In this article, I analyze the character of hyper-naturalism and exaggerated tactility in dramatic poems by contemporary Russian-Georgian philosopher and writer Keti Chukhrov. I argue that, while descriptions of violence, physiological functions, and abject poverty are common for post-Soviet art, in Chukhrov’s work these elements perform radically different task than in the pessimistic and de-ideologized chernukha, or the style of grim realism. Her approach to matter is also distinct from the historic Russian avant-garde tradition, which relished intensified sensations but did not offer constructive ways of inscribing their immediacy into coherent cultural continuity. Instead, her dramatic poems bear pedagogical, even rehabilitative stakes for recuperating the individual sensations of alienated people into meaningful and shared cultural experiences. In this article, I discuss her approach to drama as mobilizing the tradition of Soviet Marxist defectology, a special educational method of socializing disabled, cognitively impaired, or otherwise disadvantaged people. Pioneered in the Soviet Union in the 1920s by Lev Vygotsky and suppressed in the 1930s, defectology found further application in the 1960s and 1970s in the work of the Zagorsk boarding school for the deafblind, led by Vygotsky’s student Alexander Mescheriakov and Evald Ilyenkov, a Marxist-Hegelian philosopher who is a central figure for Chukhrov’s philosophical research. One of the key tasks of Meshcheriakov and Ilyenkov was to help their deafblind students to overcome isolation through learning to translate their purely tactile sensations into deliberate communicative acts. While Zagorsk offered Ilyenkov an opportunity to test and apply his theory of the collectivist formation of personality, for Chukhrov it is theater that has become the sphere for experimental, practical extension of her scholarly research into Soviet Marxist thought and socialist culture of the 1960s and 1970s. Her dramatic texts offer models of alternative subjectivization for post-Soviet people to allow themselves once again to recognize the presence of universal values and greater cultural commons behind individual, alienated sensations and experiences.

During the 1960s and 1970s the poetic reception of Karl Marx begins to increase in Germany. In this regard, it can be observed that Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s poetic and essayistic reception of Marx is not only quite complex, but also unorthodox. By focusing on the anthology „Gespräche mit Marx und Engels,“ edited by Enzensberger, his comedy „Der Untergang der Titanic“ and his poem „Karl Heinrich Marx,“ the diverse forms of reference to this philosopher are analyzed. It can be demonstrated that Enzensberger uses the montage technique masterly to avoid one-dimensional confessions.

Dieser Band versammelt Beiträge zum Thema Politik in der Gegenwartslyrik verschiedener Sprachen und Länder. Den Aufsätzen liegen Vorträge zugrunde, die im Rahmen von Workshops und Konferenzen der DFG-Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe „Russischsprachige Lyrik in Transition: Poetische Formen des Umgangs mit Grenzen der Gattung, Sprache, Kultur und Gesellschaft zwischen Europa, Asien und Amerika“ (2017-2023) gehalten wurden. Die Veranstaltungen fanden in den Jahren 2018-2019 statt – in einer Zeit, als weder die Corona-Pandemie noch der schreckliche Invasionskrieg Russlands in der Ukraine oder der Krieg im Gaza-Streifen absehbar waren.

According to a frequently encountered view, the family novel is not at all compatible with the modern phenomena of life. On closer inspection, however, it can be seen that such reproaches presuppose a trivialised genre that may be innovatively destroyed or renewed. In response to such reproaches, this article proposes a more general notion of family novel, denoting those narratives whose content and structure are essentially shaped by the relationship between characters in terms of intergenerational biological, cultural or material continuities or discontinuities. In addition, this article argues that the issues of intergenerational relationships still play a role. For instance, actual kinship without stable, affective relationships is an ongoing theme. However, there are Swiss German family novels in which the failure of establishing a strong emotional intergenerational relationship are narrated with a new relaxedness. Failing families or the renunciation of family attachment are no longer existential problems.

This article focuses on detective novel „Hunkelers Geheimnis“ [“Hunkeler’s secret”] (2015), the ninth Peter Hunkeler novel by Swiss-German author Hansjörg Schneider (b. 1938). It sets out to treat in detail the image of the family relevant to this novel with regard to the characters of the perpetrator and murder victim, and to situate them in the historical context. Upon interpreting the text, the author of the present article draws not only on the attendant literature, but also on an interview conducted with the novelist in the form of letters. In the first part, the question of what role the motif of the family plays in the classic and post-classic crime novel, especially from German-speaking Switzerland, is explored. The presentation of the plot structure is followed by an analysis and interpretation of the event leading to a puzzling murder, which reflects Switzerland’s refugee policy during the Nazi period. The fourth part pays heed to the historical context of the event as well as Schneider’s interdiscursive work with specialised literature and historical sources. In the next part, attention is drawn to blurring the line between victim and perpetrator. The last part examines the detective’s family.