Marina Cvetaeva’s biography and her relationship with visual arts, drama, folklore, music, transl... more Marina Cvetaeva’s biography and her relationship with visual arts, drama, folklore, music, translation, and the work of other poets, as well as her continuing influence on subsequent Russian poetry.
This chapter focuses on Robert Bresson’s engagement of Dostoevskii’s Crime and Punishment in his ... more This chapter focuses on Robert Bresson’s engagement of Dostoevskii’s Crime and Punishment in his 1959 film The Pickpocket. It argues that although Bresson suppresses Dostoevskii’s emphasis on psychology in favor of his own ascetic cinematic style, he nevertheless locates important points of contact with the novelist’s existentialist questions and concern for alienation from others. Bresson’s replacement of the murder of a pawnbroker with the crime of pickpocketing recalls another Dostoevskian novel, The Gambler, in which the protagonist tests himself against fate through risky bets at the roulette wheel that, similarly to Raskolnikov and Bresson’s hero Michel, enslave him in a compulsion that erodes his selfhood.
This article centers on Osip Mandelstam’s reading of his 1922 lyric «Я по лесенке приставной», wh... more This article centers on Osip Mandelstam’s reading of his 1922 lyric «Я по лесенке приставной», which I consider in light of declamation studies of the time and the subsequent observations on vowels made by linguists who discounted those studies. I first provide a sketch of the work of Sergei Bernshtein and Sofia Vysheslavtseva, two declamation theorists who were personally acquainted with Mandelstam and whose work both informed and was, in turn, informed by his declamations. I then go on to reflect on what we can glean from the way Mandelstam reads his lyric. Taking my cue from Bernshtein’s and Vysheslavtseva’s emphasis on the motor experience of poetry and from Mandelstam’s own privileging of vowels in his reading, I chart the movement of the tongue that the articulation of these vowels demands. This reveals what might be called choreography in the mouth – gestural patterns that lead into a somatic experience of the poem and provide it with an additional layer of structure. I close...
In her artistic philosophy Marina Tsvetaeva insists on the precedence of the word over what it st... more In her artistic philosophy Marina Tsvetaeva insists on the precedence of the word over what it stands for. “Slovo ved' bol'she veshch', chem veshch': ono samo veshch', kotoraia tol'ko znak.” The signifier comes first and the signified trails after it, for the acoustic properties of the word expand its capability beyond mere denotation to poetic creation. The proper name too, far from being a mere representation in Tsvetaeva's view, draws its bearer into a broad range of associations and creates a complex personal universe that can be discovered by means of the poet's “khozhdenie po slukhu.”From general observations on the importance Tsvetaeva ascribed to names in a variety of works, this paper will proceed to an examination of her 1916 dedication to Aleksandr Blok, “Imia tvoe—ptitsa v ruke.” Analysis of this remarkable poem demonstrates vividly Tsvetaeva's realization of the creative potential of Blok's name. This specific example will provide...
This article is devoted to an important but understudied aspect of the creative selfaffirmations ... more This article is devoted to an important but understudied aspect of the creative selfaffirmations that Tsvetaeva accomplishes in her essays dedicated to other poets, namely her rethinking of gender and how it relates to poetry. The focus here is specifically on how Tsvetaeva cultivates these ideas in 'Geroi truda' and 'Zhivoe o zhivom'-essays Tsvetaeva dedicated to Valerij Briusov and Maksimilian Voloshin respectively. Skillfully negotiating between the imperative to champion the woman's cause on the one hand and what was to her the distasteful feminist separatism on the other, Cvetaeva promotes a natural affiliation of women and poetry that contravenes popular assessments of women poets as aberrations. Not content to be a poetess on a male stage, she seeks to dismantle extant norms and to reconceptualize gender in order to reconstitute the tradition. Ultimately she effects a radical realignment of poetry and gender so as to privilege not only the woman poet, but all women-whether or not they write.
