Abstract: The Critical Stakes of Poetic Derision in the Work of Matei Vișniec. This paper revisits the poetry written by Matei Vișniec during the communist period in order to prove that it can be read as a civil action against the totalitarian system. It relies on the examination of Vișniec’s deployment of a series of strategies of derision, such as allusions, irony, humor, or parables. The main purpose of this re-reading is to both emphasize the subversive character of the writer’s poetic work, a rather particular case in its ethical challenging of communist realities in relation to the postmodernist aesthetic program, and underline the idealism of an ironic poet in whose vision the writer is, above all, a professional disruptor of dogmata.

Keywords: Matei Vișniec, poetry, Communism, subversion, irony