Maika Lunevskaya: In search of new rural poetry

Abstract

Maika Lunevskaya is a contemporary Russian poet, artist and musician, whose works connect peasant and post-peasant poetic traditions. She was born in Tambov but spent most of her life in the village of Pervaya Berezovka. Her works embody the “new rurality” - a conscious choice of rural life as a form of aesthetic and existential resistance to urbanization. Her poetry combines folklore motifs, ecological ref lection and digital scenography, creating a unique artistic world at the intersection of peasant tradition and postmodern sensibility. By considering her book Not Enough Memory (2024) in the context of depeasantization theories (Shanin, Vinogradsky and Vinogradskaya) and ecocriticism (Morton), the author shows how Lunevskaya reinterprets the legacy of peasant poetry (Klyuev, Yesenin, Rubtsov). Her poetry is not a return to pastoral idyll but an exploration of rural life as a space of labor, loss and creative survival in the anthropocene. Her poetry, graphics and music imply a dialogue between tradition and the present time. The book Not Enough Memory shows how peasant motifs (nature, cyclical time, folk imagery) are intertwined with ideas of ecological crisis, rural decay and digitalization. Lunevskaya avoids romanticizing rural life, instead presenting it as a space of existential reflection. A distinctive feature of her work is its multimedia nature: poems are accompanied by marker drawings, music (self-composed songs) and visual content on social media - rural life is presented as a performance, which the author describes as a fairground poetics - a fusion of traditional and contemporary art forms. Lunevskaya reinterprets the legacy of peasant poets, freeing it from naivety and exoticization. Her texts are “anti-pastoral”, since nature does not console but silently watches the decline. An ecocritical reading reveals ideas of anthropogenic impact, “nature-as-ruin”, and a non-anthropocentric worldview. Thus, Lunevskaya’s works form a new canon of post-peasant poetry relevant for the era of ecological and cultural transformations.