Abstract

This article examines Yan Satunovsky’s one-line poem, “The main thing is to have the audacity to know that these are poems” (1976), in an attempt to identify the objective characteristics of poetry in Satunovsky’s artistic system and to trace their sources. Using an immanent analysis of the text, its contextualization in Satunovsky’s poetic corpus, and the poet’s own theoretical reflections based on Boris Eichenbaum’s Melody of Russian Verse (1922), the article demonstrates the significance of the intonation of colloquial speech in the system of Russian verse in the second half of the twentieth century. It shows that the renewal of this poetic system was made possible primarily thanks to the experiments of Satunovsky and other poets of the Lianozovo school.