Buddhist sense) and creates the poetic worlds of the “flowing movement” and the “lofty and ancient” (transcendence) in Snyder’s poems.