Kirill Medvedev and Elena Fanailova: Poetry, Ethics, Politics, and Philosophy

Abstract

This essay argues that the categories of lyric utterance, subjectivity, and political insight have been rethought and reinvented by contemporary Russian poets, focusing on the exemplary work of Kirill Medvedev and Elena Fanailova. Their poems show how the category of the everyday is a scene where political meanings can be discerned: poems can be built out of rather ordinary encounters and experiences. Fanailova and Medvedev seek to make visible previously unnoticed aspects of experience, and to engage in forms of political speech based on personal interactions, economic transactions, and sexual encounters. The essay draws on theoretical work that ties poetic subjectivity to an emerging idea of freedom (Jacques Rancière), or that links personal evolution to ethics (Stanley Cavell).