How 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 Voice helps us understand how poets have at times generated a powerful sense of presence, intimating that they speak through the poem.
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
Height:235
Width:161
Spine:32
Weight:620.00