This Russian poetry speaks against authoritarian norms

The arts have both opposed and served authoritarian regimes, says poet and translator Eugene Ostashevsky.

It’s a harrowing time to speak out as a feminist or advocate for LGBTQ+ rights in Russia.

The signing by president Vladimir Putin of the country’s federal “gay propaganda law” in 2013 “coincided with an uptick in often-gruesome vigilante violence against LGBT people in Russia,” Human Rights Watch concluded in a 2018 report, and was followed by the killing of an LGBTQ activist and related atrocities. Feminist activists have been similarly targeted under Russian law.

Even in Europe and the United States, where the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act and paved the way for legalizing same-sex marriage with a pair of 2013 rulings, progress on LGBTQ+ equality remains uneven at best, with new legal gains often precipitating a backlash by those seeking to roll back rights. Still, in those nations, citizens can combat such efforts through the ballot box or changes in governmental policy—pathways not available in Russia.

So what do activists there do? Many have turned to a weapon deployed by demonstrators and dissidents over centuries: the written word and, specifically, poetry.

“For me, poetry is a form of politics and of protest,” poet Galina Rymbu recently told Time magazine, which cast her as part of a new generation of Russian poets “challenging state, societal, and patriarchal norms with poetry that draws from personal experience.”

“I believe that poetry, and language more broadly, is capable today of changing the world politically.”

To get her verses, and those of other Russian-language poets, to the English-speaking world, Rymbu worked with global liberal studies professor Ostashevsky and Ainsley Morse, assistant professor of Russian at Dartmouth College, to produce F-Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry.

The anthology features the work of women poets as well as feminist and LGBTQ+ activists associated with the Russian poetry collective F pis’mo.

Here, Ostashevsky speaks about the role poetry has played as a form of dissent:

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