Description
Book SynopsisHow have poets in recent centuries been able to inscribe recognizable and relatively stable sincere voices despite the wearing of poetic language and reader awareness of sincerity’s pitfalls? How are readers able to recognize sincerity at all given the mutability of sincere voices and the unavailability of inner worlds? What do disagreements about the sincerity of texts and authors tell us about competing conceptualizations of sincerity? And how has sincere expression in one particular, illustrative context Russian poetry both changed and remained constant?
An Indwelling Voice grapples, uniquely, with such questions. In case studies ranging from the late neoclassical period to post-postmodernism, it explores how Russian poets have generated the pragmatic framings and poetic devices that allow them to inscribe sincere voices in their poetry. Engaging Anglo-American and European literature, as well as providing close readings of Russian poetry, An Indwelling
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments Abbreviations A Note on Transliteration Introduction: The Sincere Voice, or How Sincerity Is Written and Read in Russian, and Not Only Russian, Poetry Preliminaries Two Poles in the Conceptualization of Sincerity Voice Decoding Sincerity The Structure of This Study 1. The Problem of Sincerity and the Poetic Device in Derzhavin’s Odes 2. Romantic Sincerities I From Genre to the Sincere Voice (Alexander Pushkin) Romantic Charisma and the Material Trace (Dmitry Venevitinov) 3. Romantic Sincerities II: Late-Romantic Sincerities Disarming the Byronic Hero (Mikhail Lermontov) A Poetics of Abandon (Apollon Grigoryev) 4. A Fault Line in Modernism Blok vs. Mandelstam Parallels in Anglo-American Modernism Two Poems 5. Poetic Sincerity in the Totalitarian and Post-Totalitarian Context Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem at the Crossroads of Sincerity Expectations The Second Epilogue: Confession of Hubris? Konstantin Levin: An Ironic Mid-Century Sincerity 6. Case Studies in Turn-of-the-Millennium Sincerity Boris Ryzhy’s Renewal of Traditional Sincerity The “Prodigal” Sincerity of Timur Kibirov Conclusion Appendix: Another Vista on Pushkin’s “Monument” Notes References Index
