A. D. Alyokhin. The goal of poetry: Articles, reviews, notes, and speeches

Abstract

The review examines A. Alyokhin’s monograph The Goal of Poetry [Tsel poezii]. Chief editor of the poetic and literary critical journal Arion in the years 1994–2019, Alyokhin became a preeminent authority on present-day Russian poetry. The book is formally comprised of articles and interviews that appeared in different periods and on various occasions. But collected in one volume, they read as a single conceptually solid text, which can be explained by the author’s clear view of poetry and consistent historical and cultural creed. The monograph discusses such typical and distressing issues of contemporary literary culture as the substitution of art with extra-aesthetic objectives, clichéd and irresponsible writing, writers’ psychological maturity and infantility, and the loss of professionalism in poetry, among others. At the core of Alyokhin’s position is his belief in the hierarchical structure of art. He defends the aristocratic quality of poetry and consistently challenges the idea that any versified form of self-expression is valid.