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.

The essay compares Inger Christensen’s (1935-2009) poetry and poetics with the work of the Swedish writer Birgitta Trotzig (1929-2011). It tests the potential of comparison by asking what happens if we compare what might be the two most prominent women writers of Nordic post-war modernism, two writers whose paths have crossed over the years. The first half of the paper traces a shared constellation of motifs (eye/butterfly/death) within two books of poetry, Trotzig’s “Anima” (1982) and Christensen’s “Sommerfugledalen” (1991). The initial comparison of motifs leads to a shared poetics. It offers a trotzig’ian version of Inger Christensen’s version of the condition of secrecy and fundamental parallels in their philosophy of language and the subject. But it also points to a major difference between the real as a mystic category in Trotzig and Inger Christensen’s more seamless, lucid, and dreamlike style. Advancing further into a stylistic comparison the linguistic and visionary abundancy of Trotzig’s “Anima”-poems reveals an overlooked quality in Christensen’s: That Christensen’s poems are also luxurious, albeit, typically, with moderation. The balancing of sense and sensibility appears by comparison to be a key trait in her poetry, highlighting its classical inclination. The paper demonstrates how comparison makes its subject visible by way of the other, and how comparison points out new nuances or flavors in the texts as it opens a conversation between two major women writers of Nordic modernism.

Departing from Roland Barthes’ association of text and textile, and feminist theory on weaving as text production, this article analyzes the textile qualities of Inger Christensen’s “Letter in April” (1979) and Amalie Smith’s “Thread Ripper” (2020). In “Letter in April”, Christensen establishes a connection between writing and spinning or weaving through their shared temporality of varied repetition. In “Thread Ripper” Smith alludes to Christensen and makes of the continuity between text and textile not only the main theme of the book, but also its structuring principle. Through a materialist conception of the text, regarding it as a woven fabric, the article focuses on the textual patterns of the two works (stylistic figures in Christensen, graphic composition in Smith). The connection from Christensen to Smith leads to a further connection to ecocritical conceptions of weaving as no less than a cosmological principle. On a concluding note, the article argues that weaving is not only connecting, but also disconnecting, cutting.

In order to shed light on the important function Inger Christensen had for the German poetry scene in the 1990s and 2000s, the article examines texts by Thomas Kling and Oswald Egger. The central argument is that both Kling and Egger drew on Christensen’s sophisticated nature-philosophical inspired poetics in “det”/“das” to break away from an experimental poetry that is primarily interested in questions of language and media theory. Both seem to be particularly fascinated by Christensen’s attempt to think of the relationship between language and the world in terms of a chiastic entanglement, which shows clear traces of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception. But despite this similarity, they react very differently to the poetological considerations of the Danish poet. Both do not adopt Christensen’s reflections uncritically but attempt to utilize them for their own aesthetic purposes.

Inger Christensen, maybe the most vividly received Danish writer in contemporary German poetry, is often discussed in the light of her poetry’s formal innovativeness. This paper will shift the focus on poetry’s relation to the world as another aspect repeatedly addressed by contemporary German poets when referring to Christensen’s work. Discussing three essays by Silke Scheuermann, Jan Wagner, and Uljana Wolf this paper traces their approaches to Inger Christensen’s poetry with a particular interest in personal encounters with nature and real-world sensual experiences as the core and outset of Inger Christensen’s poetic writings. The paper tries to conceptualize this perspective on her poetry by referring to the Haiku as a form of poetry that depicts a sensual and affective experience of nature along with Roland Barthes related concept of tangibilia on the one hand and to the sociological concept of resonance as developed by Hartmut Rosa on the other.

Inger Christensen muss vielleicht als die bedeutendste dänische Dichterin der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts gelten, die auch im deutschsprachigen Raum große Beachtung fand. Ihr Einfluss auf die gegenwärtige deutschsprachige und skandinavische Lyrik wird in diesem Band erstmalig untersucht. Die hier versammelten Beiträge folgen den Spuren Inger Christensens in den lyrischen und essayistischen Arbeiten von Thomas Kling, Nico Bleutge, Herta Müller, Oswald Egger, Pia Tafdrup, Mette Moestrup, Silke Scheuermann, Jan Wagner, Uljana Wolf, Amalie Smith, Birgitta Trotzig und anderen. Dabei widmen sich die Studien sowohl Christensens sprachtheoretischen Reflexionen und den formalen Einflüssen ihres Werks und deren Transformationen in der Gegenwartslyrik als auch den thematischen Gegenständen ihrer Dichtung, insbesondere ihrem Naturkonzept und dessen Adaption in neueren ökokritischen Ansätzen.

This article defines the ‘zero text’ as a text that is completely absent(ed) and is replaced by its own paratext. Such a text is a pure statement, the content of which is constituted by its context, presentation, and authorship (or performance), as well as the form of the ‘zero text’ itself. The political potential of the ‘zero text’ under an authoritarian regime becomes apparent, for instance, in the famous joke about Rabinovich handing out blank pamphlets in Red Square, but it can also be seen in the literalization of folkloric motifs in a number of protest demonstrations in post-Soviet Russia. The origin of these demonstrations can be traced to ‘zero texts’ used in the poetic avant-garde (“Poem of the End” by Vasilisk Gnedov, for example) and in neo- or post-avant-garde practices from the second half of the 20th century – in particular, those associated with names like Alexander Kondratov and Dmitriy A. Prigov, whose work actualized the political semantics of the ‘missing text.’

Shortly after Ukraine had declared its independence in December 1991, Joseph Brodsky, Nobel Prize Winner in Literature 1987, wrote the poem «На независимость Украины» [On the Independence of Ukraine], which sarcastically mourns the separation of Russia and Ukraine. In 2015, responding to the armed conflict in Ukraine, teacher and poet Aleksandr Byvshev issued a reply to this poem under the same title, taking the side of Ukraine. Both poems have been perceived as aggressive, insulting, and anti-Ukrainian or anti-Russian, respectively. This paper asks the question of whether – and in what sense – the two poems are aggressive by drawing on the linguistic features of the two texts. The investigation of the linguistic characteristics of the poems is supplemented by an analysis inspired by argumentation theory, since, as will be shown, both texts are essentially argumentative.

Using the texts of the poet and literary scholar Przemysław Dakowicz as an example, this article analyzes how the traditional martyrological discourse of the ‘romantic paradigm’ (Maria Janion) is revived in contemporary Polish poetry. The aesthetic and political instrumentalization of the symbolic link between the mass execution of Katyń in 1940 and the air crash of Smolensk in 2010 is of particular importance in this context, and, in approaching these subjects, I will suggest reading Dakowicz’s obsessive interest in the physical remains of the dead as a poetic implementation of the forensic turn that has critically manifested itself in recent years in the research of mass violence and crimes of genocide. In my discussion of the historical-political and poetic implications of this turn, I argue that Dakowicz performs a shift from the perspective of the witness to an event to that of the witness to the exhumation of physical remains and that this is how his professional background as a literary scholar comes into play. In dealing with the remnants of dead bodies, Dakowicz engages competing strategies of archiving (sighting, sifting, and safekeeping) on the one hand and hermeneutics (interpretation, revitalization) on the other. The works of the Polish historian Ewa Domańska serve as further theoretical background to this discussion (“Nekros: Introduction to the Ontology of the Dead Body,“ 2017, in Polish).