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.
Der Traum als Medium transzendenter Erfahrungen ist ein bevorzugtes literarisches Motiv von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Auch in der russischen inoffiziellen Lyrik der Sowjetzeit entwickelt der ...Traum metaphysische Dimensionen, die auf individuelle Weise gestaltet werden. Anhand der Analyse exemplarischer Gedichte wird die Traumpoetik von Elena Svarc, Ol'ga Sedakova und Gennadij Ajgi erschlossen und im Hinblick auf ihre Spezifik vergleichend ausgewertet. Die dichterisch geformten Träume erweisen sich als Wege zur Gottesbegegnung (Sedakova), zu spiritueller Selbsterkenntnis (Svarc) oder auch zu mystischer Naturerfahrung (Ajgi). Die drei AutorInnen verorten sich dadurch im literaturhistorischen Kontext der metaphysischen Lyrik, deren Tradition sie durch das Traummotiv fortsetzen.
The Voice Over Stepanova, Maria; Shevelenko, Irina
05/2021
eBook
Maria Stepanova is one of the most powerful and distinctive voices
of Russia's first post-Soviet literary generation. An award-winning
poet and prose writer, she has also founded a major platform for
...independent journalism. Her verse blends formal mastery with a keen
ear for the evolution of spoken language. As Russia's political
climate has turned increasingly repressive, Stepanova has responded
with engaged writing that grapples with the persistence of violence
in her country's past and present. Some of her most remarkable
recent work as a poet and essayist considers the conflict in
Ukraine and the debasement of language that has always accompanied
war. The Voice Over brings together two decades of
Stepanova's work, showcasing her range, virtuosity, and creative
evolution. Stepanova's poetic voice constantly sets out in search
of new bodies to inhabit, taking established forms and styles and
rendering them into something unexpected and strange. Recognizable
patterns of ballads, elegies, and war songs are transposed into a
new key, infused with foreign strains, and juxtaposed with unlikely
neighbors. As an essayist, Stepanova engages deeply with writers
who bore witness to devastation and dramatic social change, as seen
in searching pieces on W. G. Sebald, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Susan
Sontag. Including contributions from ten translators, The Voice
Over shows English-speaking readers why Stepanova is one of
Russia's most acclaimed contemporary writers.
The article, which is the result of work on the self-titled anthology, examines one of the least studied areas of Russian poetic geography. The author explores the path from indirect reception ...through other European literatures to original lyrical travelogues and compares the image of Portugal in Soviet and émigré poetry. The main Portuguese loci and heroes of Russian poems, such as Lisbon, the Azores, L. de Camões, V. da Gama, F. Magellan, are analyzed.
В статье, представляющей собой результат работы над одноименной антологией, исследуется одна из наименее изученных областей русской поэтической географии. Прослеживается путь от опосредованного восприятия через другие европейские литературы к оригинальным лирическим травелогам; сопоставляется образ Португалии в советской и эмигрантской поэзии. Анализируются главные португальские локусы и герои в русских стихах: Лиссабон, Азорские острова, Л. ди Камоэнс, В. да Гама, Ф. Магеллан.
When examined retrospectively, some poetry can be seen as using scandal and rebellion to defy social norms. Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poetry criticised the repression and conservatism ingrained in the ...fabric of Tsarist Russia; a society defined by bourgeois, capitalistic and heteronormative values. As a passionate Bolshevik, the alienation induced by the restrictive external world caused Mayakovsky to use poetry for its most extreme, subversive means in inciting revolution. While viewing Mayakovsky as a political voice for the proletariat is a commonly held view, an often overlooked aspect is how poetry was used to convey his sexual expression. When considered amidst the repressive views on sexuality that were characteristic of both Tsarist and even Soviet Russia, the flamboyant poet was consistently prone to controversy.
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.
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.
ABSTRACT This article aims to investigate the imperial element in the poetry of Joseph Brodsky through the lenses of post-colonial studies. Its ambiguity, informed by Brodsky’s experience as a poet ...in exile, as well as his personal cultural frame, echoes that of his poetic precursors. Thus, we briefly trace the history of the connection between Russian poetry and the imperial narrative, which began with the inception of the Russian Empire itself in the 18th century. Then, we explore the nuance of the concept of empire in Brodsky’s works through the analysis of the poems Post aetatem nostram (1970), Torso (1972) and On the Independence of Ukraine (1991). As we understand it, both the chauvinistic content of the latter poem and the positive and nostalgic aspect of empire to Brodsky reveal the longevity and the strength of the Russian imperial narrative in the country’s national literature.
RESUMO O presente artigo tem por objetivo investigar o elemento imperial na poesia de Joseph Brodsky em diálogo com os estudos pós-coloniais. Sua conotação ambígua, permeada tanto por suas vivências enquanto poeta exilado, quanto por seus referenciais culturais, ecoa àquela apresentada nas obras de seus precursores poéticos. Portanto, traça-se um breve histórico da relação entre poesia e narrativa imperial no âmbito cultural russo, iniciada com a gênese do Império Russo no século XVIII. Em seguida, explora-se as nuances do conceito de império na obra brodskiana por meio da análise dos poemas Post aetatem nostram (1970), Torso (1972) e Sobre a Independência da Ucrânia (1991). Entende-se que tanto o conteúdo chauvinista deste último poema, quanto o aspecto positivo e nostálgico do império para Brodsky revelam a longevidade e a força da narrativa imperialista russa presente na literatura nacional do país.
