Abstract

This article identifies and analyzes a corpus of poems on old age and aging in the works of the unofficial Soviet-era poet Yan Satunovsky (1913–1982). Focusing especially on Satunovsky’s experiments with short poetic form, e.g. with quoted language, parataxis, ellipsis, and numerical shorthand, the article discovers in these texts sites of the poet’s sustained reflection on subjectivity, history, biography, and temporality. The lyric subject that emerges from these texts represents himself and his embeddedness in history through oblique interiority, often intuited from third-person descriptions, and makeshift temporalities that are ironically assembled from citational fragments and narrative omissions. These readings are contextualized through reference to Soviet biopolitical conditions.