Slot: 30B-4 Dec.
30, 10:15 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.
Panel: Poetry and Performance in Late Soviet
Culture
Chair: Mary A. Nicholas, Lehigh University
Title: Viewing Vladimir Vysotsky’s Concert
Programs as Poetic Cycles
Author: Anthony Qualin, Texas Tech University
Much of the Russian research focusing on
Russian rock music has been devoted to the concept of the rock album as a
cohesive whole or, to use their preferred term, a poetic cycle. Because of his lack of official
recognition in the Soviet literary and musical establishment, Vladimir Vysotsky
had few opportunities to prepare his works for publication and seldom was able
to formulate the presentation of his own albums. It would seem, then, that his readers and listeners have
been deprived of the insight that comes from the interplay of multiple works
found in a carefully conceived album.
Fortunately, however, we have access to the recordings of hundreds
Vysotsky’s concerts performed over the years. This study will consist of an analysis of the playlists and
a discussion of the significance of Vysotsky’s song selection. It will explore the cumulative effect
of the songs he performs and the significance of the audience and location of
the concert. The analysis will
also include a comparison of Vysotsky’s playlists from various points in
time. While the playlists from
Vysotsky’s concerts offer a considerably larger sample, he recorded albums in
Canada and France. He also
compiled a collection of his verse for the literary almanac, Metropol′.
Though the concert programs will serve as the primary focus of the
presentation, Vysotsky’s tamizdat
albums and his selection for Metropol′ will serve as a point of comparison throughout the
study. The purpose of the current
study is to demonstrate the extent to which Vysotsky’s concert programs were as
carefully constructed as his songs, underscoring his poetic versatility and
enhancing the meaning and artistic effect his songs through the juxtaposition
of images and themes.
Title: Empire and Identity in D. A. Prigov’s Moskva
i moskvichi
Author: Sidney Dement, University of Kansas
In the 23 poems of his 1982 cycle, Moskva
i moskvichi, the
Conceptualist poet Dmitrii Prigov (b. 1940 in Moscow) makes his own
contribution to the theme of Russia’s capitals as “literary” texts. His
intertextual poems explore imperial and Soviet Russia, conflating historical
and literary events, architecture, images, legends and leaders to capture the
variegated essence of Moscow. Prigov’s Moscow absorbs all of Russia: invader
and immigrant, past and present.
In the cycle’s
preface, Prigov invites the reader to consider his work as an
“historiosophical” contribution to “tema Moskvy” (“tema Peterburga” being more than adequately developed).
He notes the uneven efforts dedicated to literary Moscow and declares that Moskva
i moskvichi will help to
fill in the gaps. Prigov’s title echoes the eponymous Moscow texts of Mikhail
Zagoskin and Vladimir Giliarovsky, and the poems of his cycle provide valuable
data for current research into the “Moscow Text.”
This paper first
explicates the imagery of the cycle’s (arguably) central poem, “Prekrasna
moia drevniaia Moskva,”
then embeds the poem in the larger context of the cycle (a stratified
exploration of the “Moscow, Third Rome” theme and its various implications for
empire), and finally speculates on what role Prigov’s cycle plays in the
“Moscow Text.” The style of the poem deserves analysis because of Prigov’s
atypical persona, which relies heavily on metonymy and vivid imagery (eagle,
snow leopard, desert sands, Assyrian king, et al.). These stylistic features
find unity with the thematic elements of the poem: the transformation of the
medieval Muscovite principality into a “Third Rome” under Ivan III.
This research
contributes to the emerging dialogue about the “Moscow Text.” That a poet like
Prigov, three years before perestroika, would assume such a novel persona in addressing pressing
issues of identity and empire reflects a prescient anticipation of post-Soviet Moscow.
Prigov's cycle Moskva i moskvichi
deserves more critical attention than it has yet received.
Title: “The Hunt for the Mammoth” — The Ahistorical Properties of
Time in the Weltanschauung
of Viktor Krivulin
Author: Zaur V Agayev, Princeton University
The creative works of Viktor Borisovich
Krivulin occupy an important place in the field of Russian contemporary poetry.
During the final decades of the Soviet Union, Krivulin was known as one of the
most significant poets and social figures of the Leningrad underground. His
poetry is a unique blend of intellectuality, spirituality, aestheticism and
asceticism.
The notion of
time is a convoluted concept in Krivulin’s Weltanschauung (mirovospriiatie/mirooshchushchenie). Krivulin’s poetry presents Time as a
multidimensional entity; it is a temporal, spatial, and social development of
human society and culture. What is more significant, the notion of time in
Krivulin’s poetry is usually defined by clearly ahistorical properties. This
paper discusses two such ahistorical properties: the social aspect of time,
which does not necessarily correspond to actual history, and a universal
cultural unity, which also transcends the boundaries of “historicism.”
Moreover, I will illustrate how the latter notion is linked to the concept of
the unity of culture in time and the liberation from fear of repetition that
Osip Mandel′shtam
developed in his essay “Slovo i kul′tura.”