The Ural Poetic School: Phantom or Reality

Abstract

This article problematises the use of the “modern Ural poetry” descriptive construction denoting the poetic space of a particular region and considers Ural poetry in a broader context of Russian-language literature. They can be understood differently depending on the researcher’s approach and the research methodology. Thus, it may be regarded as a segment within regional literature, regional poetry, or as a cultural space that exists over territories and borders. What matters is the globalised concept which resolves the opposition between the centre and the province, which is imperative for Russian culture. The analysis of Ural poetry in such a conceptual framework actualises several issues. More particularly, to what extent can regional specificity be decisive for the poetry of the Urals? And what makes up this specificity: poetics, Ural identity, a set of Ural myths, or the structure of a poetic community? How are the boundaries of Ural poetry manifested? What is the degree of its correlation with what is done outside the region? The Ural Poetry School, a project of poet and literary manager V. O. Kalpidi, gives the most important answers to these questions. The article considers the conceptual basis of the project and those significant theoretical and practical changes that have taken place over more than two decades of its existence, especially after the emergence of poetic projects under the InVersiya brand in the late 2010s which presented an alternative view of the development of Ural poetry. This generational and worldview gap fostered the distinction between modern Ural poetry and the Russian-language poetry of the Urals. A closed poetic space with tangible boundaries, its structure and logic of development, which claimed to be the Centre as originally thought by the UPS, has turned into a space that is an organic part of something larger and decentralised. The article emphasises that the view of the poetry of the Urals as a segment of modern Russian-language poetry makes it possible to revise the existing set of myths and ideas and provides more accurate tools for describing it.