The Testimonies of Russian and American Postmodern Poetry: Reference, Trauma, and History by Albena Lutzkanova-Vassileva (review)

Non-referentiality has frequently been invoked as a defining feature of postmodern poetry, including by its own practitioners. This book challenges this assumption. According to Albena Lutzkanova-Vassileva, the essence of postmodernism does not lie in a self-referential play of signifiers, but rather in the reflection of a concrete historic and traumatic reality. The author builds her argument by surveying selected works issuing from two major schools of Russian and American postmodern poetry, Moscow Conceptualism and American Language poetry, while also paying passing attention to Bulgarian post-Communist literature and Russian Metarealism. What all these movements have in common, according to Lutzkanova-Vassileva, is an experience of historic trauma. In the case of Conceptualism, represented by the texts of Dmitri Prigov and Lev Rubinshtein as well as the sculptures of Grisha Bruskin, this trauma is rooted in the implosion of the Communist system. Conceptualism, so goes Lutzkanova-Vassileva’s argument, “documents the eschatological displacement of the Russian subject beyond his/her already possessed and consummated future—a displacement caused by the sudden annulment of a system, largely seen as impending and endless, and its overnight substitution by an unfathomable post-totalitarian order” (3). In similar fashion, according to Lutzkanova-Vassileva, Language poetry has to be seen as a reaction to the cognitive confusion brought about by the information age with its perplexing overload of data and stimuli. In that sense, Language poetry “records the asignifying processes and coding of post-industrial society and bears witness to the traumatizing impacts of the global information network” (5). Overall, Lutzkanova-Vassileva tries to make sense of a frequently baffling poetic production that resists any kind of conventional meaning by inscribing it into a larger, somewhat apocalyptic narrative framework, of which the individual works discussed in the book become either an illustration or a symptom. It turns out that these postmodern poems are not empty signifiers after all—if we are to believe Lutzkanova-Vassileva, they are in a mimetic relationship with “real life” just like other, more conventional forms of referential realism.

The attempt to explain avant-garde forms of artistic production as a reaction to traumatic historic events is not in itself a novel idea. A popular, if flawed, perception of modernism has been to interpret it as a consequence of the violence and disruption of World War I, for example. One problem with this approach is that the birth of modernism actually preceded the war. Lutzkanova-Vassileva’s argument raises similar issues of chronology. Moscow Conceptualism, a movement originating in the 1970s, could not have begun as a reaction to the sudden collapse of Soviet communism. Likewise, Language poetry emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s long before the advent of the personal computer and the World Wide Web. One way to get around this conundrum would be to assign prophetic powers to the poets—they somehow “saw it coming” before the rest of us did. For example, in Charles Bernstein’s poem “Lift Off,” which consists of random characters assembled on a typewriter correction ribbon, Lutzkanova-Vassileva senses “a premonition for the looming moment of ceding control to technology” (168). But instead of endowing the poet with vatic foresight, one could perhaps also argue that certain innovative artistic forms can become an apt expression of later historical events. As far as Conceptualism is concerned, Lutzkanova-Vassileva actually concedes that the movement seems to exist in two different temporal modalities and functions, one “to break with proper communist reality (as existing prior to the 1980s)” and the other “to perpetuate the history of man’s traumatic awakening after his/her future (in the 1980s and 1990s)” (59).

In her eagerness to assign referential meaning to postmodern texts, Lutzkanova-Vassileva sometimes risks falling into a literalist trap. It seems to me that the “impasse and fear of imminent death” (47) allegedly expressed in the morbid formulas of Dmitri...