686 Russian Poetry After the Cold War (with Stephanie Sandler)

Summary

The History of Literature Podcast

Episode 686: Russian Poetry After the Cold War (with Stephanie Sandler)
Host: Jack Wilson
Guest: Stephanie Sandler, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University
Release Date: March 13, 2025

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Introduction

In Episode 686 of "The History of Literature," host Jack Wilson engages in a profound conversation with Stephanie Sandler, a renowned scholar specializing in Russian poetry. The episode delves into the evolution of Russian poetry from the Cold War era through the transformative years following the fall of the Soviet Union, exploring themes of freedom, censorship, and artistic expression.

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Historical Context: Russian Poetry During the Cold War (1946-1989)

Stephanie Sandler begins by painting a vivid picture of the tumultuous relationship between America and Russia during the Cold War. She reflects on the restrictive environment for literature in the Soviet Union, where "literature seemed on life support," and the CIA actively "smuggled literature into the country to crack things open" (00:09). Sandler highlights the clandestine circulation of Western literary works and dissident writings, emphasizing the role of books as "a reservoir of freedom, of independent thought" (03:00).

Key Points:

• State-Controlled Literature: Official publications were limited, with a stark contrast to the thriving underground (samizdat) literature.
• Influence of Exiled Poets: Figures like Joseph Brodsky played a crucial role in introducing Western poetic forms and ideas to Russian poets.
• Samizdat Poetry: Unofficial poetry circles, such as the Lianosova poets in Moscow and Leningrad, pushed the boundaries of thematic and formal expression despite governmental repression.

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The Fall of the Berlin Wall and Its Impact (1989 Onwards)

The conversation transitions to the dramatic shifts that occurred with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union. Sandler explains that "the collapse was a gradual process through the late 1980s," leading to increased publication opportunities for poets like Jelena Schwartz and Olga Sidakova (29:05). This period marked a significant expansion in the diversity and accessibility of Russian poetry.

Key Points:

• Increased Freedom of Expression: Poets gained unprecedented freedom to explore a wider range of themes and forms.
• Emergence of New Voices: The post-Soviet era saw the rise of poets who could openly express personal and political dissent.
• Continued Challenges: Despite newfound freedoms, some poets remained vulnerable, with others choosing exile to safely express their art.

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Exploring Freedom in Russian Poetry

A central theme of the episode is the dual facets of freedom experienced by Russian poets: artistic freedom and freedom from state censorship. Sandler articulates that “the interaction between those two kinds of freedom” is pivotal in understanding contemporary Russian poetry (24:37).

Key Points:

• Artistic Freedom: Poets experiment with form and content, breaking away from traditional structures to reflect personal and societal changes.
• Freedom from Censorship: The relaxation of state control allowed for more overt political and social commentary within poetic works.
• Resilience and Resistance: Poetry became a medium for maintaining autonomy and resisting oppressive narratives, especially evident during and after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

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Notable Poets and Their Contributions

Stephanie Sandler highlights several influential poets who embody the transition and resilience of Russian literature:

• Joseph Brodsky: An exiled poet whose interactions with Western poets like Derek Walcott influenced his work, bridging Russian and English poetic traditions. Brodsky’s evolution illustrates the broader shifts in Russian poetry post-exile.

  “He changed because of being in a Western context, being in a more open context.” (18:00)

• Arkady Dragomoshenko: Representing a departure from traditional forms, Dragomoshenko engaged with experimental and language poetry, significantly impacting the next generation of Russian poets.

  “He sort of opened my eyes to that poetry that's not in Brodsky's canon.” (19:04)

• Galina Rimbu and Yelena Van Ileva: Contemporary poets navigating the complexities of living in conflict zones like Ukraine, using platforms like Facebook to perform and share their work in real-time as acts of resistance.

  “It's almost like you get the wind in the sails. So you see a greater sense of freedom and of expression.” (30:23)

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The Modern Landscape: Russian Poetry Post-2022

The discussion shifts to the current state of Russian poetry amidst the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. Sandler emphasizes the heightened risks and the resilience of poets who continue to create and share their work despite severe censorship and personal danger.

Key Points:

• Clamping Down After 2022: The Russian government's intensified suppression of dissent has made it perilous for poets to publish anti-war and critical works.
• Diaspora and Digital Platforms: Many poets operate from abroad or utilize online platforms like ROAR (Resistance and Opposition Arts Review) to disseminate their work globally.
• Themes of Resistance: Contemporary poetry often directly or indirectly critiques the war, explores personal and collective trauma, and reaffirms a commitment to free expression.

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Themes in Contemporary Russian Poetry

Sandler categorizes her book around several thematic pillars, including politics, performance, and history, to explore how poets navigate and reflect upon their realities.

