“A sage in poetry, a fool in life”: Self-representation of the contemporary poet in everyday life

Abstract

In this article we present behavior models of poets in the contemporary Russian literary milieu, ways of transmission of such models from generation to generation, and their dependence on belonging to one or another literary group. On the basis of interviews with contemporary poets, we analyze the most frequent ideas about “how to be a poet” among participants of the literary process in the 1990s-2000s, how (s)he has to behave with colleagues and among the public, what (s)he may or may not do. The collected material allowed us to distinguish two behavioral models that are widespread among contemporary poetic communities: the holistic and the reductionist. Each model is determined through the attitude to several leading themes: to readers (the audience is the customer, the tactics of acceptance; the poet is the educator, the tactics of mastering; orientation on the chosen reader; complete autonomy and tactics of avoiding the reader), to social norms (from the necessity of at least a minimal life experience to its undesirability and its avoidance, from fitting into social hierarchies to opposing oneself to them), and, finally, to one’s own text (coincidence of / discrepancy between the image of the author and the person of writer; different degrees of importance of the written). The research is based on in-depth interviews and observations of literary events in the spring of 2020.