Literature as a ‘Thread of Noise’: Kirill Medvedev’s Dialectical Approach to Memory and Literary Consumption Since the 1990s

This chapter focuses on essays and some selected poems from the early 2000s by the Moscow author and activist Kirill Medvedev. In these texts, he discusses the development of the Russian literary field during the 1990s, examining the transformation of traditions and tropes such as ‘logocentrism’ and the ‘poet-as-prophet.’ I aim to show that Medvedev’s argumentation is based on dialectical reasoning, which I interpret in a twofold way. First, the author’s dialectical analysis of the 1990s contributes to a memory discourse of this decade that prioritises the need for resilience and hope over feelings of disillusionment or deception. This makes his work highly relevant as a counterweight to the tendency to foreground narratives of victimisation and chaos in Russia’s state-driven remembrance culture of the 1990s. Secondly, I view Medvedev’s dialectical writing style as a critical instrument for readers, inviting them to imagine different social realities by actively engaging with the opposing viewpoints in his texts. In a literary landscape dominated by the production and selling of books, Medvedev’s use of dialectics thus serves as a method to reevaluate the notion of literary consumption in post-Soviet Russia, placing renewed emphasis on the agency of readers and literature’s ability to foster senses of belonging.