• Politics: Poets use their work to address and resist governmental oppression, with feminism being a significant focus.

  “The very stance of feminist poets to speak out for the autonomy and the integrity of a woman's body... informs precisely the kind of poetry that I wanted to write about.” (37:21)

• Performance: The act of performing poetry extends beyond traditional readings to include digital interfaces and real-time responses to political events.

  “This is how a poet reacts in real time to a political catastrophe.” (41:48)

• History: Poets engage with historical narratives, challenging state-controlled versions of the past to assert their own perspectives and truths.

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Resources and Further Exploration

Sandler points listeners toward valuable resources for engaging with contemporary Russian poetry:

• ROAR (Resistance and Opposition Arts Review): A platform that publishes a broad range of resistant and oppositional art, including poetry, accessible in multiple languages.

  “It's a wonderful resource for people who want to see a wide range of what this resistance looks like in real time.” (45:06)

• F Letter Anthology: Showcases significant women poets, reflecting the intertwining of feminist themes with broader political and social issues.

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Concluding Thoughts

Jack Wilson and Stephanie Sandler conclude by underscoring the enduring power of poetry as a tool for personal and political agency. They advocate for poetry consumption as a meaningful form of resistance and personal enrichment, suggesting that “reading it can change us to start each day by taking five minutes for something... something that can be great.” (50:07)

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Notable Quotes

• Stephanie Sandler (16:28):
  “We are very lucky. We live in a poetry boom. It's true in the United States and it's certainly true in Russia.”

• Stephanie Sandler (24:37):
  “How, for example, would a poet who advocated for a kind of personal and political freedom also explore freer forms of expression?”

• Stephanie Sandler (41:48):
  “She's somebody who's, as a Russian poet, a Russian language poet. She's experiencing the war that Russia is making on Ukraine.”

• Jack Wilson (48:14):
  “To experience the present in all of its fullness... is to be a free subject.”

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About the Guest: Stephanie Sandler

Stephanie Sandler is a distinguished professor at Harvard University, specializing in Slavic languages and literatures. She is the author of "Commemorating Russia's Myth of a National Poet" and co-author of "A History of Russian Literature." Her latest work, "The Freest Speech in Poetry Unbound, 1989-2022," explores the vibrant and often perilous landscape of Russian poetry in the post-Cold War era.

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For more insights into the history of literature and its evolving narratives, visit historyofliterature.com and follow on Facebook.

Transcript

[Jack Wilson]

The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio.

[Side Door Host]

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[Mike Carruthers]

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[Stephanie Sandler]

