The Bilingual Muse analyzes the work of seven Russian poets who translated their own poems into English, French, German, or Italian. Investigating the parallel versions of self-translated poetic ...texts by Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, Andrey Gritsman, Katia Kapovich, Marina Tsvetaeva, Wassily Kandinsky, and Elizaveta Kul'man, Adrian Wanner considers how verbal creativity functions in different languages, the conundrum of translation, and the vagaries of bilingual identities. Wanner argues that the perceived marginality of self-translation stems from a romantic privileging of the mother tongue and the original text. The unprecedented recent dispersion of Russian speakers over three continents has led to the emergence of a new generation of diasporic Russians who provide a more receptive milieu for multilingual creativity.
Russian Silver Age writers were full participants in European literary debates and movements. Today some of these poets, such as Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, Pasternak, and Tsvetaeva, are known ...around the world. This volume introduces Silver Age poetry with its cultural ferment, the manifestos and the philosophical, religious, and aesthetic debates, the occult references and sexual experimentation, and the emergence of women, Jews, gay and lesbian poets, and peasants as part of a brilliant and varied poetic environment. After a thorough introduction, the volume offers brief biographies of the poets and selections of their work in translation-many of them translated especially for this volume-as well as critical and fictional texts (some by the poets themselves) that help establish the context and outline the lively discourse of the era and its indelible moral and artistic aftermath.
Snapshots of the Soul considers how photography has shaped Russian poetry from the early twentieth century to the present day. Drawing on theories of the lyric and the elegy, the social history of ...technology, and little-known archival materials, Molly Thomasy Blasing offers close readings of poems by Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, Joseph Brodsky, and Bella Akhmadulina, as well as by the late and post-Soviet poets Andrei Sen-Sen'kov, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, and Kirill Medvedev, to understand their fascination with the visual language, representational power, and metaphorical possibilities offered by the camera and the photographic image. Within the context of long-standing anxieties about the threat that visual media pose to literary culture, Blasing finds that these poets were attracted to the affinities and tensions that exist between the lyric or elegy and the snapshot. Snapshots of the Soul reveals that at the core of each poet's approach to "writing the photograph" is the urge to demonstrate the superior ability of poetic language to capture and convey human experience.
The book is an extended commentary on Pushkin’s poem “The Robber Brothers”. The author redefines the poem’s place in Pushkin’s creative biography and provides a detailed line-by-line commentary. This ...poem by Alexander Pushkin has been considered peripheral among his “Southern Poems”, and therefore researchers have paid little attention to it. The main cause of such lack of consideration was the specific history of the creation of “The Robber Brothers.” Pushkin experimented with constructing a new poem at the intersection of different vectors of genre and style topical for both the poet and literature as a whole. Due to this dynamic tension, the concept of the poem became ambiguous – the choice of the plot composition and narrative methods were not determined. After making several attempts and sketches, Pushkin shortened his initial concept and created an author legend on the genesis of the poem, which was introduced to the first audience of readers as a disconnected fragment of a scattered whole, whereas the plot of the poem was depicted as based on a real event. Within Pushkin’s corpus, “The Robber Brothers” remained primarily a literary monument of the author’s rapid evolution during his “Southern” period. It proved to be an extremely concentrated experiment, ultimately without success.
This book examines different contexts relevant to Pushkin in 1825 when the poem “Count Nulin” was written. Its bulk consists of studies devoted to (1) various manuscripts of the text, (2) the issue ...of censorship and the publication of “Count Nulin” during Pushkin’s life, (3) the biographical context for the poem’s creation, (4) the role of the text in literary polemics and (5) reactions of critics (as well as readers) during Pushkin’s lifetime. Developing the idea of Boris Eikhenbaum, R. Leibov proposes that the text was addressed primarily to members of the Petersburg literati who made up the “Poliarnaia zvezda” (Polar Star) circle. Moreover, Leibov suggests that, in “Count Nulin”, Pushkin purposefully exaggerated those literary techniques that attracted criticism in “Eugene Onegin”, making “Count Nulin” function as a self-parody. The final section of the book is composed of commentary on the poem, combining a traditional focus on the interpretation of fragments of the text with an emphasis on its overall composition, as well as description of the changing rhetorical and narrative strategies of its author.
An outstanding and carefully documented study of Russian and American language-centred poetry of the avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde, and an important contribution to comparative linguistic ...poetics.
"The canon of Russian poetry has been reshaped since the fall of the Soviet Union. A multi-authored study of changing cultural memory and identity, this revisionary work charts Russia’s shifting ...relationship to its own literature in the face of social upheaval. Literary canon and national identity are inextricably tied together, the composition of a canon being the attempt to single out those literary works that best express a nation’s culture. This process is, of course, fluid and subject to significant shifts, particularly at times of epochal change. This volume explores changes in the canon of twentieth-century Russian poetry from the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union to the end of Putin’s second term as Russian President in 2008. In the wake of major institutional changes, such as the abolition of state censorship and the introduction of a market economy, the way was open for wholesale reinterpretation of twentieth-century poets such as Iosif Brodskii, Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandel′shtam, their works and their lives. In the last twenty years many critics have discussed the possibility of various coexisting canons rooted in official and non-official literature and suggested replacing the term ""Soviet literature"" with a new definition – ""Russian literature of the Soviet period"". Contributions to this volume explore the multiple factors involved in reshaping the canon, understood as a body of literary texts given exemplary or representative status as ""classics"". Among factors which may influence the composition of the canon are educational institutions, competing views of scholars and critics, including figures outside Russia, and the self-canonising activity of poets themselves. Canon revision further reflects contemporary concerns with the destabilising effects of emigration and the internet, and the desire to reconnect with pre-revolutionary cultural traditions through a narrative of the past which foregrounds continuity. Despite persistent nostalgic yearnings in some quarters for a single canon, the current situation is defiantly diverse, balancing both the Soviet literary tradition and the parallel contemporaneous literary worlds of the emigration and the underground. Required reading for students, teachers and lovers of Russian literature, Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry brings our understanding of post-Soviet Russia up to date."
