Li(?)teratura; Anna Alchuk's Anagrammatic Poetry

• Published in: Zeitschrift für slavische Philologie 2010-01, Vol.67 (1), p.71-98
• Main Author: Schmidt, Henrike
• Format: Article
• Language: ger
• ISSN: 0044-3492

Anna Alchuk (1955-2008), Russian poet, art critic, curator, and feminist theoretician, explores and exploits the power of anagrammatic and palindromic word manipulation, as well as techniques of syntactic splitting and (re)assembling in her poetic work. At the same time, intertextual and mythological references richly embellish her poems. This article traces Anna Alchuk's literary development from classical verse, in which she observes traditional metrics and rhyme schemes, to her conceptual and playful (de)constructions of the poetic word, placing her "morphological poetry" (Irina Sandomirskaja) within the historical and contemporary framework of Russian literature, within futurist and acmeist traditions on the one hand, and contemporary neo-avant-garde and conceptualist tendencies on the other. Finally, the article attempts to approach the underlying philosophical concepts of Anna Alchuk's poetry. Her lyrical work revolves around the fundamental aporia of language, a notorious language-scepticism, language's inability to fully articulate the richness of our perception of the world. Alchuk's poetic experience and experiments thus closely link her to apophatic traditions in Russian culture and literature. Her "li(?)teratura" has therefore often been interpreted as an attempt to avoid articulated meaning. Mikhail Ryklin describes her work with language as the endeavour to get back to "prelinguistic thought". The present article argues for the contrary, relying on Roman Jakobson's model of the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic axis of language: Alchuk solves the language aporia by constantly projecting the two modes of linguistic arrangement (combination, selection) onto each other. Her word creations thus do not avoid sense, do not reach back into the realm of presignification, but condense meaning in synchronic multiple readings. Adapted from the source document