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The Writer in Russia
Kirill Medvedev is a new and very attractive figure on the Russian cultural landscape. A poet first, he published two books of confessional free verse early in this decade to much acclaim as well as controversy. Soon after, spurred in part by some of the violent reaction elicited by his poetry, he experienced a sharp leftward turn. In 2003, he announced that, given the conditions of the Putin regime (which he read as a mutant continuation of 1990s neoliberalism rather than as a backward step toward Soviet-style statism), he would no longer participate in literary life—he would neither publish nor give readings nor participate in round tables. In the years since, Medvedev has continued to develop his stubbornly independent position, more recently joining the nascent socialist movement Forward as a contributor to its Web site and as an activist. In all his writings, he has questioned the orthodoxy of the previous generation of Russian thinkers, the vast majority of whom were programma...
FOOTNOTES:
- [1] The United Russia Party was formed in early 2001 as the pro-government party in the Duma. With the collapse of the liberal parties and the decline of the Communists, it has become, in essence, the lone political party in Russia, winning 64 percent of the popular vote in the Duma elections of December 2007.
- [2] The chairman of the oil giant Yukos, whose support for liberal political movements led to his imprisonment in 2003, in the most publicized crackdown on an opposition figure by the Putin administration. He is serving his sentence at a labor camp.
- [3] Limonov was a scandalous and talented émigré poet and memoirist who returned to Russia in the early 1990s and founded a strange political party called the National Bolsheviks (NBP). They opposed globalization, the breakup of the USSR, and the Yeltsin regime. More recently, in opposition to Putin, they have become more focused on human rights and have allied themselves with chess champion Garry Kasparov to form “Other Russia,” the only opposition group to gain any traction in the Western media. See: Andrew Meier, “Putin’s Pariah,” www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/magazine/02limonov-t.html. And: Keith Gessen, “Monumental Foolishness,” www.slate.com/id/2078955/.
- [4] Medvedev’s picket of Alexander Kalyagin’s play—prompted in part by Kalyagin’s letter in favor of Khodorkovsky’s imprisonment, and in part by Medvedev’s love of Brecht—led to the theater’s security guard’s punching him in the face.
- [5] This is a reference to “action artists,” such as Oleg Kulik and Alexander Brenner. Kulik used to go to art exhibits and pretend to be a rabid dog. The anarchist Brenner, the more interesting of the two, is most famous in the West for spray-painting a green dollar sign onto a Malevich painting in an Amsterdam museum in 1997 (for which he served six months in prison).
