Tsvetaeva's Orphic Journeys in the Worlds of the Word explores the rich theme of the myth of Orpheus as master narrative for poetic inspiration and creative survival in the life and work of Marina Tsvetaeva. Olga Peters Hasty establishes the basic themes of the Orphic Complex--the poet's longing to mediate between the embodied physical world and an "elsewhere," the poet's inability to do so, the primacy of the voice over the visual world, the insistence on concrete imagery, the costs of the poet's gift--and orders her arguments in the tragic shape of the Orpheus myth as it worked itself out organically in Tsvetaeva's own life. Hasty delineates the connections between the Orpheus myth and other key mythological and literary figures in the poet's life--including Alexander Blok, Anna Akhmatova, Alexander Pushkin, and Rainer Maria Rilke--to make an important and original critical contribution.

Snapshots of the Soul considers how photography has shaped Russian poetry from the early twentieth century to the present day. Drawing on theories of the lyric and the elegy, the social history of technology, and little-known archival materials, Molly Thomasy Blasing offers close readings of poems by Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, Joseph Brodsky, and Bella Akhmadulina, as well as by the late and post-Soviet poets Andrei Sen-Sen'kov, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, and Kirill Medvedev, to understand their fascination with the visual language, representational power, and metaphorical possibilities offered by the camera and the photographic image. Within the context of long-standing anxieties about the threat that visual media pose to literary culture, Blasing finds that these poets were attracted to the affinities and tensions that exist between the lyric or elegy and the snapshot. Snapshots of the Soul reveals that at the core of each poet's approach to "writing the photograph" is the urge to demonstrate the superior ability of poetic language to capture and convey human experience. Open Access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

This collection of essays, which should appeal both to Slavists and students of comparative literature, deals with twelve major twentieth-century Russian poets who, for varied reasons, became estranged from the Soviet state. Some stayed in Russia to become inner émigrés, others chose to go into exile in the West. One less hope, one more song (Akhmatova's words), stands both for their suffering and often their deaths, but also for their humanity and poetic achievement. The poets in question are Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelshtam, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Alexander Blok, Sergey Esenin, Nikolay Gumilev, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Marina Tsvetaeva, Vladislav Khodasevich, Boris Poplavsky, Boris Pasternak and Joseph Brodsky. The whole collection is followed by a cultural perspective of the Russian 19th and 20th centuries.

Marina Cvetaeva is one of the best-known Russian poets of the 20th century, often translated and studied in a copious scholarly literature. With articles on Cvetaeva’s biography and her relationship with visual arts, drama, folklore, music, translation and the work of other poets, this volume offers both a valuable overview of scholarly approaches to her work today and a way to enter specific aspects of her writing and career. Contributors include both foremost established scholars of Cvetaeva’s work and young scholars taking new approaches and discovering neglected artifacts and topics. Scholars who do not read Russian will find this collection of value, as will advanced students of Russian literature, poetry, and women’s writing. Contributors include Molly Thomasy Blasing, Karen Evans-Romaine, Sibelan Forrester, Karin Grelz, Olga Peters Hasty, Maria Khotimsky, Olga Partan, and Alexandra Smith

Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva’s powerful poetic voice and her tragic life have often prompted literary commentators to treat her as either a martyr or a monster. Born in Russia in 1892, she emigrated to Europe in 1922, returned to the Soviet Union at the height of the Stalinist Terror, and committed suicide in 1941. Alyssa Dinega focuses on the poetry, rediscovering Tsvetaeva as a serious thinker with a coherent artistic and philosophical vision.

This study rehabilitates Tsvetaeva as a serious, innovative ethical thinker who developed an ethics for the poet that could dispense with universal value guarantees. For Tsvetaeva, ethical judgements had to be individual rather than universal, open to revision rather than permanent. Examining her ideational background, the study sheds new light on the pre-exile years, when Tsvetaeva suffered from a profound uncertainty about the moral nature and duty of the poet. It identifies the experience of exile as a catalyst for the development of her ethical thought that culminated in 'Iskusstvo pri svete sovesti'. Considering Tsvetaeva's application of her ethics in her life, this study reveals her emphasis on the personal to be the direct result of her ethical belief in individual judgements. Her conscious effort persistently to counteract dominant political ideologies similarly stems from her ethical suspicion of any kind of claim on universal truth. Finally the study assesses the significance of Tsvetaeva's suicide, revealing it to be the inevitable, terrifying consequence of her ethical self-definition, her commitment to individual freedom, and the pursuit of higher truths.

A wide-ranging consideration of the nature and significance of Pushkin's African heritage Roughly in the year 1705, a young African boy, acquired from the seraglio of the Turkish sultan, was transported to Russia as a gift to Peter the Great. This child, later known as Abram Petrovich Gannibal, was to become Peter's godson and to live to a ripe old age, having attained the rank of general and the status of Russian nobility. More important, he was to become the great-grandfather of Russia's greatest national poet, Alexander Pushkin. It is the contention of the editors of this book, borne out by the essays in the collection, that Pushkin's African ancestry has played the role of a "wild card" of sorts as a formative element in Russian cultural mythology; and that the ways in which Gannibal's legacy has been included in or excluded from Pushkin's biography over the last two hundred years can serve as a shifting marker of Russia's self-definition. The first single volume in English on this rich topic, Under the Sky of My Africa addresses the wide variety of interests implicated in the question of Pushkin's blackness-race studies, politics, American studies, music, mythopoetic criticism, mainstream Pushkin studies. In essays that are by turns biographical, iconographical, cultural, and sociological in focus, the authors-representing a broad range of disciplines and perspectives-take us from the complex attitudes toward race in Russia during Pushkin's era to the surge of racism in late Soviet and post-Soviet contemporary Russia. In sum, Under the Sky of My Africa provides a wealth of basic material on the subject as well as a series of provocative readings and interpretations that will influence future considerations of Pushkin and race in Russian culture.