Dmitri Golynko

Dmitry Golynko was born in 1969 in Leningrad, USSR. Following his studies in Art Theory and Russian Literature he graduated with a dissertation on the Russian post-avant garde at the end of the 20th century. He was guest professor for two years at Cheongju University (Slavic Department) in South Korea in 2004-5, and is currently Resident Researcher at Russian Institute of Arts History. Aside from his involvement with film studies and media theory, which he teaches, he also writes numerous essays on topics from the fields of contemporary art and literature which are published in renowned Russian journals.

That Golynko’s theoretical background also influences his poetic work is confirmed by all his publications to date. In his first poems, composed during the last days of Perestroika and published in 1994 under the title »Homo Scribens«, onomatopoeic experiments dominate, the goal of which can be identified as a rigorous deconstruction of prior Russian linguistic realities and ideology. He orients himself here on advanced American poetry like that of, for example, Lyn Hejinian, Robert Duncan or Charles Olson, whose works he first encountered during the mid-1980s. The title suggests the energetic talents of the strict conceptualist and learned theoretician: the writing man is a philosophically inspired and linguistically creative poet, who is to be concerned with a radical perception and renewal of modern life. After the publication of the poetry collections »Directory« (2001) and »Concrete Doves« (2003) followed the English-language compilation of his poetic work to date, »As It Turned Out«, in 2008. This was not only the first time his work had been made available to a wider audience, it also confirmed him as a precise observer and razor-sharp analyst of post-modern society. As he says himself, he creates »a bricolage of de-contextualised fragments of alienated expressions behind which there is no longer a subject« in order to provide a critique of capitalism, whose unseen violence combines economy and desire and which responds to revolutionary efforts with gentle repression. Despite this approach, he is neither fatalistic nor resigned: a thorn resides in things that holds the hope for creative freedom, as he emphatically expressed in 2004 in »Elementary Things« (published in »Die Horen«).

Dmitry Golynko has been nominated for the renowned Andrei-Bely-Award. The author lives in St Petersburg.

Homo Scribens

Borei-Art

St. Peterburg, 1994

Sashenka

Argo-Risk

Moskau, 2001

Betonnye Golubki

Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie

Moskau, 2003

As It Turned Out

Ugly Duckling Press

New York, 2008

[Ü: Eugene Ostashevsky, Rebecca Bella, Simona Schneider]