The archive of saved voices: Semyon Kirsanov and his “Poema poetov” as a project of an alternative history of Russian poetry
DOI: 10.23951/1609-624X-2026-3-100-109
The article is devoted to a comprehensive analysis of Semyon Kirsanov’s “Poema poetov” (“The Poem of Poets”, 1966), a large-scale poetic work that remains on the periphery of research attention. The aim of the study is to reveal the conceptual originality of the poem as a project of an alternative history of Russian poetry of the 20th century, implemented through the creation of a pantheon of heteronyms. The work proves that Kirsanov, using the form of a found manuscript and mystified author’s notebooks, reconstructs the lost polyphony of Soviet culture of the 1920s–1960s. Six fictional poets (Klim Smetannikov, Varvara Khokhlova, Andrey Prikhodko, Bogdan Grinberg, Gleb Nasushchny, Chrysanth Semenov) represent various, potentially possible, but historically unrealized vectors of poetic development: from “peasant cosmism” and socialist romanticism to constructivism and philosophical metapoetics. The article uses historical-literary, intertextual and comparative-typological methods. As a result of the study, it was found that the poem is not a stylization, but a revival of interrupted traditions, a synthesis of Kirsanov’s entire creative path and his aesthetic manifesto. Kirsanov’s heteronyms are understood not as stylizations, but as resurrected potentials, which makes his poetic experiment part of a cultural project to preserve an interrupted tradition. Each heteronym is analyzed as a complete artistic universe that enters into a dialogue with specific trends in Russian poetry (the works of N. Klyuev, S. Yesenin, N. Zabolotsky, M. Tsvetaeva, A. Akhmatova, V. Mayakovsky, I. Selvinsky, O. Mandelstam, V. Khlebnikov, etc.). The connection between Kirsanov’s experiment and Western European precedents of literary heteronymy (S. Kierkegaard, F. Pessoa, M. de Unamuno) is noted. It is concluded that “Poema poetov” is an act of preserving cultural memory, an archive of “saved voices”, outlining the paths that Russian poetry could have taken, but did not take under the conditions of ideological pressure. The work appears as a unique example of resistance to the canon of socialist realism through demonstrating the internal diversity and human dimension of the literary process. This spiritual testament of the poet, created in a difficult time for him, acquires new relevance today as a model of alternative historical and literary thinking.
Keywords: Semyon Kirsanov, “Poema poetov” (“The Poem of Poets”), Russian poetry of the 20th century, Soviet literature, heteronym, literary mystification, alternative history of literature, poetics, intertextuality, polyphony
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Issue: 3, 2026
Series of issue: Issue 3
Rubric: RUSSIAN LITERATURE AND LITERATURE OF THE PEOPLES OF THE WORLD
Pages: 100 — 109
Downloads: 275