Hello, I suppose America and Russia have always had a relationship of sorts, dating back to the earliest days of the Republic. But as someone who grew up in the Cold War, I remember well the death clinch the two nations had then, or maybe I should say America and the Soviet Union had their arms wrapped around each other like two foes who had jumped off a cliff together, each one determined not to die unless the other one did as well. We believed ourselves in America to be the land of the free, the land of unopened mail and a robust and thriving pressure which allowed criticism of the government. We had two political parties that bickered. It seemed that the Soviet Union only had one. We had the First Amendment. They had Stalinism and show trials. These were years when literature seemed on life support over there, and the CIA was busy trying to smuggle literature into the country to crack things open. In Poland they received George Orwell and Hannah Arendt and John Le Carre, Virginia Woolf and Albert Camus and Philip Roth and Kurt Vonnegut, the New York Review of Books and the Manchester Guardian Weekly. And books by Russian dissidents were smuggled in. Blacklisted authors like Boris Pasternak and Czeslaw Milos and Joseph Brodsky, the plays of Vaclav Havel and Bertolt Brecht. Listen to this quote, courtesy of the Guardian, taken from a book called the CIA Book Club by Charlie English. I wonder if that's his real name. It sounds like it could be a KGB codename for him or her. I'm just kidding, Charlie. If you'd like to be on the show, please reach out, listen to this quote and marvel at the power of literature, Poland was the most crucial of Eastern bloc nations. When Communism collapsed in 1989, this was the first domino to fall. As the leading Polish dissident, Adam Michnik, put it, it was books that were victorious in the fight. A book is like a reservoir of freedom, of independent thought, a reservoir of human dignity. A book was like fresh air. We should build a monument to books. They allowed us to survive and not go mad. This was the hope, the dream, that came true. And Poland may have been on the outskirts, but when it came to the core of the Soviet Union, things were changing as well. We learned of perestroika and glasnost, a kind of opening up, a new transparency. And our American hearts were with the Russian people in the long tradition of literature that we in the west revered. This was the land of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Chekhov. And we thought maybe there could be some room for literature like that to reflower. The wall fell, and the world seemed full of promise for the people of Russia and their poets. Well, what exactly happened after that? Our guest today, Stephanie Sandler, has been studying the poetry of Russia in this post Cold War period, and she's written a book called the Freest Speech in Russia. Poetry Unbound, 1989-2022. Stephanie Sandler, today on the history of literature. Okay. Hello, hello, hello. I'm Jack Wilson. Welcome to the podcast. My goodness. I blathered on so long in the introduction, it seems like we could just jump straight in from there, Right? Bring out the guest, dear Jack. Bring out the guest. But I have something else to talk about, and it feels very appropriate, both with our Cold War topic today and the state of affairs in America as of this moment, which is late February 2025. As I'm recording this, we're talking now about a perhaps underrated element of American popular culture which helped keep Americans on a path of valuing American institutions and American values, like free speech, like democracy, like community, like tolerance. And that is Rod Serling's television series, the Twilight Zone. The episodes were fascinating, often so creepy and weird, and they helped deal with human nature. They helped us see human nature for what it was and helped us deal with the specific political moment of the Cold War with fears of nuclear holocaust and the idea that we might destroy ourselves from within, Paranoia against our neighbors or hatred of one another, or a turn to a fascist strongman to put an end to the turmoil that he himself likely created. It's page one in the fascist playbook. Our enemies could want nothing more. Famous Episodes like the Monsters are due on Maple street helped us deal with those fears and to resist them. In that story, two aliens arrive on Earth and conquer a neighborhood simply by playing with their power, the electricity turning it on and off. Instead of finding the real source, the neighbors start accusing one another, and soon enough, paranoia and panic do work that the aliens could not themselves have brought about. The aliens sit on a hillside and watch as the neighborhood eats itself alive. Here's the closing narration from that. The tools of conquest. I'm doing a Rod Serling voice. I can't help it. The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone. There were dozens of episodes like this one, commenting on politics and society indirectly through good storytelling. In 1986, in the revival of the Twilight Zone, an episode came out called Button Button. It came across my path the other day, and I was struck by how relevant it seemed to our current moment in the story. A couple living in a low rent apartment receive a box with a button on top of it. That evening, a man arrives who explains that if they press the button, someone they do not know will die, but they will also receive a large amount of money. The couple agonizes over what to do. They open the box, see that it's empty, with no wires or anything that could activate any sort of killing device. Then they throw the thing in the trash. The next day, the wife. Her name is normal. Would you wonder why she wasn't called Eve And Arthur. Adam, the husband. Adam. Sorry. Arthur, the husband, sees Norma, the wife, sitting at the kitchen table, transfixed by the box which she has retrieved from the trash. She did that after Arthur went to bed and he's kind of disgusted. He says, push the button just to get it off your mind. And she pushes the button. The next day, the man comes back and he has the money. Yes, it worked. The box worked somehow and someone they didn't know died. And he says, here's your money now. The man takes the box back with him. It's going to be reprogrammed, he says. And then he says it will be offered to someone else with the same terms and conditions. And he adds, I can assure You. It will be offered to someone who doesn't know who you are. Right? Get it? We're all glad to push the button when we think it will hurt someone else. We're not so glad when the harm comes our way. The solution is not to push the button. Take the cash and hope for the best. The solution is to stop ourselves, all of us, from having those buttons to push. Okay, that's an interesting story. Kind of creepy at the end. It's a good story. Now for the history of literature part. The episode was based on a short story that had been published in playboy magazine in 1970 and had been written by a man named Richard Matheson. And guess what? He hated the episode. You'd think he'd have been excited about having his short story presented to millions of viewers via the Twilight Zone. And maybe viewers who weren't quite as distracted as his readers of Playboy magazine. But nope, not Richard Matheson. He hated the episode because they changed the ending. And that raised my eyebrows. Because when I told you the story, I mean, the ending is half the story, right? At least half. There's the. I mean, there's more to it than just the ending. There's the agonizing over the dilemma. Would we all take the money if it killed someone? We don't know. You can talk yourself into it. You could say, people die all the time, don't they? We don't stop our lives and go try to save every single person, every stranger. It's impossible. We couldn't live our own lives. So what's the difference here? Maybe you tell yourself that. Maybe you say, couldn't I do some good with the money? Maybe that money will save my own life or my loved ones. Maybe I know someone who could use it. I could save two lives. But then the ending is what makes the story great.

[Jack Wilson]

Go ahead.

