What follows from Peiper’s design of “embrace with the present” (reflections of a historian of the twentieth-century avant-garde, with a slight swing towards the XXI century)

Abstract

The article discusses the evolution of the avant-garde, determining the emergence of important differences between the historical avant-garde of the 1920s and the attitudes of the post-avant-garde and neo-avant-garde – from the 1970s of the twentieth century to the first decades of the twenty-first. At the same time, it answers the question of where the logic of the avant-gardes would find its axioms. Post-avant-garde poetry undoubtedly pursues the avant-garde postulate of approximation to the social reality of everyday life, but fundamentally understands this postulate differently. Consequently, it fulfills what the historical avant-garde did not: opening the boundaries of poetry as a result of questioning the autotelicity and autonomy of poetry, redefining reality-in-the-present as that, historically, locally, politically conditioned. Not infrequently, this forces a critical gesture against social
reality and the associated rules of social communication. To an even greater extent, this opening was determined by the conviction that this reality is not available in unmediated experience, that poetic critical discourse must be based on “interceptions” of social narratives, more or less petrified, leading to the recognition that everything belongs to reality, regardless of ontological status. It points out that countercultural movements have had a significant impact on the direction of this evolution.