In the contemporary era of post-truth politics, documentary art forms that seek to redefine the meaning and authority of truth have acquired renewed significance. This lecture examines the development of documentary poetry in Russian literature.

In the 2000s and 2010s, Russian poetry saw an intensive turn toward documentary forms based on interviews with real people, court records, media quotations, and historical documents. Such poetry has typically adopted a pronounced anti-totalitarian stance, aiming to expose the narratives of Kremlin propaganda as well as entrenched clichés of public consciousness. A comparable surge of interest in documentary and reportage-based writing occurred in the 1920s, when left-wing writers after the Bolshevik Revolution—including Vladimir Mayakovsky and Nikolai Aseev—sought to record society’s movement toward communism through what was known as the “literature of fact.” At the same time, unofficial poets, excluded from publication, depicted the darker dimensions of Soviet life and human experience.
This lecture argues that contemporary documentary poetry is genealogically closer not to Soviet “literature of fact,” but to the unofficial poetic traditions of the Soviet era. It also proposes a new theoretical framework for understanding documentary poetry as a form that resists stable definition. This framework draws on Michel Foucault’s concept of “regimes of truth” and rethinks documentary poetry as a site where competing truth claims are produced, contested, and revisited.