If I heard the rumor that Andrei Monastyrski: Elementary Poetry contained encoded instructions for the Philosopher's Stone, or that reciting certain passages would turn one invisible, I would believe it. Elementary Poetry is a bewildering and brilliant collection of the lesser-known poems, texts, and experiments of Andrei Monastyrski, a towering figure in Russian contemporary art, as both a performance artist and organizer within Collective Actions, and as a key voice within Moscow Conceptualism.

The present book was lovingly curated by Yelena Kalinsky and Brian Droitcour for the Ugly Duckling Presse and Soberscove Press, offering excellent new translations of the vital artist, and a delightful work in its own right, mystifying and enticing. The book recalls the heterogeny and playfulness of samizdat artist albums. Poetry is interspersed with questionnaires, astronomical charts of culture, pictograms testing the limits of language, violent excerpts from a Soviet cooking book, and even an intruding sheet of sandpaper labeled “distance” whose texture derails the haptics of reading (279). The texts, images, and photographs are framed by two essays introducing Monastyrski and offering an insightful exegesis of the collection.

Boris Groys's “Preface” explains the significance of Monastyrski as a poet and performance artist, and describes the Collective Actions group. Groys weaves immediate connections between Monastyrski and other Moscow Conceptualists like Ilya Kabakov, and through reference to Martin Heidegger, sets larger stakes for the utopianism and egalitarianism in Monastyrski's project. This is a crucial insight, because the collection can feel as if elitist, as though making complex reference to some privileged culture the reader does not know. This feeling is a red herring, as Groys points out. He focuses on Monastyrski's privileging of “emptiness” as the key to his and Collective Actions’ utopianism. By emptying their artwork of authorial control and intention, Monastyrski and Collective Actions liberated their audience, freeing them to make their own meanings. Groys reminds us that Elementary Poetry also elides prepared meanings, prompting conceptual play, not studious passivity.

Kalinsky and Droitcour's “Translator's Introduction” is a nuanced analysis explaining key choices made in the volume. They emphasize Monastyrski's experimentation with the boundaries of poetry as a priority for themselves. When describing Monastyrski's experimental Poetic World (1976), it is clear that they applied the same formal principles that Poetic World sought, in their own translation: “By writing through nothingness, Monastyrski built a form that has volume. By describing the invisible, language acquired material. For him, the book as a physical phenomenon mattered more than the contents of the text” (xiv). Kalinsky and Droitcour directly address how Elemental Poetry misbehaves as a poetry book, entangling word, image and touch: “The work's unusual material properties—the pasted cut-outs, rough sandpaper, and colored papers—are physically engaging. The reader feels different weights and textures, sees the visual cues that distinguish the sections, flips the photo pages, and moves back and forth between questions and answers…One might read this as a suggestion that poetry is a physical process, much like cookery” (xix). While referring to Monastyrski's inclusions from a cookbook, the collapse of poetry and cookery into a performance played by the readers themselves, stages a flickering between the visceral and spiritual, poetic and mundane, esoteric and domestic, that organizes the polyphony of voice and meaning within the text.

Monastyrski's characteristic voice emerges clearly here, perpetually eliding and shimmering between earnest mysticism and critical irony, structuralist analysis, and playground rhyme. Dmitrii Prigov aptly described Monastyrski's poetic approach in a 2007 essay entitled “The Understanding Machine,” as “quasi-esoteric practices appearing as quasi-esoteric formulae, processing numerous metaphysical and metapsychological situations—not to figure out some grand truth (which truly esoteric texts are prone to do) but to create a particular situation, atmosphere, or aura of experience and consciousness” (Dmitrii Prigov, Mysli: Izbrannye manifesty, stat΄i, interv΄iu. Mark Lipovetsky, Ilya Kukulin, eds. [Moscow, 2019], 611). None of Monastyrski's voices are authoritative, the unitary artistic voice is here willfully discarded for a polyphonic architecture of meaning prompting readers to explore, expand, and liberate their consciousness on their own.

This is a necessary addition to the library of anyone interested in contemporary art and poetry in Russia, Andrei Monastyrski, the Collective Actions group, Moscow Conceptualism, or experimental books of poetry. Ugly Duckling Presse and Soberscove Press have published a work of art: complex and challenging, a joy to hold and insistent on the haptic as a source of pleasure and meaning.