One bright April day last year, the Russian poet Kirill Medvedev visited the Tagansky District Court, in Moscow. Inside the building, in a courtroom crowded with press, a pretrial hearing for the radical art-rock band Pussy Riot was getting under way. Activists had planned a concert to protest the proceedings, and Medvedev, who belonged to a militant folk band named for the socialist poet Arkady Kots, had come to Tagansky to play.

When it became clear that authorities would not allow the concert to take place, Medvedev and a bandmate began an impromptu performance. They sang a couple of songs and traded jokes with a small crowd that had gathered to watch. (“Which one of you is Arkady? Which is Kots?” “We take turns.”) When the police arrived to arrest him, Medvedev had just enough time to hand his guitar to a bystander before he was dragged off to a waiting paddy wagon.

After the two members of Arkady Kots were taken away, a reporter observing the scene asked a policeman what crime the musicians had committed. The officer replied that protests outside courthouses were illegal. “So you’d detain people for reciting poems?” the reporter asked, as noted by the blog Chtodelat News.

“For poems as well—for any unsanctioned actions.”

“Is it permitted to converse in prose?”

“Prose is allowed.”

“What about unrhymed free verse?”

This last question apparently puzzled the policeman into silence. But activists who overhead the conversation suggested that, “given the political situation, free verse was doubly forbidden.”

I met Medvedev not long ago, at a brick-walled diner near the Barclays Center, in Brooklyn. He was visiting the U.S. to promote “It’s No Good,” an English-language selection of his poems and essays published by n+1 and Ugly Duckling Presse. Nearing forty, he is going bald on top, though his black hair gathers strength as it moves down the back of his head. He wore layered T-shirts and green leather sneakers, and except for his teeth—which looked dark and damaged, a startling sight here in what Joseph Brodsky called “the country of dentists”—he was indistinguishable from the Sunday-morning-hangover crowd that sat slumped over their eggs and iPhones.

In the early part of his career, Medvedev was affiliated with the New Sincerity, a literary movement characterized, in his words, by “a direct and very personable form of writing.” The association had an obvious influence on his style. Narrated in a voice of prosey companionability, his poetry recalls the colloquial free verse of Grace Paley, Frank O’Hara, and Charles Bukowski, the last of whom Medvedev has translated into Russian. Like many young poets, his favorite subjects are sex, drugs, poetry, and politics, and—in translation, anyway—the lack of artifice and conspicuous literary effect in his work is notable. Some of his poems read like documentary records of an ephemeral piece of performance art. Still others have the flavor of straight autobiography:

I recently ran into the poet Lvovsky

whose poems I like

(and he likes mine back)

on an escalator;

Lvovsky was going down and I was going up

I was chewing gum

and at the moment

we saw each other

I was blowing

a giant bubble.

With two collections to his name, Medvedev had established himself as one of the most promising Russian poets of his generation, when, in 2003, he announced the end of his literary career. He wrote that he could no longer tolerate a literary milieu that reduced art to “a series of irresponsible infantile games,” and said that he found it “impossible to participate in literary life, to publish even in publications I find sympathetic.” “I refuse to participate in literary projects organized or financed by government or cultural bureaucrats,” he wrote on his blog. “I refuse all public readings.” A year later, he took a further step, disclaiming his copyrights and declaring that henceforth his work could only be published in pirate editions.

As the peculiar status of “It’s No Good” suggests—the book is officially unauthorized, though its author crossed an ocean to promote it—there was something quixotic, even self-important, in all this. Certainly, Medvedev has never hidden his fondness for the grand gesture: a few years ago, he spilled several litres of fake blood (thickened beet juice) in front of the Kazakh Embassy in Moscow to protest working conditions in the oil industry. Still, Medvedev insisted that the precocious demolition of his literary career was not a P.R. stunt. “What I wanted to do,” he told me, “was to try to think through what politics would mean to me: who I wanted to stand with, who I wanted to stand against, and what a real politics would be like. I didn’t feel like I could do that in the literary world.” Though Medvedev despises the glittering petroligarchs and ex-K.G.B. autocrats who make the news out of Russia such depressing reading, he has found more immediate targets for his scorn among his well-meaning peers in the Russian culture industry. In a 2007 essay, he lamented the conviction, widespread in liberal literary precincts, “that the poet is alone and that his texts, his political position … and his personal qualities are in no way interrelated …. It’s as if, within this system the artist were indulged as a vessel for a particular kind of political innocence.”

At the same time, Medvedev has argued that the political abstinence of the Russian literary scene is symptomatic of a more general depoliticization that took root among liberal intellectuals of the perestroika generation. He told me that he has lost patience with those who would claim that the freedom not to engage with public life is the purest expression of political freedom. “My answer to them is: No matter what you think, your work is implicated in politics. Your refusal to think about the connections between what you do and what is political, that is the renunciation. You’re renouncing your role as an intellectual. You’re renouncing your duty to be critical.”

Medvedev’s frustration with the failures of Russian liberalism led him to the political left. He joined a tiny “non-Stalinist, non-nationalist” socialist movement that counts among its three hundred members many children of the old Soviet intelligentsia. A few years ago, he started a small publishing house, which has translated Western Marxists like Pier Paolo Pasolini, Herbert Marcuse, and Terry Eagleton. Arkady Kots, which Medvedev calls “the worst band in Moscow” as well as “the most militant, with the exception of Pussy Riot,” has played recently in Vienna, Helsinki, and Odessa.

Medvedev told me that he keeps coming back to poetry because other genres seem always to be “addressed to particular people, particular audiences, particular strata,” while poems are “addressed to no one in particular, and therefore to everyone.” At times, however, he seems to have found his lingering fondness for poetry bemusing. In one of the later poems translated in “It’s No Good,” he writes of discovering that a book of “sweet conservative verses, / which you need to read / over tea, with milk / in a bathrobe” can still bring pleasure, even though he’s reading it “in a store that got blown up a few days ago / and still smells like dried fish.” The possibility of such a pleasure in such a place both surprises and disturbs him, causing him to end the poem on a quavering note of ethical unease: