Русская поэзия 2010-х в поисках солидарности

Abstract

Since the mid-2010s, the problem of overcoming individualism and social atomi-
zation through group solidarity has been a central motif of Russian political poetry.
New responses to this issue primarily employ feminist optics and an intersectional
approach: at the crossroads of gender, nation, and society, authors as diverse as
Galina Rymbu, Oksana Vasyakina, Elena Fanaylova, and Maria Galina all explore
possibilities for linking the poetic subject to the construction of a group con-
sciousness or collective. I propose that a hallmark of this tendency is the increased
frequency and ingratiating use of first-person plural pronouns. This “we index”
(the ratio of the number of these pronouns to the number of lines in a text) seems
to demonstrate a direct correlation to the author’s degree of thematic interest in
the problem; meanwhile, the example of Ilya Rissenberg also shows how the soli-
darity motif functions in political poetry with a low “we index.”