This is an introductory article to a special cluster devoted to contemporary Russophone Anti-War Poetry. The cluster’s title, “Language in a Coma,” metaphorically implies the complex state of current Russian literature: its bewilderment, its turmoil, its profound shock. The introduction focuses on the recent publication of an anthol- ogy Doomsday Poetry in Russia. It includes contemporary Russophone Anti-War poems by more than one hundred authors who reside in Russia, Ukraine, Europe, America, Near and Far East—their years of birth range from 1937 to 1997; all of them are united by their use of the art of poetry as the means of making sense of a collective trauma. The anthology opens with poems written right before the beginning of the military invasion of Ukraine by Putin’s Russia and ends with those dated July 25. Surveying the reception of the book upon its publication, I claim that Doomsday Poetry stands as both a collective authorial statement and a mirror to the fractured state of Russian literature and society, echoing the broader discourse of war, cultural identity, and the role of art in times of crisis.

Yuri Leving is Professor of Literature and Cinema in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. He has published eleven monographs and nine edited collections, including Nabokov in Motion (2022), A Revolution of the Visible (2018), Marketing Literature and Posthumous Legacies (2013), Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl—Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel in Art and Design (2013), Anatomy of a Short Story (2012), and Keys to “The Gift.” A Guide to Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel (2011). He is the founding editor of the Nabokov Online Journal (since 2007). Leving was an Alexander von Humboldt Senior Research Fellow at Heidelberg University and an affiliated research fellow at the American Academy in Rome. The American Association of Teach- ers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL) named Leving the 2017 recipient of the award for Outstanding Contribution to Scholarship, and most recently he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (2023).

Between 2022 and 2023, a significant body of anti-war poetry emerged in Russian lit- erature, including works by authors residing in Russia and those who had recently emigrated. These poems represent diverse artistic movements. This article proposes a comprehensive theoretical framework for analyzing contemporary anti-war poetry and examining its genealogy. Rather than employing the term “anti-war poetry,” this study introduces the concept of “anti-aggression poetry,” as these works specifically critique the contemporary Kremlin regime’s aggression toward Ukraine and its sup- pression of Russian civil society, rather than war in general. Two aesthetic and polit- ical movements chronologically and thematically preceded contemporary anti- aggression poetry: critical poetry from the Russian-Chechen wars (1994–2000) and poetry from the 2010s that criticized societal violence and presented history through the lens of violence (primarily in works by Irina Kotova and Gala Pushkarenko). Beyond political interpretations, anti-aggression poetry can be most effectively analyzed through the theoretical framework of Czech dissident philosopher Jan Patočka, who conceptualized the “solidarity of the shaken” as fundamental to resisting the nor- malization of aggression.

Ilya Kukulin is a Research Fellow at Amherst College and is the co-author of the monograph Partizansky Logos: Proekt Dmtriia Aleksandrovicha Prigova (A Guerilla’s Logos: The Project of Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov) with Mark Lipovetsky (Novoe Literaturnoe obozrenie, 2022). He is also the author of Mashiny zashumevshego vremeni: kak sovetskii montazh stal metodom neofitsial'noi kultury (Machines of Noisy Times: How Soviet Montage Became the Aesthetic Method of Unofficial Culture) (Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2015), which won the Andrei Bely Prize in 2015. Kukulin has also edited numerous collections of articles, most recently: Proryv k Nevozmozhnoi Sviazi (Breakthrough to an Impossible Connection); Essays and Articles on Russian Poetry: 2000–2018 (Kabinetny Uchiony, 2019); and Ostrova Utopii: Sotsial'noe i Pedagogicheskoe Proektirovanie Poslevoennoi Shkoly (Utopian Islands: Social and Pedagogical Projects in the Postwar School) (Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2015).

The article discusses shifts in the representation of the lyrical self in the Russophone poetry reacting to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. For the first time in more than thirty years, “I” made room for “we.” This article traces different meanings of the “we” in this poetry and makes a conclusion about the association of this type of writing with the “minor literature” as per Deleuze and Guattari.

