Dangerous Russian Poets: The case of Natalya Gorbanevskaya and Joseph Brodsky - Poetry as Political Resistance

This project posits a new and unprecedented role played by poetry in the last decades of the Soviet regime, that of fomenting civil disobedience and advancing political dissent. Its purpose is to explore and understand poetry’s agency in generating political change.

To achieve its goal, the project will conduct a case study of the two most iconic Russian poets of post-Stalinist Russia – Natalya Gorbanevskaya (1937- 2013) and the Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996).

The overarching questions are:What threat did these two poets pose to the all-powerful regime?What artistic means did they employ to challenge the idiom and the mindset of the official ideology?What was the meeting ground between their poetry and political activism?The project combines poetry analysis with biography, archival research, and field work interviews.

It proposes an innovative approach uniting the theory and methods of the Moscow-Tartu semiotic school, Arendt’s political theory, as well as the Central European theory of civil disobedience under totalitarianism.

The hypothesis is that that the most subversive political act of the poets during late socialism became writing non-political poetry.

The broader purpose of the project is to contribute to an ongoing interdisciplinary discussion of culture’s potential to effect political change.

The integral role of culture as agency in resisting political oppression is increasingly valued in the face of the current global shrinking of democratic space.