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.

This case study addresses the question of families, both referential and literary, in the 2017 mystery novel «Qui a Tué Heidi?» (“Who Killed Heidi?”), by Swiss writer Marc Voltenauer. It sets out with the assumption that the family, despite the changes undergone, is still perceived as “the uncanny” and fascinates French-speaking authors, including those whose main stake is not its depiction. According to the initial hypothesis, Marc Voltenauer puts family matters at the service of his literary project. Several family stories are woven into the police investigation, which is typical for mystery novels and forms the core of the narrative canvas. These literary families, laden with secrets, dysfunctional and potentially pathogenic, are depicted in a hyperbolic way. Is this just a consequence of genre norms (the detective novel is based on a set of stereotypes) or does the author paint a troubling picture of the contemporary family and its metamorphoses? This is one of the questions the study attempts to answer.

In «Tu écriras mon nom sur les eaux», published in 2019, Jean-François Haas proposes a reflection on the family based on two distinct models put in opposition. The first, limited and exclusive, corresponds to the archetype of the Swiss family at the beginning of the 20th century. Haas describes it extensively in the first part of his novel before breaking it up and proposing a more open and human counter-model based on fiction and the potentialities offered by literature. Playing on in-tertextuality and the use of personal pronouns, among other things, Haas lays the foundations of an ideal but illusory family model, encompassing humanity in its entirety. By constantly weaving links between different moments of the 20th cen-tury and the present of narration and writing, Jean-François Haas is also building a strong discourse on Switzerland, its institutions and conservatism.