Internationally recognised art and literary critic, writer and cultural producer. Published in ELLE, Glamour, Esquire and Cosmopolitan; member of the Union of Writers.
Ilya Kutik is not only a distinguished professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Northwestern University, but also a renowned poet and a founder of Russian metarealism in poetry. His poems have been translated into 19 languages and included in the major anthologies of Russian poetry of the 20th century. He has also published seven collections of poetry in Russian, as well as several books of literary criticism in English. But how did he become such a prominent figure in the world of poetry, and what is metarealism, the movement he helped to create?
Kutik was born in 1961 in Lvov, where he grew up in a family of writers and artists. He began writing poetry at the age of 14, and soon became involved in the underground literary scene of the late Soviet era. He was influenced by the poets of the Silver Age, such as Mandelstam, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, and Mayakovsky, as well as by the Western modernists, such as Pound, Eliot, and Stevens. He also developed an interest in the mystical and esoteric traditions, such as Swedenborg, Gnosticism, and Kabbalah.
Kutik and his fellow metarealists, such as Alexei Parshchikov, Ivan Zhdanov, and Aleksandr Eremenko, sought to create a new poetic language that would reflect the complexity and diversity of the contemporary world, as well as the spiritual and metaphysical quest of the modern human being. They also challenged the official and ideological discourse of the Soviet regime, and expressed their individuality and freedom through their poetic experiments.
In 1988, Kutik left the Soviet Union and moved to Sweden, where he completed his Ph.D. in Stockholm University. He then moved to the United States, where he taught at Harvard University, Yale University, and Northwestern University. He continued to write and publish poetry and criticism, and also translated poetry from English, American, Polish, and Swedish into Russian. He received numerous awards and honors, such as the Andrei Bely Prize, the Pushkin Prize, and the Guggenheim Fellowship.
Kutik is widely recognized as one of the most original and influential poets of his generation, and as a pioneer of metarealism, a movement that has inspired many other poets and artists in Russia and beyond. He is also a respected scholar and teacher, who has contributed to the understanding and appreciation of Russian and European poetry from the 18th to the 21st century. He is currently working on two book-length projects: META: Reader to Russian Poetic Thinking (co-authored with Reginald Gibbons) and Visa to Byzantium: Understanding of Byzantine Culture in the 21st Century.
Kutik’s poetry is a testament to his vision and creativity, as well as to his passion and curiosity. He writes with a rare combination of intellect and emotion, of clarity and mystery, of realism and transcendence. He invites his readers to join him in his poetic journey, and to discover the hidden and the sublime in the world and in themselves.
