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Narrative poetry
In the mid-2000s, the interest in narrative forms in poetry was increasing among the milieu of young Russian writers, especially those who considered themselves as the sucessors of so called uncensored poetry of the Soviet period. This flourishing of narrative poetry (as it turned out later, not very long: it lasted approximately till the early 2010s) was strongly differing from the previous experiments in narrative poetry, such as ballads by Vassily Zukovsky in the 1800s--1810s, or the "poetic storytelling" (ofter called ballads as well) by Evgenii Evtushenko or Alexander Galich in the 1960s. One of the main features of the new narrative poetry was the experiments with modality of a story depicted or mentioned, i.e. with author's (and, presumably, reader's) attitude to the . This chapter is focused on such experiments with credibility -- or, on the contrary, fantasticality -- of narrative in contemporary Russian poetry. These narratives use to demonstrate the "rhymes" of historical and imaginary events, to present the different ways in which the events could develop, and thus these poems are aimed at reinventing of human agency, and at ability to imagine the diverse types of agency. In this chapter the poems by Maria Stepanova, Fedor Svarovskii, Stanislav L'vovskii, Andrei Rodionov, and Serguei Kruglov are discussed.
