Poetic language can be a means of asserting primary hierarchies — of meaning, consequence and attention. In the years immediately before and after the Russian Revolution, when Russia collapsed amid hopes of a utopian future, Russian Avant-garde artists began to employ poetic languages as a means to forge complete and long-standing alternatives; to generate a printed or sounding word that pronounced its own logic.

Through this talk, Vika Adutova will introduce unofficial literature of Russia from the 1910s to 1930s; its people and practices, as well as the emergence of samizdat publishing as a method of establishing an independent culture in the context of political censorship.