Intimate Readings: Pavel Arseniev with Çağlar Köseoğlu

Moving between Istanbul, Cairo, and Moscow, Köseoğlu and Arsenev explore how poetry navigates the wake of an uprising.

Köseoğlu’s collection Nasleep [Aftermath] (het balanseer, 2020) takes the Gezi Park protests of 2013 as a point of departure, exploring the remnants of that historical moment when ‘another world’ seemed possible. Pavel Arsenev’s collection Reported Speech (NY: Cicada press, 2018) as well as his recent Le russe comme non maternelle (Vanloo éditions, 2024 / Ciconia verlag, 2025), also exist in a mode of post-reflection on the last major social mobilization: the Bolotnaya square protests of 2011-13. Following these events, Arsenev was forced to emigrate, while Russia annexed Crimea and started its war against Ukraine.

While oscillating between polyphonic, critical noise, and post-revolutionary affects, Köseoğlu pushes the political poem to its extreme, asking what poetry can still do when collective political action feels out of reach. Arsenev, in turn, occupies himself with the poetic scanning of official documents (such as the arrest records of political activist, texts of the Constitution, or the “state-standard” Bachelor’s degree), while capturing the repressive undertones hanging in the air — a surreal indictment of contemporary poetry and art that has now turned out to be entirely factual in Russia.