Paths of Russian Avant-Garde Poetry in Israel

2023, Paths of Russian Avant-Garde Poetry in Israel, ed. Roman Katsman and Maxim D. Shrayer (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2023).

This essay attempts an aerial view of the landscape of Russian avant-garde poetry in Israel from the early 1970s to the early 2000s-roughly thirty turbulent years of the multifaceted Russophone literary culture created in Israel by the repatriates from the USSR and the post-Soviet states. 1 I will explore the individual careers of seven poets, four of whom made aliyah in the 1970s, and three in the late 1980s. In taking stock of their individual destinies and artistic sensibilities, I will also underscore the idea of avant-garde Russian poetry in Israel as part of the larger, transnational Russian cultural avant-garde. In the pages that follow, I would like to investigate three principal questions. 1) What are the principal trends of Russian-Israeli avant-garde poetry? 2) How do we measure the texture of Russian-Israeli avant-garde poetry against the backdrop of late-Soviet poetry, Third-Wave Russian émigré poetry, Fourth-Wave Russian-émigré poetry, post-Soviet Russian poetry, and, finally, modern Israeli poetry? 3) How do we study Russian-Israeli avant-garde poetry within and without the Israeli geopolitical, historical, and cultural contexts? An exploration of these questions will help us understand the reasons why avant-garde literary practices hold a relatively modest place in the context of Russian-Israeli literary culture and in Israeli literary culture as a whole.

Maxim D Shrayer