Improvisation as a readerly response in avant-garde poetic practices (group “41°”)

The paper focuses on the poetic activities of “41°” circle (A. Kruchennykh, I. Zdanevich, I. Terent’ev). Communicative interactions between the author and the reader take center stage. Russian Avant-garde communities are considered to mobilize the creativity of a reader, to turn the reader into a co-author (see Ioffe, Bobrinskaya, Feshchenko), and, as a community, “41°” was no exception to the rule. In the community of “41°,” a particular readerly response (W. Iser) becomes prominent and is foregrounded: an active improvisation on the part of the reader. The author casts himself as a pedagogic persona initiating the contact with the reader, yet it does not appear to be the case that he aspires to take on the role of a poetic authority. Rather, the poet invites the reader to engage with the poetic text, so that the latter is able to actively re-write the text, tp re-create it and to use the text as a foundation for improvisation. Improvisation as a readerly response is analyzed in three communicative interactions involving the presence of three types of readers, the readers being the actual reader, the actual reader aspiring to fill in the role of an ideal reader, the implied reader. In all three cases improvisation is projected as a readerly response. The possibility of such a response is closely linked to an emphasis on marginal, epiphenomenal characteristics of the poetic utterance. This implies an emphasis on the look of the word (font choices, letter size, the combination of these parameters in a word), aspects of poetic performance (the way the text is articulated). These characteristics are considered to be particularly expressive, emotionally charged, so that the experience they convey lays the foundation for the improvisation on the part of the reader.