last century. This use is related to the deep immersion of a number of poets in the Marxian
intellectual project. These poets may share its values (like Eduard Bagritskiy, Boris
Slutskiy or, later, Kirill Medvedev) or distance themselves from it (like Viktor Krivulin
or, in part, Oksana Vasyakina). In both cases, they exploit Marxian conceptual language
and comprehend the poetic subjectivity through the prism of its agenda. For instance,
Eduard Bagritskiy in his poetry created a specific WE uniting a tragic feeling of postrevolutionary
epoch with enthusiastic impulse for searching the new world. This WE
had to associate all the people of the new epoch who can share the importance and urgency
of the current governmental construction. In his Problèmes de linguistique
générale, Émile Benveniste distinguished two kinds of WE: “inclusive”, which attaches
YOU to ME, and “exclusive”, which does THEY to ME. In early Soviet political poetry,
there were two significant variants of the first Benvenistian WE, quite opposite to
each other. The first one is a WE of (bolsheviks’) party referred to a close circle of individuals:
in this case, YOU re-codes as multiplied ME which obtains a quite abstract nature released from the elements of the individual experience. This conception echoes
Aleksandr Bogdanov’s study of the collective subjectivity developed in “empiriomonism”
theory, which was a doctrine on the collective individual who constitutes himor
herself through a kind of shared experience and the organized labor. The Proletkult’s
poets led by Bogdanov himself developed the most straightforward interpretation of
empiriomonism, although the later Soviet pre-WWII poetry was more delicate with this
conception. Eduard Bagritskiy and some his contemporaries found a new basis for the
collective experience: not in the organized labor but in the dramatic history of the recent
past. Almost a century later, in the political poetry of 2010s, one finds similar trends.
After “post-conceptualist” poetry of Kirill Medvedev, Anton Ochirov, and Roman
Osminkin, a new generation enters the stage in the late 2010s. These new poets have
partially returned to the Bogdanovian conception of the collective subjectivity. While
creating a new collective subjectivity, they combine fragments from the WE of shared
experience (although it is experience of loss instead of that of labor) and that of the party:
they are ready to include every individual in the circle of the WE but tend to defend
its borders from the external aggression (like in Oksana Vasyakina’s poems).
The paper regards the specific use of pronoun WE in Russian poetry of the
last century. This use is related to the deep immersion of a number of poets in the Marxian
intellectual project. These poets may share its values (like Eduard Bagritskiy, Boris
Slutskiy or, later, Kirill Medvedev) or distance themselves from it (like Viktor Krivulin
or, in part, Oksana Vasyakina). In both cases, they exploit Marxian conceptual language
and comprehend the poetic subjectivity through the prism of its agenda. For instance,
Eduard Bagritskiy in his poetry created a specific WE uniting a tragic feeling of postrevolutionary
epoch with enthusiastic impulse for searching the new world. This WE
had to associate all the people of the new epoch who can share the importance and urgency
of the current governmental construction. In his Problèmes de linguistique
générale, Émile Benveniste distinguished two kinds of WE: “inclusive”, which attaches
YOU to ME, and “exclusive”, which does THEY to ME. In early Soviet political poetry,
there were two significant variants of the first Benvenistian WE, quite opposite to
each other. The first one is a WE of (bolsheviks’) party referred to a close circle of individuals:
in this case, YOU re-codes as multiplied ME which obtains a quite abstract nature released from the elements of the individual experience. This conception echoes
Aleksandr Bogdanov’s study of the collective subjectivity developed in “empiriomonism”
theory, which was a doctrine on the collective individual who constitutes himor
herself through a kind of shared experience and the organized labor. The Proletkult’s
poets led by Bogdanov himself developed the most straightforward interpretation of
empiriomonism, although the later Soviet pre-WWII poetry was more delicate with this
conception. Eduard Bagritskiy and some his contemporaries found a new basis for the
collective experience: not in the organized labor but in the dramatic history of the recent
past. Almost a century later, in the political poetry of 2010s, one finds similar trends.
After “post-conceptualist” poetry of Kirill Medvedev, Anton Ochirov, and Roman
Osminkin, a new generation enters the stage in the late 2010s. These new poets have
partially returned to the Bogdanovian conception of the collective subjectivity. While
creating a new collective subjectivity, they combine fragments from the WE of shared
experience (although it is experience of loss instead of that of labor) and that of the party:
they are ready to include every individual in the circle of the WE but tend to defend
its borders from the external aggression (like in Oksana Vasyakina’s poems).
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<i>We</i> in Russian Poetry: From Avant-Garde to the Newest Political Agenda С. 378–391. DOI 10.25205/2307-1737-2019-2-378-391