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Word Play: Experimental Poetry and Soviet Children's Literature by Ainsley Morse

2022; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 117; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mlr.2022.0111

2222-4319

Elena Goodwin,

European Linguistics and Anthropology

Reviewed by: Word Play: Experimental Poetry and Soviet Children's Literature by Ainsley Morse Elena Goodwin Word Play: Experimental Poetry and Soviet Children's Literature. By Ainsley Morse. (Studies in Russian Literature and Theory) Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 2021. xiv+251 pp. $120. ISBN 978–0–81014–328–9. The Russian minimalist poet Vsevolod Nekrasov, a member of the experimental Lianozovo group of writers and artists and a founding member of Moscow Conceptualism, believed that 'all poetry needs something childlike' (p. 99). As Ainsley Morse masterfully demonstrates in her inspiring book, childlike elements manifest themselves extensively in twentieth-century Russian experimental poetry. She argues that children's literature and experimental poetics unite Soviet avant-garde poets of the 1920s and 1930s with the unofficial poets active from the sixties to the eighties. In fact, almost all the poets examined in this book gravitated towards children's literature and were employed, to varying degrees, as freelance children's authors, creating brilliant examples of Soviet children's poetry. However, the central subject of this meticulously researched study is the importance of childlike features in official Soviet children's literature and in experimental unofficial poetry (not written for children). These features are identified by Morse as a childlike aesthetic (including silliness, humour, nonsense, naivety, absurdity, antilogic, and zaum ('a kind of abstract sound poetry; the neologism [. . .] reaching beyond the apparent rules of language and signification' (pp. 9–10)); childlike narrators of lyric poetry; [End Page 525] and play with forms. This engaging intellectual journey into the history of Russian experimental poetics demonstrates that, in the context of Soviet ideological and aesthetic constraints, the childlike aesthetic was a significant poetic phenomenon in unofficial Soviet poetry, deployed as 'an act of aesthetic opposition' and a way of undermining 'authoritative, optimistic discourse' (p. 17). Morse focuses her readers' attention on the main childlike aesthetic traditions in Russian poetry: the pre-revolutionary avant-garde (her Prologue introduces Elena Guro, Aleksei Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov), early Soviet experimental poetics (tracing the use of avant-garde devices in children's literature), the OBERIU poets (Chapter 2), late Soviet unofficial poetry (Chapters 3–8), and post-Soviet and contemporary poets (covered in the Epilogue). Chapter 2 defines the experimental, philosophically inclined OBERIU poets as the 'first Soviet underground' (p. 48). Morse examines both published children's poems and unpublished work for adults by Aleksandr Vvedenskii, Nikolai Zabolotskii, and Daniil Kharms, demonstrating how manifestations of the childlike aesthetic in their poetry paved the way for Soviet experimental unofficial poetry to appear after the post-war Thaw. Chapter 3 examines in detail the Soviet literary scene from the Thaw era into the 1970s, enabling readers to contextualize the Lianozovo group of poets (Vsevolod Nekrasov and Igorʹ Kholin) as well as poets unaffiliated to any literary group (Leonid Aronzon and Oleg Grigorʹev), to whom she returns in later chapters. Morse emphasizes that these authors continued 'the linguistically critical path of the OBERIU poets' (p. 97). Like the OBERIU poets, they were partially employed as Soviet children's authors, but could not publish their experimental adult-oriented poems in the official press. By using childish devices in their adult poetry, such as 'sound and wordplay resembling children's language' (p. 98), to present a bleak reality, these poets distinctly counterposed their aesthetic to official Soviet literature. The latest authors to be analysed here did not work in the children's book industry, although their poetics is also directly connected to the childlike aesthetic. Chapter 8 focuses on Dmitri Aleksandrovich Prigov, a leading Moscow Conceptualist poet and artist, whom Morse sees as 'an important transitional figure' for her study (p. 163). His poems abound in childish features, but, as Morse convincingly demonstrates, unlike his predecessors, he 'deconstructs the notion of the childlike as a source of sincerity or authenticity' (p. 165). Finally, in the Epilogue Morse examines post-Soviet and contemporary poets (Dina Gatina, Vasilii Borodin, Anna Gorenko, and Irina Shostakovskaia), whom she identifies as post-Conceptualists and 'descendants of the unofficial literary tradition' (pp. 182, 183). She closes her argument persuasively: through their links with the early avant-garde, the OBERIU poets, and with Soviet unofficial poetry, contemporary Russian poets...