[Stephanie Sandler]

Be tempted. Give in to your greed or your curiosity and pay the price for it. That's the ending. It's so good. I couldn't imagine that Matheson and his story could have had a better ending. And actually, he had a very different ending. And arguably a better one. I don't think I necessarily agree with him that it's a better ending, but it's arguable. What do you think it was? Well, I'll tell you. In Matheson's version of the story, the wife, Norma, presses the button and she receives the money. Someone has pushed her husband onto the train tracks and he was killed. And the money arrives to normal thanks to her husband's life insurance policy. And she's despondent. She asked the stranger, well, this wasn't the deal supposed to be someone I don't know? And the stranger says, do you really think you knew your husband? Okay, that's also a twist. Also kind of literary. Very different. You can see why an author might prefer his version if he sees the other. Leaves us with a kind of horror on Norma's behalf. In the Twilight Zone version, she's left with the suspenseful notion that she killed someone she doesn't know and death will be coming for her and her husband soon. In the Matheson story, she's left with the idea that she just murdered her husband and everything she believed about her past is wrong. But she does have the money and she does get to live. I think I like the Twilight Zone version better, but as they say, your mileage may vary, especially when you're in the Twilight Zone. Stephanie Sandler will tell us about Russian poets after the Cold War. After this.

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[Jack Wilson]

Foreigning me now is Stephanie Sandler, who is a professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Harvard University. Her previous works include Commemorating Russia's Myth of a National Poet and A History of Russian Literature, which she co authored. She's here today to discuss her new book, the Freest Speech in poetry unbounding 1989 to 2022. Stephanie Sandler, welcome to the History of Literature.

[Mike Carruthers]

Thank you very much.

[Stephanie Sandler]

So I thought we might start with.

[Jack Wilson]

Your encounter with Joseph Brodsky. Maybe you could tell us what your scholarly focus was at that point and how you came to meet Brodsky and.

[Stephanie Sandler]

The advice that he gave you.

[Mike Carruthers]

Of course, I was lucky enough to get my first teaching job out of graduate school at Amherst College, and Joseph Brodsky was teaching at Mount Holyoke at that time. He would quickly become a five college professor, so teaching at all of the five campuses in the area. And he taught one semester a year in the spring. I was at that time a Pushkin scholar. So you mentioned one of my books on Pushkin, commemorating Pushkin. And I largely lived my scholarly life in the 19th century. I loved many things about 20th century poetry. I had studied it in college and graduate school, but I didn't think of it as a real focus for my work. And I didn't really know Joseph Brodsky's poetry very well. I knew of it. I'd maybe read a little bit, but I had the chance to meet him. I even audited a couple of the classes that he taught and spent time just talking with him. And he began giving me the poetry, really, of his friends, his buddies, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Les Murray, the poets whom he admired, and got me thinking more about the poetry of our lifetime. And I did write a small amount about him. In fact, he's included in this book in a small way. But it really prompted me to be alert to what was going on all around me. We are very lucky. We live in a poetry boom. It's true in the United States and it's certainly true in Russia.

[Stephanie Sandler]

Yeah.

[Jack Wilson]

And it's interesting he was suggesting not just contemporary poetry, but contemporary poetry in English.

[Mike Carruthers]

Yes, he was very alert to poetry in English. You know, Borodsky left the Soviet Union. He was invited in quotation marks to leave in 1972. And when he came to the west, he had wonderful and intense interactions with poets whom he admired and got to know very well. So Derek Walcott was another contemporary poet of his whom he admired very much, and that had an impact on his Poetry. Brodsky continued, continued to write his poetry in Russian, largely. He wrote occasional verse in English, but he wrote his essays in English. And I think he changed because of being in a Western context, being in a more open context. And certainly he changed because he could publish in Soviet Union. His work was really not published until after the fall of the Soviet Union, toward the end of the 1980s.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. And then I was struck by the second encounter you described that you had while in Russia in the 1980s that you say, opened a whole new approach to English languages, poetry.

[Mike Carruthers]

Brodsky's pantheon, as I mentioned, these are great formal poets. And Brodsky himself remained a great formal poet. But on one of my research trips to work on Pushkin, through a friend of a friend, I met Arkady Dragomoshenko. He's another poet whom I write about in this book. And Dragomoshenko represents a very different kind of poetry. He was very engaged with a strand of American poetry called language poetry, and he sort of opened my eyes to that poetry that's not in Brodsky's canon. A great example of that would be Lynn Haginian, who actually died recently, a remarkable and prolific poet. Another example, whom I came to know separately from him is Susan Howe or Charles Bernstein. So this was a strand of more experimental, formally radical poetry. And I began to explore it in English, which also taught me to be a better reader of it in Russian. Dragomoshenko had also a kind of outsized influence on the next generation of poets. He lived in Leningrad, Petersburg, and had very close relationships with a number of important poets of the next generation.

[Jack Wilson]

So the old approach, if we could summarize it, I guess, was sort of the Eliot, Stevens, Robert Frost, W.H. auden kind of modernism. And what you were finding in this new window that opened was something that would be, how would you characterize it?

