Andrei Monastyrski

Elementary Poetry

New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019.

New Book.

Item #6497
ISBN: 9781937027681

Paperback. 360 pp.

In recent years Andrei Monastyrski has received international recognition for his work with Collective Actions, a group of artists who have organized actions in the fields around Moscow since 1976. Though his poetry is less well known, that is where it all began. After writing poetry in the manner of Russian modernists, newly available to Soviet readers during Khrushchev’s thaw, Monastyrski’s interest in John Cage and ideas about consciousness from Western and Eastern philosophical traditions led him to deepen his dialogue with poetry of the past through experiments with sound, form, and the creation of artistic environments involving carefully conceived objects and situations. Elementary Poetry collects poems, books, and action objects from the ’70s, tracing a genealogy of the art action in poetry.

With a preface by Boris Groys, and a translators’ introduction by Yelena Kalinsky and Brian Droitcour.


Andrei Monastyrski (b. 1949) is a poet, author, artist, art theorist based in Moscow. He is, along with Ilya Kabakov, one of the founders of conceptualism in Russia. He graduated from Moscow State University with a degree in philology and worked for many years at the Literature Museum in Moscow. In 1973, he began to work with serial structures and minimalist sound compositions and in 1975, turned his attention to poetic objects and actions. He is best known as a founding member and chief theoretician of the Collective Actions group, which began to stage outdoor actions on the edges of Moscow in 1976. He compiled many of the group’s documentary volumes, Trips Out of the City, and participated in many solo and group exhibitions with his own work. In 2003, Monastyrski was awarded the Andrei Bely Prize in literature. He also received the Soratnik Prize in 2008 and the Innovation Prize in 2009. His poetry and theoretical writings have been gathered into several Russian-language volumes by the publisher German Titov for his Library of Moscow Conceptualism series.

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