Slot: 28D-3 Dec.
28, 3:45 p.m. – 5:45 p.m.
Panel: From the Center Out: The Space of
Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry
Chair: Sarah Pratt, University of Southern
California
Title: City Outskirts and the Moscow Avant-Garde
Author: Sarah Valentine, Princeton University
From the Lianozovo group to Gennady Aigi,
Moscow’s Soviet-era avant-garde produced its art not only outside dominant
aesthetic and political ideologies, but on the city’s geographic periphery as
well. As the Soviet Union’s capital and the seat of the government, Moscow was
the hub of Soviet political, intellectual, and cultural life. Residence in the
city required documentation and perennial housing shortages increased the
location’s coveted status. Residence in Moscow was also reward for adherence to
Soviet ideals. Conversely, banishment from the capital to the outskirts—or
farther—was a common punishment for those who were perceived as less than
exemplary Soviet citizens. Thus, for avant-garde artists whose work
fundamentally opposed Socialist realist principles, residence on the outskirts
was often a political necessity. However, distance from the cultural and
intellectual center of Moscow, which may at first seem detrimental to artists
seeking to engage with avant-garde concepts and forms, often provided these
artists the creative space and freedom they needed to pursue their artistic
endeavors. Thus, in the work of avant-garde artists residing in Moscow’s remote
environs, the outskirts themselves become a frequent motif that carries
varying, often conflicting associations. In the paintings of Oscar Rabine, such
as Barrack in Lianozovo
(1954), the motif of outskirts portrays the grim realities of the living
conditions of the average Soviet citizen. In the film Okraina (Outskirts, 1933) by director Boris Barnet, the
film’s setting dramatizes a sardonic statement about post-WWI Soviet life. For
Gennady Aigi, in poems such as "Okraina: Zima bez liudei"
(“Outskirts: Winter without People,” 1982), the outskirts represent a pure,
creative space, close to nature and far from the contaminated city.
Title: Poetry of the Periphery: City Outskirts
in Brodsky and Shvarts
Author: Dunja Popovic, Princeton University
The present paper focuses on two poems,
Joseph Brodsky’s “Ot okrainy k tsentru” (1962) and Elena Shvarts’s “Detskii sad
cherez tridtsat′ let” (mid-1980s), both of which set autobiographical lyrical
reflections on memory and on the passage of time against the landscape of the
city’s periphery. This paper explores the way in which choosing a marginal and
blighted part of the city as the setting plays into the two poets’ explorations
of the nature of remembrance, as well as into their metaphysical themes. The
setting serves in both poems as a vehicle for understanding the nature of
nostalgic memory. The grimy industrial cityscape these works describe could not
be further from any commonly accepted idea of paradise; and yet, both poets toy
with the conception of this space as a lost Eden, evoking it ironically, but
also with a real sense of longing. In this way, they acknowledge their yearning
for a past that they recognize was already taking place in a fallen world. The
periphery also serves a symbolic function in the poems by virtue of its status
as a liminal space, on the border between the city and the countryside beyond
it. The edge of the city symbolically represents in these poems the edges of
memory, where one’s earliest recollections – those connected with childhood and
youth – reside. Furthermore, this space can also be interpreted as symbolizing
the boundary between earthly life and a metaphysical “beyond,” and thus appears
as a logical setting for both poets’ confrontation with mortality and, in
Shvarts’s case, also with the divine.
Title: Modes of Lyric Collision: The Urban
Phantasms of Nikolai Zabolotskii
Author: Benjamin Paloff, Harvard University
In the waning days of the New Economic
Policy, many important Russian writers, including such luminaries as Andrei
Platonov and Osip Mandel’shtam, undertook an exploration of how the rhetoric of
societal transformation, which portended the end of history and the rise of a
new homo soveticus, came
into conflict with realities on the ground, where such transformations were
barely consummated. This paper examines the philosophies of space-time and the
word behind Nikolai Zabolotskii’s landmark collection Stolbtsy (Columns, 1929), which presents a vision
of NEP-era urban space as a suspension of the past in the world of the future.