[Mike Carruthers]

So I think the word you were going to end that sentence with is postmodern. And one could, Jackie, that's entirely possible. I think it's a little misleading just because postmodern is such a big and capacious term, and because some of the poets who are of that later generation, some of the poets I write about in this book continue to be rather interesting formal poets. So in a way, what really exploded was that seemingly vast distinction between those who write in strict form and those who write in free verse. So one of the kinds of freedom that happens is the explosion of free verse. But there was a tradition of free verse verse well before this. Even in the Russian tradition, some of it going back to folk poetry, which used different forms as well. And what I think really happened starting in the 1990s, right up through to the present, is both that the balance shifts so that proportionally there is much more free verse in the kind of poetry that I'm interested in, but also that formerly adept poets themselves become freer in their work. So an example of a brilliant, formally adept poet would be Polina Barskova, or another would be Maria Stepanova. And you can see strict form, beautifully rhyming poems. Stepanova is especially well known for her ballads, but you also find poems that really explode on the page and that explore a wider range of forms. So to my mind, the most interesting kind of freedom was the freedom not to be in that straight jacket, that if you're going to be a postmodern poet, then this is what you have to do. You can't have an exploration of lyric subjectivity, for example, or your poetry can't rhyme. There's much more kind of mixing it up.

[Jack Wilson]

Right, okay. So we're talking about a couple of different kinds of freedom here, I guess. One is the freedom that. An artistic freedom that poets might feel that they don't have to follow convention. And. And maybe they're looking at critics or readers or publishers and thinking, well, this is what their expectations are, and that can limit me and hamper me. And the other freedom would be the freedom of the poet's relationship with the state and with censorship and that kind of thing. And I take it we're going to be talking about both kinds of freedom during our conversation today. But I want to make sure that we're, you know, trying to keep it as clear as possible when we use the word freedom.

[Mike Carruthers]

Absolutely. And I would say that for me, as a reader of this poetry, what became most interesting gradually was the interaction between those two kinds of freedom. How, for example, would a poet who advocated for a kind of personal and political freedom also explore freer forms of expression? How would those two things align? And. And actually, how would such a poet seek to inspire readers themselves to be freer? I. I think we don't inspire freedom by making a speech about freedom, although sometimes the poetry is thematically about freedom. I. I cite some poems that refer directly to freedom. But actually, what may most liberate us is when a poem opens up a new vista for a way to see and think about ourselves in the world. So I appreciate your wisely separating out those two strands, because we need to separate them out in order to be able to talk about them. Separately, but I'm also interested in how they might intertwine.

[Jack Wilson]

Right, okay, so let's. Before we get to 1989 and the beginning of the unbinding or unboundedness, let's talk about some historical context. Let's start with the Cold War in 1946 through 1989. Let's say what were. What was life like for a poet then? And. And are we only. Do you. Was it possible to be a true poet? Was one working for the state? Was it only in exile that one could be a poetry? Were people reading contemporary poetry? Did they have access to it? What was the general state of things.

[Stephanie Sandler]

For poetry during those years?

[Mike Carruthers]

I think there was a very wide range. There were poets who were officially recognized as poets, who were members of the writers union, who had their work published, who were doing important work for advancing the possibilities for poetry in Russian. A very good, and to my mind, interesting example of this is a poet named Bodice Slutsky, who was a wartime poet and who flourished in the post war period, so precisely the period that you're asking about, and published his work, but when Slutsky was also writing a tremendous amount for the drawer. And so after Slutsky's death, a whole other side of his poetry became very well known. And some of that poetry, for example, explored Jewish themes or explored more personal approaches to experience. There's a wonderful book in English by an Oxford scholar, Gerald Smith, called Things that Happened, which intertwines Slutsky's poetry with stories about Slutski's life. For a poet of that era, Slutsky is unusually available to readers in English because of this really excellent book.

[Jack Wilson]

Was that when you say that his book became. Or his poetry became widely known, was that before 1989 that he died and readers were able to find it then? Yeah, right. Okay.

[Mike Carruthers]

Yes. Although, again. So one thing we should should say is that there's official poetry. So during the Soviet period, we have official publications, but we also, quickly, by the 1960s, we have something called Semizdad. So we have an enormous amount of work that's circulating unofficially. And although I just gave you Slutsky as an example, in fact, the kinds of poets I write about, Slutsky is not really the one that they would point to. They would point more to the poets of Semistat, to unofficial literature. And that's really the. I don't so much trace a genealogy or a lineage directly. That's not my task. But if I were to do that, that would be more the way that I Would link people. So for example, in Moscow there was a group of poets often called the poets of the barracks, because some of them lived in. Or the Lianosova poets. Some of them lived in the Lianosova district, where there were lots of barracks, quickly put up housing after the war. And those are very interesting poets formally. So Genik Satgir or Jan Sonowski would be examples. Interesting poets. To again reimagine what are the possibilities of what Russian poetry can do formally, but also thematically. So they write about the people who live in those rather challenging circumstances, not the mainstream subject matter that you might find. And then there is. May just add one other thing, because I gave you this Moscow example. Dragomoshenko would be an instance of somebody who is in the comparable Leningrad scene. So there is an unofficial poetry scene in Leningrad, later returns to its name of Petersburg, but in Leningrad at the same time. And Dragomoshenko is part of that scene. Jelena Schwartz would be part of that scene. So some of the poets I write about in this book, because they live past the end of the Soviet Union and their work is published much more be examples of that.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. So what exactly happened? How did things change when the Berlin wall fell in 1989? Was the difference immediate? And what could you see in those months and years right after that?