Two hundred years after his birth, Alexander Pushkin still issues a dynamic, liberating challenge... more Two hundred years after his birth, Alexander Pushkin still issues a dynamic, liberating challenge to Russia's cultural identity. His story has promised national coherence and meant artistic integrity in its seemingly purest form. Irreverent and polemical responses to Pushkin abound, but Russians retain a deep investment in Pushkin's image. Commemorating Pushkin argues that the emotional complexity of Russia's relationship with Pushkin has informed both large-scale cultural institutions and the writings of talented individuals. It assesses twentieth-century museums, anniversary rituals, and films that keep the poet alive. It shows how Pushkin's self-fashioning was exemplary for Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Andrei Bitov, and Andrei Sinyavsky. And it goes beyond well-known figures to give names and histories to poets, novelists, actors, filmmakers, scholars, and museum workers who have sustained Russia's myth of a national poet.
Invitation was one of Nabokov's favorite novels, written “in one fortnight of wonderful excit... more Invitation was one of Nabokov's favorite novels, written “in one fortnight of wonderful excitement and sustained inspiration.” Although it reads like an attack on dictatorial rule, Nabokov denied it political relevance, aiming at totalitarianism of a higher order: the constraints of mortality that he seeks, as the epigraph indicates, to refute: “Comme un fou se croit Dieu, nous nous croyons mortels.” The novel rebels against the certainty that life is movement toward death operating in conjunction with the uncertainty of when death will come. Its hero is condemned to execution, but denied “compensation for a death sentence”—the “knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die.” His nearing end is manifested metaphorically, but it is in the construction of the world of Invitation that Nabokov—whom one reviewer called “almost as much a theorizer of fiction as a practitioner”—develops narrative strategies that engage the reader in his challenge to mortality. This article considers h...
Examining the significant influence of the Soviet Union on the work of four major African America... more Examining the significant influence of the Soviet Union on the work of four major African American authors—and on twentieth-century American debates about race— Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain remaps black modernism, revealing the importance of the Soviet experience in the formation of a black transnationalism. Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, Claude McKay, and Paul Robeson each lived or traveled extensively in the Soviet Union between the 1920s and the 1960s, and each reflected on Communism and Soviet life in works that have been largely unavailable, overlooked, or understudied. Kate A. Baldwin takes up these writings, as well as considerable material from Soviet sources—including articles in Pravda and Ogonek , political cartoons, Russian translations of unpublished manuscripts now lost, and mistranslations of major texts—to consider how these writers influenced and were influenced by both Soviet and American culture. Her work demonstrates how the construction of a new Soviet citizen attracted African Americans to the Soviet Union, where they could explore a national identity putatively free of class, gender, and racial biases. While Hughes and McKay later renounced their affiliations with the Soviet Union, Baldwin shows how, in different ways, both Hughes and McKay, as well as Du Bois and Robeson, used their encounters with the U. S. S. R. and Soviet models to rethink the exclusionary practices of citizenship and national belonging in the United States, and to move toward an internationalism that was a dynamic mix of antiracism, anticolonialism, social democracy, and international socialism. Recovering what Baldwin terms the "Soviet archive of Black America," this book forces a rereading of some of the most important African American writers and of the transnational circuits of black modernism.
... I. Hasty, Olga Peters. II. ... who have helped us in a variety of ways throughout our project... more ... I. Hasty, Olga Peters. II. ... who have helped us in a variety of ways throughout our project: Robert V. Allen, Susan Amert, Allen Forte, Christopher F. Hasty, Joan D. Hedrick, Robert L. Jackson, Judge Louis H. Pollak, Tatiana Rannit, Eric Salt, Ronald W. Schatz, Edward Stankiewicz ...
In his "Confession of a White Widowed Male, " Humbert Humbert, the fictional narrator of Nabokov'... more In his "Confession of a White Widowed Male, " Humbert Humbert, the fictional narrator of Nabokov's Lolita, writes: "I am not concerned with so-called 'sex' at all. " In the context of a narrative that centers on his pedophilia, it is difficult to take this assertion seriously. Yet if we do, we come to appreciate that Humbert's sexuality is emblematic of a distinctly modernist response to the perennial question of how to counter temporal passage and the inevitable loss attendant on it. Nabokov's configuration of memory, consciousness, and time in Lolita shows how passage itself might be engaged in the creative enterprise of resisting loss. tic re-living." 4 Arising from the modernist tendency to think in terms of process and change rather than stability and stasis, this configuration of time, memory, and Memory, Consciousness, and Time in Nabokov's Lolita • 227
Marina Cvetaeva’s biography and her relationship with visual arts, drama, folklore, music, transl... more Marina Cvetaeva’s biography and her relationship with visual arts, drama, folklore, music, translation, and the work of other poets, as well as her continuing influence on subsequent Russian poetry.
