Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The protagonists of the book are five poets who belong to the current in Russian poetry that dominated Leningrad's unofficial cultural sphere during the 1970s and early 1980s. The book discusses Viktor Krivulin, Aleksandr Mironov, Elena Shvarts, Oleg Okhapkin, and Sergei Stratanovskii in separate chapters. It demonstrates the role of the Religious-Philosophical Seminar in the evolution of the Leningrad School's poetics. The book focuses on the poetry, and the discussion in chapters combines contextualization and close reading, aiming for a balance between illustrative-empirical and speculative-theoretical considerations. In the late 1960s and 1970s the Soviet Union experienced a surge of interest in religion. The discussion in the book is limited to the revival's Orthodox Christian component, which took place in the wake of Nikita Khrushchev's anti-religious campaign, which saw the closure of more than 10,000 churches.