[Mike Carruthers]

So I did take the fall of the Berlin Wall just because symbolically it's such a great metaphor for the opening. But if I were to be a little more historically accurate, I. We would need to push it back into the 1980s, because it's really the. When Gorbachev comes to power, when we start to have the slogans of perestroika and glasnost, we start to get more publications. So Brodsky, for example, or Solzhenitsyn, some of these people start to be published before 1989. You can find some Brodsky. The first poems are in 1987, which is the year he wins the Nobel Prize. And it's not as dramatic as there was a wall. Then the wall fell down and suddenly everything changed. It was a gradual process through the late 1980s and the beginnings of poets starting to break through. So the first official publication of a book by Gilin Schwartz is in the late 1980s. And then 1989, the Wall Falls, or when the Soviet Union itself falls at the beginning of the 1990s, then of course it's much more dramatic.

[Jack Wilson]

Can you see a change in the poetry itself as well as the access that people had to it?

[Mike Carruthers]

I don't think That I could say that there's a black and white difference. So if I took Jelena Schwarz as an example, there's great continuity in Schwartz's poetry from the 1980s through the 1990s into the beginning of the 20th 1st century. And there's continuity thematically. She's a writer of what she loved to call her little big poems. So grouping these kind of lyric poems into cycles, if anything, it's a question of degree. And as a poet like Schwartz is suddenly able to actually reach her audience as she's able to travel, it's almost like you get the wind in the sails. So you see a greater, again, my word, freedom. You see a greater sense of freedom and of expression. Although some of Schwarz's greatest work is done in the 1980s, the same is true of Sudakova. So even with the limitations that people had writing their poetry, realizing it's just going to circulate among their friends, quite remarkable work was done.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah, I've talked to writers who grew up in repressive regimes who came to feel alienated from the language itself. For example, a novelist from China who told me that she no longer trusts the Chinese language to convey the truth. And she now can only write in English because Chinese for her has become so distorted because of the propaganda and the. The way that writers had tried to get around the propaganda, but they used everything with such heavy symbolism that it just became a language for her that was only the language of oppression. Was that a problem for Russian poets living in Russia or outside Russia? How did they manage to keep the Russian language from becoming that for them.

[Stephanie Sandler]

If they did so?

[Mike Carruthers]

I. I think that. Well, first of all, I'm going to bracket everything I'm about to say with the fact that in 2022, with the start of the full scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia, for some poets, there is a sense of revulsion and alienation from anything Russian. And people who have more than one language, especially in 2022, some began experimenting and writing, say in Ukrainian or in. And ways to try, trying to find ways to pull away from Russian. Although I think there was quickly a decision to say we will not cede our language to the state. And so there has also been a flourishing of Russian poetry after, in and after 2022. The afterward to. The book talks about this a bit, but I think that Russian poetry was helped by always having had a history of a kind of spiritual independence that. That's not to say there aren't exceptions. There are, but there was always the joke, right? People in Russia prize poetry so much that you can be killed for it. So the sense of the possibilities of Russian poetry to express things that maybe aren't in a conventional sense, politically dissident, but yet push toward a kind of autonomy of spiritual independence, that's got a very long tradition and it especially is it's, it's in the 19th century. You can find it in Pushkin, Botachinsky, others. But it is especially felt in that unofficial literature, that samizdat literature that I was talking about. So that for the poets watching the rise of Putin in the 21st century and seeing the state language revert to those kinds of Soviet slogans, that public distortion, using language toward what seemed remarkably hypocritical and damaging ends, there always still had been a tradition of carving out an alternative space. A really brilliant example of that is Dmitry Prigov and other conceptualists in the late Soviet period. What's remarkable about them is that they took that very public language and used it to build satirical, ironic poetry that twisted it twisted those meanings into something that could be reclaimed.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay, let's take a quick break and then come back with more from Stephanie Sandler.

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Okay, we're back. So Stephanie, let's talk a little bit more about your book in particular, and I was interested in how you organized it with some of the main topics. So maybe you could just give us a general sense of what you were able to explore by focusing on politics and performance and music and so on. And if you have some examples that would help us kind of see what you were seeing when you looked at those individual topics, that might help as well.

