Description
Book SynopsisThis book outlines a fresh and coherent framework for the apprehension of Akhmatova's oeuvre in its totality, seeing her as a poet who moves beyond modernism in her later period. The appeal to postmodernism, which is in itself innovatory with regard to Akhmatova studies, also allows exploration of a second problematic issue: how to account for the shift in self-presentation in the later verse, and the different concept of poetic self which it advances. This new account of Akhmatova's path to maturity challenges the conventional view of the early Akhmatova as poet in the classical Russian tradition, and of the later Akhmatova as paradigmatically modernist.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Missing Centres, Hints and Evasions - Epistemological Uncertainty in the Early Period; Epistemology and Ontology in the Debate between Acmeism and Symbolism; Epistemology and the Conventions of Lyric Poetry; Truncated Plot in Akhmatova's Early Lyrics, The Nineteenth-Century Novel; Cinema and Cubism; Avant-Garde Techniques in the Early Poetry; Montage Composition in Lyric Cycles; Towards a Nouvea Roman; The Chameleon Persona; From Epistemology to Ontology; 2. Requiem - The Upturned World and Disintegrating Self; The Modern Poetic Sequence; The Paratexts of Requiem; The Inconsistent Speaker and Fragmenting Text; The Transformation of the Speaker; 3. Ends and Beginnings, Different Selves and Possible Worlds - Ontological Instability in the 'Northern Elegies'; The Alien World of the Past; The World Next Door; Possible Worlds of the Future; Forking Paths and Other Dramas; Paper Worlds; The World of Fiction, Ironic Beginnings, 4. Non-Meetings and the World Through the Looking Glass - Akhmatova's Late Cycles; The Poetics of Negation and Paradox; Non-Meetings and Non-Being; The Burnt Notebook; Living, Dying and Resurrection; 'Midnight Verses'; 5. Worlds Within Worlds - Poem Without a Hero; The Text-within-a-Text; Viewing 1913 from 1940 - the Postmodernist Return to Modernism; Akhmatova's Critique of the 1910s; The Surpassing of Modernism; Postmodernist Pla(y)giarism; Converstaion betwewen an Author and an Editor; The Multiple Author; Multiple Endings and Paratextual Paraphernalia; Rough Drafts; Conclusion; Endnotes; Bibliography; Index
