THE BOOK OF POEMS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY ... - TopReferat

Other critics who have discussed the role of narrative in lyric cycles have
distinguished plot types or outlined spatio-temporal schemes. 16
Rather than trying to
create my own narrative typology, I attempt to address the issue of narrative within the
context of the second generation of symbolist poets—the poets, particularly Blok, who
solidified a place for the lyric cycle and the book of poems in the Russian twentiethcentury
tradition. To what extent do the books I consider follow a “poema-myth” model?
To what extent can they be read as spiritual diaries or biographies of the poet, and, by
extension, his or her time? Is some form of narrative necessary to create a successful
book of poems? Does each of the books under consideration contain narrative elements?
Are they the dominant elements? How does a narrative thrust affect the autonomy of the
individual poems contained in the book?
In my conclusion, I pose the question of tradition. I have chosen to focus on
books from distinct time periods—the twenties and thirties and the eighties. While just a
tiny sampling of the tremendous poetic output of the past seventy-five years, this
selection of books begs the question of how the conception of the book of poems has
changed over the course of the century. Does Shvarts approach the book of poems
differently because of her fuller awareness of twentieth-century tradition? Or are
Khodasevich and Gippius, having witnessed the advent of the book of poems and already
writing after the importance of its form had been firmly established, even more conscious
of their approach to the book?
16 See Sloane, Aleksandr Blok, 43-60, and L. Liapina, "K voprosu tipologii liricheskikh tsiklov (liricheskii
tsikl v poezii Bal'monta)," in Materialy XXVI nauchnoi studencheskoi konferentsii (Tartu 1971), 61-2.
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