The Occulted Woman In Russian Silver Age Decadent Poetry

2015

2019

P oetry is only one of the exciting cultural achievements of the Russian fin-de-siècle, which has come to be known as the Silver Age. Along with the Ballets russes, the music of Alexander Scriabin or Igor Stravinsky, the avantgarde painting of Kazimir Malevich or Marc Chagall, and the philosophical writings of Lev Shestov or Nikolai Berdyaev, poetry is one of the era's most precious treasures. The Silver Age witnessed an unprecedented and fruitful interaction between Russian literature and the other arts, sometimes within the same person: several of the major poets were (or could have been) musicians and composers; others were painters, important literary critics, religious thinkers, scholars, or philosophers. The culture of book illustration and graphic presentation of poetry rose to new heights, from Mstislav Dobuzhinsky's gorgeous initial letters in the Acmeist journal Apollon to the Cubist-tending images in Futurist publications. The Silver Age also saw the emergence of a much wider range of poets than earlier periods: the poets in this collection represent a striking variety of class, gender, religion, ethnicity, and sexuality. There were plenty of aristocratic writers, of course (like Count Leo Tolstoy, the moral and literary giant whose importance continued right up to his death in 1910). The aristocrats had a better education, access to foreign languages and travel, and money to self-publish when publishers weren't biting. But there were also "raznochintsy" (figures of mixed social background, like Valery Bryusov or Marina Tsvetaeva-though in

2012

The Russian Review, 2019

Much of women's writing emerged as a response to misogynic interpretations of the feminine in androcentric tradition. This paper examines intertextual affinities between the Russian modernist poet Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) and Ukrainian modernist poet Natalia Livyts'ka‐Kholodna (1902–2005) in the context of the European negative symbolism of the feminine; and as a manifestation of transnational modernist practices. It demonstrates how the representation of female sinfulness in misogynic mythology, in which women appeared as demonic‐vampiric, heterodox seductresses, involved a mapping of purported feminine moral deficiency onto the discourse of Orientalism. Identifying how women's writing in Ukrainian and Russian modernisms mimicked androcentric cultural symbolism, the paper demonstrates the complexity of this mimetic function, which simultaneously preserves the symbolic tradition of its origin while in effect canceling it. Specifically, it investigates the poetics of sin as a common thread between Livyts'ka‐Kholodna and Akhmatova. Focusing on the concept of sin enables us to vividly reconstruct the logic of cultural conventions that cast the woman's role as negative, and to trace how female authors departed from these conventions. The study analyzes, in particular, three aspects of the thematics of sin and sinfulness: temptation, heterodoxy, and betrayal.

Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry: Reinventing the Canon

Her research focuses primarily on modern Russian poetry and literary culture, in particular the career of Anna Akhmatova, and she is currently writing a monograph on Russian literary fame and the phenomenon of literary celebrity. Alexandra is also working on a longer-term project, The Poem in the Eye: The Visual Dimension of Russian Poetry, which investigates Russian poetry from the seventeenth century to the present, with a focus on the different ways in which poems prompt the reader to visualise, and the varied relationships that exist between Russian poetry and the visual arts. Her publications include

In my final paper for the “Proseminar: The Silver Age of Russian Poetry – Lost in Translation” by Mag. Irina Brantner I chose to write about the Russian Avant-garde and Velimir Khlebnikov.

2008

Russian Literature, 2013

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.

The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review