In such poems as “Krasnaia Bavariia,” “Futbol,” and “Novyi byt” (where the poet
remarks that “time dries out and yellows” at the same time as he declares
himself “the militiaman of the new life”), Zabolotskii envisions Soviet urban
space as a collision of the old and new, where transformation is inherently
incomplete and lyric potential opens out onto historic catastrophe. By
examining Zabolotskii’s early aesthetic and philosophical development, with special
reference to the OBERIU manifesto and the technological idealism of Nikolai
Fedorov and Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, this paper demonstrates how Zabolotskii
reconfigures early Soviet society into a tragicomic hybrid of past and future.
This preoccupation with underdevelopment also fosters Zabolotskii’s interest in
immaturity, both as an existential concept and as a compositional principle in
lyric poetry, as evidenced by such poems as “Nezrelost′.” Seen through this
conceptual framework, Zabolotskii’s phantasmagoric distortion of urban space
exposes not only a poet at play, but also Zabolotskii’s serious engagement with
some of the most pressing historical and metaphysical problems of his era.
Title: The Poetics of Space in Vladislav
Khodasevich’s Evropeiskaia Noch′
Author: Maria Khotimsky, Harvard University
Evropeiskaia Noch′ (1929), the last collection of poems
published by Vladislav Khodasevich, has generated diverse critical responses
(Veidle 1974; Miller 1989).
However different the
interpretations might be, the notion of space set forth in the title of
the collection calls for further scrutiny. While the imagery of Khodasevich’s
earlier books, Putem Zerna
and Tiazhelaia Lira, reflects
the poet’s strong sense of place and incorporates multiple reference to Moscow
and Saint Petersburg, the poetics of Evropeiskaia Noch′ to a large extent seems to be defined by
the sense of foreign cultural space. Many of the poems in this collection (e.g.
“Berlinskoe,” “Pod zemlei”) include spatial characteristics in their titles,
while other texts (“An Mariehen,” “Zvezdy”) present scenes from Berlin and
Paris life in the twenties, and, thereby, create a new and challenging
environment for the lyrical subject.
The goals of
this paper are twofold: to analyze the innovative use of poetic space in Evropeiskaia
noch′ in comparison with
earlier collections of poetry, and to describe the emerging stylistic changes
of Khodasevich’s later verse as development rather than decline of his poetic
manner. Special attention is
devoted to such features of Evropeiskaia Noch′, as the use of precise biographical
detail, montage, creation of grotesque images in the interpretation of “alien”
space, many of which are characteristic of Russian literature in exile and are
echoed in the works of Vladimir Nabokov, Georgii Ivanov, Joseph Brodsky.
The analysis will
draw primarily on Khodasevich’s poetic works of Berlin period, as well as on
his epistolary heritage and several prose essays. Theoretical studies of post-symbolist subjectivity and
problems of poetic space in Russian literature together with major scholarly
works on Khodasevich’s poetics (Bethea, Bogomolov, Malmstad) will provide the
methodological framework for the paper.
References
Bethea, David M. Vladislav
Khodasevich: His Life and His Art.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.
Bogomolov, N. A. “Zhizn′ i poeziia
Vladislava Khodasevicha.” Russkaia literatura pervoi treti XX veka.
Portrety. Problemy. Razyskaniia.
Tomsk, 1999.
Kirilcuk, Alexandra. “The Estranging
Mirror: Poetics of Reflection in the Latter Poetry of Vladislav Khodasevich” Russian
Review 61 (July, 2002).
Miller, Jane. “Xodasevich’s Gnostic
Exile” Slavic and Eastern European Journal 28.2 (1984).
Veidle, Vladimir. “Khodasevich’s
“Double-Edged” Ars Poetica”
Russian Literature Triquarterly,
1974-2.