„kostbar ist uns nur der augenblick des erkennens“. Eine Einführung in Anne Seidels Chlebnikov weint (2015)

Summary Chlebnikov weint (2015), the first collection of poems by Anne Seidel (who was born in 1988 in Dresden), is more than a diary of her travels, be they real or imaginary, through the Russian territory and Russian culture and – more generally – the Slavic world. It causes images of today’s post-Soviet Eastern Europe to collide with images of the Stalinist or Nazi past through the use of figurative constellations which can be compared with Benjamin’s dialectic images. The collection is structured by the principle of differences and repetitions, of cycles and variations and of presence and absence whose dialectic creates what Anne Seidel calls “the instant of (re)cognition” after Mandelʹštam. That is why she defines every poem as a “form of absence”. That way, Anne Seidel keeps away from all memory projects which tend to crush the objects of poems under the weight of memorials.