Underground Poetry

The Underground Poetry project was my first major research project after completing my DPhil at the University of Oxford. I won funding from the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust and the John Fell Fund at Oxford to partner with researchers from the Memorial Society in Moscow and St Petersburg.

I began work before a large number of samizdat journals were scanned and made available online. In fact, in the course of the project, I was able to participate in the preservation process myself. As well as conducting research in what was then the richest archive of Soviet unofficial culture – curated by the Memorial Society over several decades – I also cultivated a large contact network and interviewed many thinkers, poets and artists who were active in the late Soviet underground. This enabled me to explore the remnants of the Leningrad Religious-Philosophical Seminar as a social space, and it brought home to me the limitations of working from published sources alone.

The primary outcome of this project is a monograph that won the Antsiferov Prize 2019 for the best work on St Petersburg by a foreign author. I also published many peer-reviewed articles on specific poets from Leningrad and their evolving role in the literary canon.

Key Outputs

• Poetry and the Leningrad Religious-Philosophical Seminar 1976–1980:  Music for a Deaf Age (Oxford: Legenda/MHRA and Routledge, 2016).

• “The Leningrad School of Neo-modernists” in The Oxford Handbook of the Soviet Cultural Underground, ed. by Mark Lipovetsky, Tomas Glanc, Maria Engström, Ilja Kukuj and Klavdia Smola (Oxford: OUP, 2022).

Publications

• “The Pearl of an Unreasonable Thought’: Religion and the Poetic Imagination” in The Dangerous God: Christianity and the Soviet Experiment, ed. by Dominic Erdozain (DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP, 2017)

• “From Underground to Mainstream: The Case of Elena Shvarts” in Reconfiguring the Canon of Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry, 1991–2008, ed. Katharine Hodgson and Alexandra Smith (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2017)

• “Self-Canonisation as a Way into the Canon: the Case of the Leningrad Underground”, Australian and East European Studies 31 (2017)

• “Poety andegraunda i literarturnyi kanon, ili kak avtory leningradskogo samizdata stali klassikami“ [public lecture] (2015)

• Introduction to the samizdat journal “37” for the Project for the Study of Dissidence and Samizdat at the University of Toronto, with Ann Komaromi

• “Religious Verse in Leningrad Samizdat: Origins and Confluences”, Enthymema 12 (2015)

• “Olga Sedakova’s Journey Poems: The Spirituality of Form and the Journey into Silence”, Literature and Theology  29:2 (2015), pp. 183–198

• “Poeziia kak molitva? Elena Shvarts i Oleg Okhapkin” in Vtoraia kul’tura:  Neofitsial’naia poeziia Leningrada v 1970-e-1980-e gody, ed. Jean-Philippe Jaccard (St Petersburg: Rostok, 2013)

• “Viktor Krivulin and Aleksandr Mironov: The Quest for Sacred Language in 1970s Russian Poetry”, Modern Languages Review 107 (2012)

Photo by Josie von Zitzewitz