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1913issue6online

56 The End of Post-Soviet Poetry The following publications are some of the results of a translation project carried out in 2011 under the title “Your Language—My Ear: Russian and American Poetry at Close Quarters,” with the support of New York based cultural exchange organization CEC Artslink and the University of Pennsylvania. “Your Language— My Ear” brought together Russophone poets from locations scattered across Russia and Eastern Europe and American poets, scholars and translators. Following two months of work on translations via a document cloud, our group assembled from April 18-23 at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia to polish the work and discuss the state of poetry in Russian today. One of the most general conclusions of our discussions was the realization that the term “post-socialist,” which has been used indiscriminately for the past twenty years to refer to the social and cultural reality of what used to be called “the second world”, is no longer all that meaningful—no longer sufficient to describe current circumstances. The term’s poverty is manifest in several ways. In the simplest, temporal sense: the Russian poets represented here reflect a generation for which the Soviet era is a memory of childhood. Their emergence as poets and their adult lives are entirely circumscribed by present social and cultural life, and not by the historical “hangover” of the twentieth century. While these poets are reflective of an era after socialism, the emphasis in such a formula must fall in a very different manner than it did for what was called the post-socialist era of the 1990s—when the memory of the preceding era remained the single definitive feature of the cultural landscape. Another failing of the term “post-socialist” relates to its homogenizing effect: there is no single post-socialism, because what once was a unified life-world is now fragmented into multiple, distinct social and political contexts—the experience of Sergej Timofejev, Artur Punte and Semyen Khanin, who live in Riga, the capital of the Latvian Republic, an EU state and a member of NATO, is in many ways incommensurate with that of the other poets included here, who live in the Russian Federation. Among the latter, significant distinctions distinguish the cultural life of the isolated European patch of Russia on the

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