Two Post-Soviet Anthologies of the 1990s and the Russian Twentieth-Century Poetry Canon

Abstract

The publication of two large anthologies of Russian twentieth-century poetry in the 1990s sparked lively critical discussions, particularly about the place of ‘official’ Soviet poetry in the literary canon. This article considers the extent to which these anthologies may be seen as attempts to revise the canon, and what their reception can tell us about attitudes in the early post-Soviet period about attitudes towards the canon, who determines its composition, and how the canon relates to questions of Russian national identity.