Mark Lipovetsky is Professor at the Department of Slavic Languages, Columbia University. His research interests are diverse and include Russian postmodernism, New Drama, Soviet literary and cinematic tricksters, Soviet underground culture as well as various aspects of post-Soviet culture. Lipovetsky edited five volumes of Dmitry Prigov’s collected works and currently is working on his critical biography. Lipovetsky’s works were nominated for the Russian Little Booker Prize (1997) and short-listed for the Andrei Bely Prize (2008). In 2014, Lipovetsky received an award from the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages for Outstanding Contribution to Scholarship. In 2019, he was awarded the Andrei Bely Prize for his service to Russian literature. A History of Russian Literature (Oxford, 2018), which Lipovetsky co-authored, received the Honorable Mention from the MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures.

Varvara Nedeoglo is an experimental Russian poet, designer, and self-styled “anar- chotsarevna.” Her poetic works have been published on the online multimedia, translocal platform Syg.ma since March 2022 and, in May 2023, her collection russian girls finish [orgasm] like free earth was published by Asebiia in print for pur- chase and free PDF formats. In this article, I explore Nedeoglo’s submission to Doomsday Poetry (¡ɚбудь рʏ͍ ссҝой+ой+ʙ̥ ой/на/рõϛϛию!; “be russian+oi+howl [war]/at[on]/russia!”) as an epic of the End, in which the national epic and the Biblical Apocalypse are cast against the Putinist hypermilitary political culture of imperialism. I further argue that Nedeoglo’s exorussian alphabet represents her greatest poetic innovation to date and the crucial device in negotiating the themes and questions of Russian complicity and resistance at stake in her text. The exorussian text draws attention to the distinct but interrelated graphic and semantic dimensions of the Russian language, challenging both the language itself and the imperial political claims attached to it. I conclude that Nedeoglo’s poetic project is fundamentally not geared towards metaphoric comparison or empathy that would express support for Ukraine, but a metonymic de- and re-composition of language which is both ego- and Russo-centric. Ultimately, Nedeoglo’s epic of the End should be read as an attempt at constant and defamiliarized consciousness (rather than a durable poetic alternative) to the complicity of both its speaker-writer and language in Russian imperial war.

Kathleen Mitchell-Fox is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. In her dissertation research, she focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Russophone radical poetry and literary theory, exploring the concept of "voice," ideas about poetic performance, and the intersections (staged or refuted) between aesthetics and politics

This article is devoted to a phenomenon in the reception of contemporary Russian poetry, rap, and rock: a special form of reaction of readers/listeners/viewers, when they, commenting on a new poem, song, or composition, claim that the author has expressed for them what they themselves would say if they were able to write poems and songs. Considering the reactions to the works of two poets who are particularly popular in the Russian-speaking environment today—Alja Khajtlina and Zhenia Berkovich—as well as the rapper and rock musician Noize MC, it is important to answer the question as to what parameters of the poetic text (or intermedial composition) provoke such a reaction. Here I propose to use the concept of deixis, which is widely used in reader-response theory, and to supplement it with two new subtypes: referential deixis and attitude-based deixis, where the former refers to a certain social and cultural experience that unites the author and his/her readers, and the latter refers to the author’s (and after him/her the readers’) attitude to different types of conscious- nesses portrayed in lyrics or musical compositions

Maria Mayofis is a literary scholar and cultural historian working at the Center for Russian Culture at Amherst College. She is the author of Appeal to Europe: The Literary Society “Arzamas” and the Russian Modernization Project of 1815–1818 (in Russian, 2008), and a co-editor of volumes on the history of Soviet children’s and youth culture and educa- tion. Contemporary Russian poetry has been among her research interests at least since 2003, when, being an editor of the New Literary Observer journal, she conceived, planned, and co-edited a special issue of this journal devoted to contemporary Russian poetry.