A film for an older-than-school-age audience. On Anton Azarenkov’s Children’s Cinema [Detskaya sinema

Abstract

The essay is concerned with detailed examination of Children’s Cinema [Detskaya sinema] (2020), a book by the contemporary poet Anton Azarenkov that contains his selected poems, including the narrative poem ‘A refuge’ [‘Ubezhishche’]. The reviewer analyses the book’s subject and motif structure, identifying key topics such as abuse, traumatisation, and a revisited childhood experience, and discusses the complexity and gradual unfolding of the collection’s images and reminiscences. Subjected to Nuzhdina’s close examination is Azarenkov’s lyrical hero and his reception in present-day poetic criticism. According to Nuzhdina, the lyrical hero of Children’s Cinema typifies an unreliable narrator who looks to childhood traumatic experiences for a source of self-identification and, therefore, professes the aesthetic of ‘talking about trauma,’ a staple of modern poetry. In Azarenkov’s case, it results in the cyclicity of the book’s subject structure and its continuous use of recurrent motifs, as well as an artistic world constructed from the same repeatedly used elements, such as the experience of surviving abuse, departing, loneliness, memories about childhood, etc.