This chapter focuses on Robert Bresson’s engagement of Dostoevskii’s Crime and Punishment in his ... more This chapter focuses on Robert Bresson’s engagement of Dostoevskii’s Crime and Punishment in his 1959 film The Pickpocket. It argues that although Bresson suppresses Dostoevskii’s emphasis on psychology in favor of his own ascetic cinematic style, he nevertheless locates important points of contact with the novelist’s existentialist questions and concern for alienation from others. Bresson’s replacement of the murder of a pawnbroker with the crime of pickpocketing recalls another Dostoevskian novel, The Gambler, in which the protagonist tests himself against fate through risky bets at the roulette wheel that, similarly to Raskolnikov and Bresson’s hero Michel, enslave him in a compulsion that erodes his selfhood.
This article centers on Osip Mandelstam’s reading of his 1922 lyric «Я по лесенке приставной», wh... more This article centers on Osip Mandelstam’s reading of his 1922 lyric «Я по лесенке приставной», which I consider in light of declamation studies of the time and the subsequent observations on vowels made by linguists who discounted those studies. I first provide a sketch of the work of Sergei Bernshtein and Sofia Vysheslavtseva, two declamation theorists who were personally acquainted with Mandelstam and whose work both informed and was, in turn, informed by his declamations. I then go on to reflect on what we can glean from the way Mandelstam reads his lyric. Taking my cue from Bernshtein’s and Vysheslavtseva’s emphasis on the motor experience of poetry and from Mandelstam’s own privileging of vowels in his reading, I chart the movement of the tongue that the articulation of these vowels demands. This reveals what might be called choreography in the mouth – gestural patterns that lead into a somatic experience of the poem and provide it with an additional layer of structure. I close...
In her artistic philosophy Marina Tsvetaeva insists on the precedence of the word over what it st... more In her artistic philosophy Marina Tsvetaeva insists on the precedence of the word over what it stands for. “Slovo ved' bol'she veshch', chem veshch': ono samo veshch', kotoraia tol'ko znak.” The signifier comes first and the signified trails after it, for the acoustic properties of the word expand its capability beyond mere denotation to poetic creation. The proper name too, far from being a mere representation in Tsvetaeva's view, draws its bearer into a broad range of associations and creates a complex personal universe that can be discovered by means of the poet's “khozhdenie po slukhu.”From general observations on the importance Tsvetaeva ascribed to names in a variety of works, this paper will proceed to an examination of her 1916 dedication to Aleksandr Blok, “Imia tvoe—ptitsa v ruke.” Analysis of this remarkable poem demonstrates vividly Tsvetaeva's realization of the creative potential of Blok's name. This specific example will provide...
This article is devoted to an important but understudied aspect of the creative selfaffirmations ... more This article is devoted to an important but understudied aspect of the creative selfaffirmations that Tsvetaeva accomplishes in her essays dedicated to other poets, namely her rethinking of gender and how it relates to poetry. The focus here is specifically on how Tsvetaeva cultivates these ideas in 'Geroi truda' and 'Zhivoe o zhivom'-essays Tsvetaeva dedicated to Valerij Briusov and Maksimilian Voloshin respectively. Skillfully negotiating between the imperative to champion the woman's cause on the one hand and what was to her the distasteful feminist separatism on the other, Cvetaeva promotes a natural affiliation of women and poetry that contravenes popular assessments of women poets as aberrations. Not content to be a poetess on a male stage, she seeks to dismantle extant norms and to reconceptualize gender in order to reconstitute the tradition. Ultimately she effects a radical realignment of poetry and gender so as to privilege not only the woman poet, but all women-whether or not they write.