[Mike Carruthers]

Sure. I should say that I. When I set out to write this book, which is an embarrassingly long time ago, I really started with the poets themselves. And so I wrote quite a lot of articles, reviews of various things, to sort of teach myself about this world and to build up a knowledge base. And so as I began to think about how to put it into a book, I didn't want to just collect articles, which is not what this is. I wanted to find rubrics in which I could feature the poets who I thought were doing the most interesting work. So in a way, my logic was inductive rather than deductive. I can imagine somebody else looking at the same body of work and coming up with somewhat different topics. I'm not trying to say that what I did was completely arbitrary, but there are topics, for example, that aren't here. One of the topics that at one point I was going to include was history. And there are people doing incredibly interesting work around history. But I sort of moved things around so that I could include one of the poets who's doing some of the most interesting historical work, Paulina Barskova. And to use that as an example of something else, in a way to again, just try to broaden out the possibilities of what I could do. I knew, though, that I wanted to start with politics. Obviously, if I'm writing a book about freedom, I need to explore the political dimensions of that. And I wanted to take ideas of politics that also were not ideas, like how do we build a better state? So it's not politics in that sense at all. It's more politics as a way that a poet could take political speech and use it to understand notions of freedom and autonomy. So in the first chapter, which is called Writing Poems in a World of Harm, it winds toward the poetry of feminism because, first of all, because there happen to be a large number of really significant women poets, but also because the very stance of feminist poets to speak out for the autonomy and the integrity of a woman's body, that very stance informs precisely the kind of poetry that I wanted to write about. So I write about the group of poets called F Letter. There's a really wonderful volume of their work in English called F Letter that readers could follow. And I give the example of the poetry of Galina Rimbu. Rimbu is A poet who was originally from Siberia, lived for a while in Moscow, educated in Moscow, moves to Petersburg and actually now lives in Lviv. She's living in Ukraine. So she's somebody who's, as a Russian poet, a Russian language poet. She's experiencing the war that Russia is making on Ukraine. There's a chapter on performance, and although I talk about in person performance and video recorded performances, I'm also interested there in a metaphor of performance, an idea of how a poet might perform the act of creating their poetry. And one of the examples I give is the poet Yelena Van Ileva. She's a journalist and actually she was originally a doctor. And she's been writing poetry, especially since 2014, which is when Russia illegally annexed Crimea. She's been writing poetry that responds to the war Russia is making on Ukraine and largely posting it to Facebook. Some pieces have appeared in journals and in fact, this year in Sweden, a bilingual version of some of those poems appeared. But largely it was being posted to Facebook where people would comment, people would react. And I read this as a kind of performance on the screen. This is how a poet reacts in real time to a political catastrophe. Those are two examples.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah. How dangerous is this for them?

[Mike Carruthers]

Well, Vanela was not in Russia. She left her. So she works for Radio Liberty, Svoboda News. And they needed to get out of Russia, actually several years before 2022. And in fact they set up offices in Kiev, which with the full scale invasion, that became dangerous. And she's now working out of Riga. Stepanova is in Berlin, as I said. Rimbu is in Lviv. Very few of the poets I write about are still in Russia. Olga Sidakova is still in Moscow. A number of them, unfortunately have passed away.

[Jack Wilson]

There's this common expression that we often hear, something like, well, if poetry doesn't matter, then why do oppressive regimes always go after the poets? Do we see this playing out in Russia? Are political leaders sensitive to the poetry that's published even in the Internet age, when there's so much other content available? Or are they largely thinking, well, that's just poetry and so it's not going to really affect minds as much as other forms of content might.

[Mike Carruthers]

Things really changed after 2022. Until then, I would have said people wrote and what they believed and they behaved with courage. As you know, there were large scale protests against what Russia was, against the falsification of elections or against the annexation of Crimea. But after 2022 there has been an appalling clampdown and things are remarkably dange. There are still some wonderful, courageous examples of things that people are doing. I can think of a publishing house in Moscow and a publishing house in Petersburg, but even there they are, I think, careful not to publish the most. So it's, It's. It tells you something that the example I just gave you of Van Ileva's work that was a co production done in Sweden, or people are publishing often in Israel, there's very active publication, or in Latvia, where we see the most appalling clampdown. I think sometimes this kind of sort of censorship will also happen around the theater. So there's a terrible example of a poet and theater person, genius Berkovich, who was arrested and is in prison right now from Petersburg. For the most part, people are walking a fine line, or else actually have left. And mostly they have left.

[Jack Wilson]

Are these poems that are considered dangerous by the current regime, are they directly critical of the Russia Ukraine war, for example, or are they finding ways to criticize it, or to talk about freedom in general, or to talk about other topics? But it's clear that it's a veiled criticism. Yeah.

