Escaping from the Self in the Silent Landscape of the Ancestral Forest: Ecocriticism and the Russian Poets of the Novaja Volna

Abstract

In the Soviet artistic context, the origins of Postmodernism are based on the development of an underground cultural scene. Despite the lack of awareness on ecocriticism, poetical works by the authors associated to the second underground period show a strong connection with the theme of nature. This essay focuses on the symbolic meaning that can be identified in descriptions of forests. The forest, which is a recurring image in the poems by some postmodern Russian writers, becomes the passage to an unknown place beyond reality, where men can escape from socially established individual identities. Besides, the syntactic and visual crumbling of the poems shows that the denial of all cultural stratifications is needed to reach a deep self-awareness. The poetical fragments are interrupted by silent white spaces with no hierarchical order. These reveal the failure of language as an instrument to
establish an ideologically characterized reality.