Montaging Pushkin: Pushkin and Visions of Modernity in Russian TwentiethCentury Poetry (Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics 46) (Studies in Slavic Literature & Poetics)

Montaging Pushkin offers for the first time a coherent view of Pushkin's legacy to Russian twentieth-century poetry, giving many new insights. Pushkin is shown to be a Russian forerunner of Baudelaire. Furthermore it is argued that the rise of the Russian and European novel largely changed the ways Russian poets have looked at themselves and at poetic language; that novelisation of poetry is detectable in the major works of poetry that engaged in a creative dialogue with Pushkin, and that polyphonic lyric has been achieved. Alexandra Smith locates significant examples of Pushkin's cinematographic cognition of reality, suggesting that such dynamic descriptions of Petersburg helped create a highly original animated image of the city as comic apocalypse, which followers of Pushkin appropriated very successfully even as far as the late twentieth century. Montaging Pushkin will be of interest to all students of Russian poetry, as well as specialists in literary theory, European studies and the history of ideas. "Smith's thesis is both startling and original: that Pushkin, for all his Mozart-like fluidity and perfection, can be productively read as a poet of pain and violence. His reflex was to respond to the totalizing, authoritative public landscape of his era with an equally severe but specifically private, individualizing, disciplined set of demands on the Poet. The recurring attention that later generations have paid toward those aspects of Pushkin's life and texts governed by the private right to resist or to initiate violence (his duel, his struggles with the bureaucracy, his failed pursuit of service with honour) suggest that this mythologeme is among the most productive in Pushkin's astonishing legacy" CARYL EMERSON (A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Chair of the Slavic Department, Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University) "Smith's innovative study offers a wonderful analysis of how cinematographic editing and polyphony are detected in Russian twentieth-century poetry... It views Pushkin as a "référence obligée" of contemporary urban poetry" VÉRONIQUE LOSSKY (Professor Emeritus of Russian Literature at the Université de Paris-Sorbonne IV) Contents 6 Acknowledgements 8 Introduction 12 1. From Pushkin's poetics of exile to the concept of writing as dwelling 40 Preamble 40 Pushkin's lyric "To the Sea" and the formation of the poetic self 55 Tsvetaeva's dialogic poetic self and the Pushkin canon 75 2. Pushkin's Petersburg as comic apocalypse 104 Preamble 104 Pushkin's Petersburg: dandy, aesthetic rag-picker and madman 109 3. 20th-century Pushkinian poetic responses to modernity & urban spectatorship 164 Preamble 164 Annenskii's Pushkin as spectacle, Eisenstein's concept of imagery 168 Pushkin's Petersburg as a living experience in new contexts 181 Urban spectacles and Eisenstein's montage of attractions 214 Narrating the city: from modern object to postmodern sign 228 4. Modernity as writing: Pushkin readers & the Pushkin Myth 256 Preamble 256 Russian émigré poets as readers of Pushkin's texts 270 Pushkinian readings of the city in pain & dynamics of subjectivity in Russian contemporary poetry 305 5. Conclusion 328 Bibliography 334 Additional Reading 352 Index 354 A 354 B 354 C 355 D 356 E 356 F 356 G 356 H 357 I 357 J 357 K 357 L 357 M 358 N 358 O 359 P 359 R 360 S 360 T 361 U 362 V 362 W 362 Z 362 Alexandra Smith. Includes Bibliographical References (p. [333]-352) And Index.