Two hundred years after his birth, Alexander Pushkin still issues a dynamic, liberating challenge... more Two hundred years after his birth, Alexander Pushkin still issues a dynamic, liberating challenge to Russia's cultural identity. His story has promised national coherence and meant artistic integrity in its seemingly purest form. Irreverent and polemical responses to Pushkin abound, but Russians retain a deep investment in Pushkin's image. Commemorating Pushkin argues that the emotional complexity of Russia's relationship with Pushkin has informed both large-scale cultural institutions and the writings of talented individuals. It assesses twentieth-century museums, anniversary rituals, and films that keep the poet alive. It shows how Pushkin's self-fashioning was exemplary for Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Andrei Bitov, and Andrei Sinyavsky. And it goes beyond well-known figures to give names and histories to poets, novelists, actors, filmmakers, scholars, and museum workers who have sustained Russia's myth of a national poet.
Invitation was one of Nabokov's favorite novels, written “in one fortnight of wonderful excit... more Invitation was one of Nabokov's favorite novels, written “in one fortnight of wonderful excitement and sustained inspiration.” Although it reads like an attack on dictatorial rule, Nabokov denied it political relevance, aiming at totalitarianism of a higher order: the constraints of mortality that he seeks, as the epigraph indicates, to refute: “Comme un fou se croit Dieu, nous nous croyons mortels.” The novel rebels against the certainty that life is movement toward death operating in conjunction with the uncertainty of when death will come. Its hero is condemned to execution, but denied “compensation for a death sentence”—the “knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die.” His nearing end is manifested metaphorically, but it is in the construction of the world of Invitation that Nabokov—whom one reviewer called “almost as much a theorizer of fiction as a practitioner”—develops narrative strategies that engage the reader in his challenge to mortality. This article considers h...
Examining the significant influence of the Soviet Union on the work of four major African America... more Examining the significant influence of the Soviet Union on the work of four major African American authors—and on twentieth-century American debates about race— Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain remaps black modernism, revealing the importance of the Soviet experience in the formation of a black transnationalism. Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, Claude McKay, and Paul Robeson each lived or traveled extensively in the Soviet Union between the 1920s and the 1960s, and each reflected on Communism and Soviet life in works that have been largely unavailable, overlooked, or understudied. Kate A. Baldwin takes up these writings, as well as considerable material from Soviet sources—including articles in Pravda and Ogonek , political cartoons, Russian translations of unpublished manuscripts now lost, and mistranslations of major texts—to consider how these writers influenced and were influenced by both Soviet and American culture. Her work demonstrates how the construction of a new Soviet citizen attracted African Americans to the Soviet Union, where they could explore a national identity putatively free of class, gender, and racial biases. While Hughes and McKay later renounced their affiliations with the Soviet Union, Baldwin shows how, in different ways, both Hughes and McKay, as well as Du Bois and Robeson, used their encounters with the U. S. S. R. and Soviet models to rethink the exclusionary practices of citizenship and national belonging in the United States, and to move toward an internationalism that was a dynamic mix of antiracism, anticolonialism, social democracy, and international socialism. Recovering what Baldwin terms the "Soviet archive of Black America," this book forces a rereading of some of the most important African American writers and of the transnational circuits of black modernism.
... I. Hasty, Olga Peters. II. ... who have helped us in a variety of ways throughout our project... more ... I. Hasty, Olga Peters. II. ... who have helped us in a variety of ways throughout our project: Robert V. Allen, Susan Amert, Allen Forte, Christopher F. Hasty, Joan D. Hedrick, Robert L. Jackson, Judge Louis H. Pollak, Tatiana Rannit, Eric Salt, Ronald W. Schatz, Edward Stankiewicz ...
In his "Confession of a White Widowed Male, " Humbert Humbert, the fictional narrator of Nabokov'... more In his "Confession of a White Widowed Male, " Humbert Humbert, the fictional narrator of Nabokov's Lolita, writes: "I am not concerned with so-called 'sex' at all. " In the context of a narrative that centers on his pedophilia, it is difficult to take this assertion seriously. Yet if we do, we come to appreciate that Humbert's sexuality is emblematic of a distinctly modernist response to the perennial question of how to counter temporal passage and the inevitable loss attendant on it. Nabokov's configuration of memory, consciousness, and time in Lolita shows how passage itself might be engaged in the creative enterprise of resisting loss. tic re-living." 4 Arising from the modernist tendency to think in terms of process and change rather than stability and stasis, this configuration of time, memory, and Memory, Consciousness, and Time in Nabokov's Lolita • 227
Uploads
Papers by Olga Hasty