“Poetry Was Forever, Until It Was No More”: On the New Temporality and Media-Context of the Contemporary Cultural Movement

This auto-testimonial reflection claims that the acceleration of electronic exchanges and amortization of political change became deeply imbricated during the last decades in Russia. By the end of the 2010s, discussions around activist or utilitarian poetry gave way to non-conformism, aesthetic resistance, and stylistic dissidentism. The new defense state is defined by two key dimensions: mediated temporality and an institutional milieu of “new stagnation” (“neozastoi”). The epoch of political reaction inspires poets to look toward an idealized and rather “postponed” future, instead of pragmatic interactions in the here-and-now. This moment leads not only to a seemingly familiar feeling of slowed time but also to institutional divisions into the “official” and the “unofficial.” But in contrast to that institutional temporality and the structure of literary space, familiar as Soviet stagnation, the “new stagnation” was accompanied by a new climate and phenomena of media acceleration. After a short theoretical introduction, I cite three auto-reflective cases, which provide evidence that this new situation has greatly influenced, first of all, the (self)archival practices to which cultural actors normally turn, having a) being filmed; b) geographically migrated, and; c) undergone a professional conversion—to the adjacent domain of Slavic Studies and, thus, being transformed from object to subject of research.