Prof Bradley Gorski (Barnard College): "Literary Success and the Russian Internet: Vera Polozkova and the Poetics of Social Media"

How have market regimes and contemporary technology shaped what it means to be a poet in Russia today? This talk explores the literary landscape of post-Soviet Russia, where institutional shifts in the 1990s undermined expert opinion, and allowed popular acclaim to serve as a new basis for cultural legitimacy. In this new environment, which I call “cultural capitalism,” individual success became an important structuring value for both authors and their works. By tracing the career of one prominent poet, Vera Polozkova, I show how she forged an innovative pathway to success through social media. Polozkova built an online public of followers, participants, and even co-creators of her online persona, a public that she then was able to transform into readers and fans in the coming years. Moreover, her particular path to success has informed her most innovative poetry, which develops a collective subjectivity particular to her generation. She largely rejects the individualized “lyrical I” in favor of second person and plural pronouns, “you” and “we.” This expansive lyrical subjectivity has been the source of her popular success, her acclaim by certain critics, and also of her contentious position in the literary field, and it is inextricable from her rise through social media.