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

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SEER, 94, 1, JANUARY 2016 162 and hammered home repeatedly to the detriment of Draskoczy’s informative narrative. One wonders why, given her acute awareness of performance, Draskoczy condemns speculation about the truth of prisoners’ enthusiastic endorsements of the canal project and the transformative value of hard labour as simply ‘scurrilous’ (p. 91). Belomor concludes with an interesting survey of relatively recent artistic representationsofBelomor’sdestructiveandcreativeforcesandwithreminders of the lingering presence of Belomor’s mythical power in popular culture in the maps adorning the labels of Belomor brand cigarettes and vodka. Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures Madeline G. Levine University of North Carolina Lutzkanova-Vassileva, Albena. The Testimonies of Russian and American Postmodern Poetry: Reference, Trauma, and History. Bloomsbury Academic, London and New York, 2015. 296 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £80.00. Albena Lutzkanova-Vassileva’s comparative study of Russian and American postmodern poetry is a combative and spirited defence of postmodernism against accusations of self-referentiality and insularity. For a scholarly monograph, the book is fun to read, as it has all the elements of a thriller: likely villains (brazen operators of Communist regimes; psychosisinducing media culture of late capitalism; and arrogantly blind and deaf cultural theorists), unlikely heroes (postmodern poets and artists trying and failing and trying again, by aesthetic means, to withstand the corrosive effects of their environments), and finally, a surprising plot reversal in which the future arrives unannounced, exchanging places with the past. The verbal and visual artworks themselves appear in lieu of requisite elaborate action sequences and dry quips. Despite its highly entertaining aspect, the book’s aspirations are grand and deadly serious. To support her contention that the artworks under discussion should be read not in a vacuum but as testimonies to the traumatic events of recent history, the author expands the concept of reality to include both its physical and psychic manifestations, and reinterprets history as a collection of symptomsfoundinnarrativebreaksratherthaninnarrativecontinua.Toreach the roots of the trauma at the core of postmodern art, Lutzkanova-Vassileva examines the temporal acceleration that appears to have happened in the last decades of the twentieth century, and contends that Russian conceptualism and metarealism as well as American Language poetry were created under the influence of temporal displacement. In the Russian context, Lutzkanova- REVIEWS 163 Vassileva finds the double temporal displacement of the Soviet socialist subject whose illusions that Communism was synonymous with perpetually deferred future were brought to an abrupt and cruel end with the fall of the Soviet Union. This momentous event led some perspicacious few to two unsettling realizations that a) unbeknownst to its builders, Communism had already happened, and b) once the future they were moving toward had passed, there was nothing to take its place. The effect of these exposures was severe discombobulation to which Russian postmodern artworks collectively attest. According to the author, a parallel cataclysm in the West is the acceleration of capitalism and the incredible velocity with which media technology has come to mediate every aspect of everyday life. Perhaps, the most significant contribution of Lutzkanova-Vassileva’s monograph is the tracing of the influence of the information technology environment on the collective output of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets. Lutzkanova-Vassileva adduces a number of traits of postmodern art — nonlinear strewing of ideological and consumerist clichés, parataxis, repetitions, transsense or nonsensical babble, pictorially-effective typographical experimentation — to diagnose psychic distress, disorientation and dissolution under the influence of the information overload in the capitalist West and the abrupt loss of teleological certitude in the Communist East. In order to support her position that these formal elements do not just amount to careless play with empty signifiers but rather should be treated as grave records of internal malaise, the author appeals to the poets and artists themselves. She finds ample evidence in support of her diagnosis not only in the form but also in the explicit content of the poems, such as, for example, when Viktor Krivulin writes, ‘I know: we long ago have ceased to live where our lives contain a meaning…’ (p. 78). Similarly, Lutzkanova-Vassileva invokes Charles Bernstein, as he insists ‘on the primary influence of the contemporary moment: on the forms and...