Ivars Steinbergs Baltic Avant-garde: The Temporalities of Contemporary Latvian Conceptualism and Estonian Surrealism

During the last decade, contemporary Latvian literature, poetry in particular, has witnessed the formation of different literary groups that position themselves as the local avant-garde. They are, therefore, theoretically and artistically entangled with Western modernist ideas and aesthetics. A portion of Latvian writers have made use of conceptual writing methods, “uncreative” text production mechanisms, and digital technology, simultaneously retaining a fascination with aspects of the historical avant-garde, e. g., the ambition to upset the literary status quo. Parallelly, the long-standing tradition of surrealist writing in Estonia can be seen as a process of appropriating and interpreting historical avant-garde in Baltic contexts and developing a unique poetic sensibility. Building on existing research (Bru 2009; Bru et al. 2016; Godiņš 2023; Ostups 2016, 2017), the conference paper focuses on these two cases of artistic expression, illuminating concrete examples of both Latvian and Estonian poetry, and examines the complexity and ideological implications of the conceptualism and surrealism that is being written in the Baltic countries today. In post-socialist societies, modernism in the 21st century can be seen as a kind of anachronism. However, as the paper will suggest, both cases create a kind of temporality that has less to do with compensating the historical lack of local modernists, and more to do with the present, which is being, and must be, ruptured. 

Ivars Šteinbergs (1991). Ph.D., is a researcher at the Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art of the University of Latvia (ILFA) and a university lecturer at the Latvian Academy of Culture. In 2017, he received a Fulbright grant to study comparative literature in the U.S.A., and he earned his M.A. in Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Binghamton (SUNY, Binghamton) in 2018. His research interests include poetry in translation, translation theory, modernism, feminism, deconstruction, and post-colonial studies. He is a poet, translator, and critic, with two books of poetry published by Neputns (2020, 2022), and a recipient of the Annual Latvian Literature Award (2023) and the Normunds Naumanis Annual Award for Criticism (2024). An editor of the literary magazine Strāva (Current). Šteinbergs has translated various foreign poets into Latvian, including Louise Glück, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Sharon Olds, and Jan Wagner. His own poetry has appeared in English, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Finnish.