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This article presents a close reading of Andrey Voznesensky's poem “Return to Flowers” alongside the collaborative poetry collection by contemporary St. Petersburg writer Pavel Alekseev and artist Zoya Norina, titled “Hogweed. Bolshevik. The Culture of Capture”. For the first time, this study examines texts that synthesize the agitational poetic genre with florographic verse. Drawing upon comparativehistorical and cultural-historical methodologies for textual analysis, the author argues that Voznesensky imbues the linguistic register of political slogans and botanical symbolism with urgent existential signification; conversely, Alekseev incorporates modern lexicon into revolutionary-era propaganda posters while supplanting simple, accessible versification with profound philosophical poems rendered through the form of the florilegium. The analysis concludes that both the individual poem and the multi-authored volume exhibit distinct markers of postmodernist poetics — including the deconstruction of established semiotics, irony, and intertextual play — as well as metamodernist strategies such as sense-generation, post-irony, multigeneric hybridity, and stylistic super-flexibility. It is demonstrated that within Alekseev's poetics, the axiology of metamodernism ultimately subverts the initial postmodernist premises of deconstruction from which the poet departs. Furthermore, the paper documents the presence of latent metamodernist tendencies within the hypertextual architecture of Voznesensky's late oeuvre. The findings establish that Voznesensky and Alekseev perpetuate the classical tradition of integrating vegetal imagery into slogan-based art but transpose these plant symbols into radically contemporary variations.
Translated title of the contributionFloropoetic and Florigraphic Response to Agitational Literature of Past Centuries in Works of A. Voznesensky and P. Alekseev
Original languageRussian
Pages (from-to) 277—298
Number of pages22
JournalНаучный диалог
Volume15
Issue number6
DOIs
StatePublished - 4 Aug 2026

    Research areas

  • Agitprop poster, Contemporary Russian literature, Contemporary poetry, Florography, Floropoetics, Sloganeering poetry

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