Dorine Schellens (Universiteit Leiden)
Abstract
This January, a picture of a red banner hanging between two trees was posted on the Instagram account 89gradusov with the (translated) text: “I howl in pain and I absolutely dislike it, although I lived and grew up here and thought I knew everything about these places.” Designed as an homage to the famous Collective Actions’ performance “Slogan-1977”, the banner situates itself in a longer history of ‘poetic actions’ in Russia while at the same time pointing to the increased difficulty of performing protest in the present. This paper will explore the relationship between poetry and activism in recent Russian literature. I will particularly focus on the poetic work, theoretical essays and performances of Pavel Arsen’ev, Roman Osminkin and Kirill Medvedev, and discuss how they relate to older traditions (such as Collective Actions and Moscow conceptualism) of combining poetry and activism.
Bio
Dorine Schellens studied Russian and German literature and culture in Leiden, Berlin and Freiburg. She obtained her PhD in Freiburg in 2020. Her research focuses on entanglements between contemporary Russian and German cultural history through the lens of literature and art. She is the author of Kanonbildung im transkulturellen Netzwerk (transcript, 2021), a history of the transnational reception and canonization of Moscow conceptualism. She has also published on contemporary Russian protest culture. Her current research focuses on literary imaginaries of the future in Eastern German and Russian literature and art after 1989.