[Mike Carruthers]

Yes and yes. Yes and yes. So some of the most interesting work especially happened right, in 2022, when it wasn't yet fully clear just what would be dangerous. And there were some fantastic examples of anthologies of directly anti war poetry. One of them was called Poetry of the Recent Past, Paesia Pasadena Vriminyi, which a scholar named Yuri Leving, who teaches at Princeton and others edited. And that mixes people who were still in Russia at the time with people who had left directly political poetry with that, which is more indirect. There's also a splendid website called roar. Its original name meant Russian Oppositional Arts Review. And now it stands for Resistance and Opposition Arts Review, because it's not just Russian, and that organized by Leonor Garalek, a poet and writer who lives in Israel. That includes people who are still in Russia, a few of whom write with their own names, others who publish anonymously or with pseudonyms. And again, it's a mix. Things that are directly resisting and oppositional and things which are indirect. And that has poetry, it has prose, it has visual arts. And it's a fantastic thing that your listeners can find, because although it publishes in Russian, it also publishes in other languages. So you can find multiple issues of ROAR in English. It's a wonderful resource for people who want to see a wide range of what this resistance looks like in real time.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. And when talking about some of the indirect criticisms or I don't even know if Criticism is the right word, but responses. Maybe your book really enlightened me on something that I hadn't quite put together in this way before. And that was the way that totalitarianism will focus on the past, either a glorified or distorted version of it, and it'll focus on the future as a kind of promised utopia. But they don't really want you to focus on the present. And for poetry and poets to do so is a kind of insistence on an alternative reality. And you were seeing in this freedom the. I think the quote I have here is an intensified sense of the present moment, of the felt experience of the body in space, and of the sensory impact of sights, sounds, smells and the movement of the air itself. It's really a. I mean, it's a beautiful quote and it's about what poetry can do, but also about the application of poetry to the moment when totalitarianism has kind of closed things off, that it's almost an act of resistance. Just to say there is something else here that I can focus on that is not the totalitarian state, but is myself and my body and my own day to day experience living in the world.

[Mike Carruthers]

Thank you for noticing that. You're a good reader. I, I believe that for all of us, whether we are living in an actual totalitarian state or simply with some form of authoritarianism in our political leadership, to be, to feel the power of our own bodies, our own selves in the world is to keep hold of a certain kind of agency. It's to, it's to. It is its own form of resistance. And you're quite right that there is a temporality to that. We can and we should resist falsified versions of the past. And there is very good work by poets, writers, all kinds of cultural agents doing to do that work in Russia and in many other places. But to experience the present in all of its fullness, in all of its potential for harm, but also its potential for exhilaration is to be a free subject. And I believe that many of the poems that I write about perform that work and they inspire their readers to have that as their own mo as they move through the world.

[Jack Wilson]

We were famously told in response to 911 by the President, well, what you should all do now is go shopping. That's what we want you to do. And maybe we can say that the current version of that should be we want you to read poetry. Maybe that's coming from Stephanie, coming from Stephanie and Jack, more than the. More than anyone in charge. But it seems like that is something that can be done, and it's important to continue to do it.

[Mike Carruthers]

You know, I teach a course called Poetry Without Borders, and I am always saying to students what I most want for you to do in this class, I'll be thrilled if you write brilliant essays and do all sorts of great things. But the thing that will make me the happiest is just knowing that you're spending time reading this work, because I think reading it can change us to start each day by taking five minutes for something. I was just listening to the trailer for There's a poetry podcast called Poetry Unbound. Patrick Otuma, which is coming back for another season, and he talked about what does it mean? Sometimes when he's having a bad day, he'll just take a pause and read a poem. And it will kind of reorient the brain waves poetry. Because often it's little. You know, it can. It can be this little moment of interruption, and that can be great. And it's certainly going to do a lot more for us than going shopping.

[Jack Wilson]

And a good way to know which poems to read and what to understand about them is to check out your book, which is called the Freest Speech in Poetry Unbound, 1989-2022 by my guest, Stephanie Sandler. Stephanie Sandler, thank you so much for joining me on the History of Literature.

[Mike Carruthers]

Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure to speak with you.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay, that's going to do it for.

[Stephanie Sandler]

This episode of the History of Literature. My thanks to Stephanie Sandler for joining me. We've got a Great Gatsby expode episode, a Great Gatsby episode next week, and maybe some George Simon after that. And Coleridge is coming up soon. And an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story with our friend Mike Palindrome. Apocalyptic literature and miraculous literature from the ancient world. And John Ruskin Regency Romance, 10 classic works from India, maybe a little trip to China, and maybe some Mark Twain. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.

[Mike Carruthers]

SA.

[Stephanie Sandler]

Hi, I'm Rick Rubek.

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