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The article considers the question whether poets lie against the background of the possible difference between poetical and discursive knowledge. Starting from Plato’s thesis, namely that poets lie, the article refers to Rorty, who, in contrast to Plato and with the example of Nabokov, recognizes in poetry a special kind of knowledge. It is opposed to discursive knowledge, which is closely related to prose. In the second part Parmenides’ didactic poem “On Nature” is seen as an example of proposing discursive truth in poetic words. Heidegger read Parmenides’ poem as a case for the evidence of truth in non-ambiguous poetical words (cf. the example “a-letheia” – un-concealedness, truth). Popper, however, interpreted the same text very differently, namely as a critical reference to the principal ambiguity of the word in human language and as the first known instance of the presentation of the deductive method. In this context the works of Nietzsche and Solov’ev are seen as opposed to each other, as Nietzsche in “Zarathustra” identified philosophical and poetical knowledge, whereas Solov’ev in his main work kept them separate from each other. The last part of the article studies the relation of poetical and discursive knowledge in poems of Gennadij Ajgi with their closeness to the dream, of Vera Stepanova with the intriguing opening to the co-presence of the Poetical I and the Other in one and the same word and of Durs Grünbein, who exposes the ambiguity of poetical language as a means to show that even untruth can open a way to come to truth. Then the lie of poetical words can be their way to say the truth.
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.
This article considers the theme of Karl Marx in the poetry and artwork of Dmitrii Prigov. It conceives of his poetic communication as a political activity, which is stressed by its performative qualities and is presented by the example of the poem “Moscow and Muscovites”. Further on, the article distinguishes four speech attitudes in relation to the term “Karl Max” in the culture of Soviet Russia: belief, condemnation, quotation, and Prigov’s technique of reading Marx’s texts literally. Thus, he interprets Marx’s sentence “The answer to a question is contained in the critique of the question itself” verbatim and, by generalization (a common device of Soviet Marxism), leads it to absurdity. Prigov does the same with the slogan “Proletarians of the World Unite” from the “Communist Manifesto”, which he transforms into a parodic epistolary poem modeled on Lermontov’s “Demon”. The article also considers the use of the name of Marx and the stereotypically connected family names of Engels, Lenin, and Stalin in Prigov’s work and argues, using the motif of the policemen (“militsaner”), that, contrary to Marx’s expectations of real Socialism, the function of power was not dying but growing. Finally, attention is drawn to the role of so-called historical and socio-economical “Marxist laws” (such as ‘dialectical’ and ‘historical materialism’), which in Prigov’s work are dethroned and become possible concepts beside others. Thus, Prigov installs freedom in place of the Marxist necessity of interpretation, which was also the basis of Mikhail Lifshitz’s anti-modernist aesthetics, the most important contribution of Soviet philosophy to aesthetic theory.
This article aims to reconstruct the reception of pre-Socratic philosophy, especially that of Parmenides, in Russian modernism and avant-garde literature. In doing so, it places this reception into two contexts: the contemporary discussion of pre-Socratic ideas in Russian, European and American philosophy, on the one hand, and the proclamation of a third, a Russian and/or Slavic Renaissance, on the other. This Renaissance has been conceived as the intense discussion and reconsideration of ideas, notions, and expressions of ancient Greek thinking. It aimed also to avoid the reduction of Greek philosophy to Plato, as had been practiced by the Russian Orthodox Church and largely pushed through in Russian culture. One of the main points of this reconsideration concerned the quest of the relation between the word, the process of thinking, and human life, while another one connected with it involved the (re-)establishment of a close bond between the poetic word, its meaning, and its sense. The integration of this productive discussion with pre-Socratic Greek philosophy enriches and improves our knowledge of Russian modernism and avant- garde literature.
The article considers the circulation and the role of the motifs China, the Chinese man/woman and the Chinese as concepts of the other/strange(r), which negatively correspond to the concepts of the self in the work of the Russian poet, writer, artist and producer of performances Dmitrij Prigov. These phenomena and their historical development are of special interest in the present context of the Russian war against Ukraine, the Western sanctions against Russia and the growing political, economic and military approximation of Russia to China. In its analytic design the article discerns in Prigov’s China-text a broader geo-esthetical from a smaller geo-poetical horizon and distinguishes the theme- and sense-orientated phenomenon of stereotype, reducing (the concept of) a culture or a nation to special, often discrediting it, semantic features (as topoi), from the phenomenon of the imagotype, which is orientated to the poetical and/or esthetical construction of an artifact and relates the specialty of the other to certain sounds, intonations, colors, textures. Reconstructing the development of the motifs of China, the Chinese man/woman and the Chinese in Prigov’s China-text from the 1970s up to the posthumously in 2013 published novel “Katia, the Chinese”, the article shows that the evolution of the imagotypes and stereotypes of China, the Chinese man / woman and the Chinese as concepts of the other/alien is correlated with the development of the geopolitical relation of Russia and China.
