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This talk examines poems on aging by the unofficial Soviet poet Yan Satunovsky (1913-1982), analyzing how his compressed lyric navigates the intersection of biological and historical time. Through formal experimentation—with quoted language, parataxis, ellipsis, numerical shorthand—these texts carve out minimal spaces for life story and temporal complexity under conditions of constraint. Close reading of these techniques demonstrates how Satunovsky's minimalism transforms biopolitical pressures into a distinctive poetics of historical subjectivity.
Luba Golburt is an associate professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature. Her award-winning book The First Epoch: The Eighteenth Century and the Russian Cultural Imagination(2014) traced how the emergence of epochal consciousness and historicism in the Romantic era contributed to the perception of a substantive divide between the cultures of the 18th century and the new modernity ushered in by the Romantics. She is currently at work on a book project provisionally titled The Russian Nature Lyric and coediting The Oxford Handbook of Russian Poetry.
