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.”

The article analyzes three modernist novels, Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s “Death on Credit,” Samuel Beckett’s “The Unnamable,” and Paul Auster’s “4321”. The texts examined manifest radical discursive changes that are connected with epistemological and ontological conceptions of mind and being. Modern conceptions of being are seen as being based on the non-concepts of exaiphnes, the timeless instant, as developed by Parmenides, sunyata as defined in Buddhist thought, and the indeterminacy of particles as discovered by quantum physics. The idea of being as a state of infinite potentiality impacts the discourse and the form of the modern novel as it moves in the direction of formlessness, thus mirroring the non-substantiality of the human subject. The narrators of the three novels speak at a breathless pace that punctuates and disrupts the narrative and that inserts death as the agent of the negation of meaning.

Wallace Stevens is widely regarded as an author whose poetry possesses a particularly close affinity to philosophy, which is usually taken to mean that his poems contain statements of philosophical concepts or propositions. In contrast to this, the following article examines the relation of Stevens’s poetry and philosophy with respect not to the contents of his poems but to their sequential structure. This analytic focus is motivated by the observation that the progression of the utterance in a great many of Stevens’s poems appears to be modelled on the principles of philosophical argumentation: i.e., that the poems go through a quasi-philosophical process of questioning, reflection, and cognition. As lyric poems, however, they pursue this practical process of thinking and arguing on the basis of the principles of poetic composition. The poems can thus be described as employing two different discourse types at the same time and in interaction with each other: philosophical argumentation, on the one hand, and poetic composition on the other. Accordingly, the following analyses are guided by two questions: first, what aims do the argumentations in the poems pursue and, second, how do the two discourse types interact with each other in that process? Three poems from different periods of Stevens’s poetic œuvre are used as examples: “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman” (1923), “Man Carrying Thing” (1947) and “The Plain Sense of Things” (1954).

There are astonishingly numerous and profound influences of the Pre-Socratics – especially Herakleitos and Zenon – on Russian literature between realism and the avant-garde of the 1920s. The focus here is on the concepts of Herakleitos’ “panta rhei” and his pre-dialectical thinking in polarities. From there, a bridge can be built to Leo Tolstoy’s narrative technique of the “stream of consciousness” and his speculations on time and history in the context of his novel “War and Peace.” The Russian novelist was particularly fascinated by Zenon’s time paradox (Achilles and the Tortoise). Furthermore, this contribution is concerned with Herakleitos’ model of circulations and dualities in the mytho-poetics of Russian Symbolism around 1900 (Viacheslav Ivanov, Andrey Bely, Konstantin Balmont) and, above all, with Russian poetry of the absurd (Daniil Kharms, Aleksander Vvedenskii) and the concepts of nothingness, of infinity in the context on this side of the categories of space and time (“cisfinite poetry”), and with the spirit of the time paradox of Zenon.

In this paper, I examine Gottlob Frege’s attempt in “On Sense and Reference” to determine semantically what poetry is. Therefore, Frege’s assumptions as well as strategies concerning the distinction between poetic and non-poetic discourse are analyzed in order to show in which way a theory of “poetic meaning” is possible. Frege’s rather inconspicuous explanation of poetry, although itself quite unsatisfactory in the end, allows us to strengthen the hope for a ‘minimal’ semantic theory of poetry that depends on a certain idea of fictionality.

Earliest Greek philosophy concurred with traditional poetry in its attempt to deliver cosmological thought about the Universe (τὰ πάντα); to this end, it used a paratactically descriptive prose style (Anaximander, Anaximenes). Adopted by a new kind of poetry criticizing the traditional myths as mere opinions (δόξαι) and mediated through its Pythagorean mathematization, philosophy gathers itself into its own critical principle: Identity (Xenophanes). Identity and Difference together (Heraclitus) differentiate the world-immanent Logos (λόγος ἐών). In human thought, this Logos presents itself as Judgement (κρίσις): Predication is reflected in a tropic prose style. The disentanglement of the resulting paradoxical unity of opposites calls forth the Principle of Contradiction and reinstates poetry as self-revelation of intellectual intuition (νοεῖν): while in the opinions of mortals, everything might be considered as merely asserted and ambiguous, contradiction is the ever-present presupposition in every act of thinking (Parmenides). The infinite progress of excluding contradiction (Anaxagoras) is itself dialectically shown as contradictory (Zenon): What remains is the perception of the sole, non-conceptualized phenomenon, whose apprehension existentially deepens into faith (πίστις). Linking up with pre-philosophical myth (Hesiod), it manifests itself once again as poetry, now already rhetorically (Empedocles).

With Hölderlin’s conversion to philosophy, he began to take an interest in the problem of how to address philosophers and non-philosophers in one and the same literary work. He developed a doctrine that would enable him to transform the desire for eternal things in accordance with his political and educational ambitions. His understanding of exoteric teaching guided his reading of Plato, Kant, Hemsterhuis, and Fichte. It shaped both his correspondence and the composition of his novel, “Hyperion”.

This paper explores the relationship between philosophy and literature in the dialogues of Cicero. It argues that Cicero was a sceptic Roman philosopher who used the freedom permitted by his epistemological point of view to systematically present the doctrines of all the Hellenistic schools of thought without open polemics in an almost neutral and rather new way. In presenting the doctrines of the different Hellenistic schools of thought, Cicero, on the one hand, devaluates only the philosophy of Epicurus by means of rhetoric. On the other hand, he allows his reader, and even stimulates him, to make a rational choice between different philosophical options such as either the ethics of Stoicism or of the Peripatetic school. To this end, Cicero depicts his fellow citizens and himself in the situation or process of theoretical (and practical) decision-making between different philosophical points of view or even different ways of life.