“Spaces of Silence” and “Secret Music of the Word”: Verbo-Musical Minimalism in the Poetry of Gennady Aygi and Elizaveta Mnatsakanova

Abstract

Two major poets of the Russian Neo-Avant-Garde—Gennady Aygi and Elizaveta Mnatsakanova—created textual works that transgressed the limits of language and the borders between the arts. Each pursued their own method of the visualization and musicalization of verbal matter, yet both share a particular musical sensibility, which guarantees the integrity of the linguistic structure of their verse, despite the fragmentation and logical incoherence of its elements. The atonal (serial) musical tradition has a special significance for these experimental poetics of minimalism. Mnatsakanova, herself a musicologist, who was friends with Dmitri Shostakovich, not only used the techniques of contemporary music composition in her visual and sound poetry, but also collaborated with electronic musicians in her recorded poetry performances. Aygi experimented with language, not only crossing the boundaries between music and poetry, but also between sound and silence. For him, music was a way of expressing pre-verbal subjectivity and reproducing signs of meaning that are hidden from ordinary perception. In his poems, Aygi brought together Chuvash folk music with experimental techniques of minimalism, correlating his own work with such Soviet unofficial composers as Andrey Volkonsky and Sofia Gubaidulina. This paper will address the issues of transmutation between verbal, visual, and sound art in poetic minimalism of the Soviet-era underground.