The paper focuses on two blogger-poets, Maja Solar and Jelena Savić, who create poetry and conceptualize the relationship between philosophy and politics. Maja Solar is a refugee from Croatia, now living in Serbia, who sometimes mixes Serbian and Croatian language standards. In her poems, she combines the lyrical with the experimental, while in her essays, she critically reflects on neo-liberalism. The authors discuss her dual position(s), as a poet and philosopher active in the Gerusija philosophy collective from Novi Sad. Jelena Savić is a poet of Romani descent, whose poetry takes identity politics as both its point of departure and object of critique. The authors examine how her experimental writing embodies this dual position. More specifically, the paper investigates how Solar and Savić construct themselves online as engaged intellectuals, poets and writers. In the case of Maja Solar, the authors focus on “Ispod crte”, a blog created by the collective “Za kulturne politike: politika kulture”, and the Gerusija collective’s magazine “Stvar”. By using these examples, the authors review her place in the micro-social map of younger critical intellectuals. In her blog “Usernamekaspoetry: Biti žena, Romkinja, pesnikinja”, Jelena Savić discusses her paradoxical position as an almost invisible poet in the national context, and questions the place of minorities within the nationally homogenous Serbian society. In 2017, Savić started writing about problems of education in the regional e-magazine “Proлetter” and her work became more visible in the post-Yugoslav context.

In this digitized age, we witness a transnational interest in the ‘aesthetics of imperfection’ – aesthetic gestures that foreground shortcomings, mistakes, and flaws. Blockbusters shot with cheap cameras, trash fashion, consciously blurry photos, glitch music: for the cultural producers and consumers of these and other aesthetic practices, the unpolished object is not a taboo but rather an asset or a hallmark of sincerity, authenticity, and other positive values. With the help of existing scholarship, in this article, I will study and compare the writings of three Russian poets/artists: Vera Khlebnikova, Vera Pavlova, and Linor Goralik. Each uses conceptual as well as formal, grammatical, and/or stylistic imperfections as an aesthetic device. The aim of my analysis is to juxtapose and historically contextualize the social anxieties that inform these and other present-day creative practices that foreground the imperfect.

This volume brings together contributions addressing the intersections of political poetry, performativity, and the internet. The essays are based on presentations given at workshops and conferences organized by the DFG Centre for Advanced Studies “Russian-Language Poetry in Transition: Poetic Forms of Dealing with Boundaries of Genre, Language, Culture and Society between Europe, Asia and America” (2017-2023). The conferences took place in 2018-2019, at a time when neither the coronavirus pandemic nor Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine were foreseeable, and the contributions have not been updated in light of these catastrophes. The articles presented here deal with recent poetry and focus on the connection between politics, performativity, and the internet in multiple literatures and intercultural relations. Although the majority of these texts belong to the Russophone world, poetry from Serbia, Latvia, and China is also considered. The contributors demonstrate, on the one hand, how newer poetry softens genre distinctions and formally tends towards multimedia hybridization and, on the other, how it transcends or dissolves linguistic, cultural, and social boundaries. Dr. Ekaterina Friedrichs and Ms. Lena Rosalin Schwarz were involved in preparing this publication for printing. We would like to thank them both for their careful review and wonderful cooperation.

Metaphorical shifts from one subject area to another are a central structural strategy in Inger Christensen’s work. This principle will be demonstrated and discussed in this paper by referring to the poem “Gopler” [“Jellyfish”] from “lys” [“light”], 1962. The Danish contemporary poet Pia Tafdrup, whose work is influenced by Christensen, also makes use of a distinctive, associative imagery in her pentalogy “De fem sanser” [“The Five Senses”] (2014–2022). This paper contrastively explores the ways in which metaphorical shifts function in Christensen’s and Tafdrup’s poetry. Christensen realizes the metaphors’ potential in a radical way through the semantic superimposition of different subject areas. Thus, the regularities of the designed world are solely valid within linguistic structures, opening up new spaces of cognitive experience. In Tafdrup’s work, the texts’ different levels of meaning tend to remain separable. Here, the focus is on an associative technique of erratic and surprising transmissions, often applied to the external and the internal in a way that the cutting conciseness of the poems touch the reader almost sensually.

Inger Christensen’s alfabet is one of the most formative contributions in Danish eco-poetry that also initiates a broad reception of Christensen’s œuvre in German literature. Besides the ecocritical tendencies the text establishes a self-referential dimension that deals with the relation between a human speaker, its speaking about ‘world’ and its reference. In this regard the text implicitly debates the verbal material and its (connotative) semantics that one has to use. This dimension of alfabet is one of the main linking points for a productive reception by Herta Müller. Especially her collages published in Schreibheft expose the materiality of linguistic signs and speech. In addition to this, the specific constitution of the collages which are made of newspapers and magazines shows that linguistic signs not only refer to a real reference but also (and mainly) to discourses and other prior communicative contexts.