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

perhaps" (роман в стихах, может быть). 189
Critics have addressed the novelistic nature
of Lavinia in similarly qualified terms. 190
In this chapter I will try to understand the
nature of Shvarts's "perhaps"—to explicate more fully the novelistic and other generic
and formal qualities of the book. First, I will explore the book's introductory material
(the title, epigraphs, publisher's foreword and sister's letter)—a fictional structure within
which the reader approaches Lavinia's verse. I will pay special attention to the title
which provides the ecumenical mission of Lavinia's convent (the circumcision of the
heart), and to the subtitle, "От Рождества до Пасхи," a literal and spiritual timeframe
which Lavinia's poetry follows. I will discuss the fictional world created within Lavinia's
book and the characters who populate it. I will then look at lyric connections made
between non-narrative poems which make whole an otherwise "fragmentary novel."
Finally, I will show how the final poem, "Скит," provides a resolution to the many
seemingly disjointed threads of the book.
Title
Shvarts provides a tremendous amount of "introductory" material in Труды и дни
Лавинии, монахини из ордена обрезания сердца. The title itself is packed with
references to multiple traditions: the poetic ancestry of Hesiod's Works and Days; the
apparent pagan ancestry of the heroine, Lavinia; and the biblical source of the
189 Ibid. See also the short autobiography written for Barbara Heldt in December, 1988. Barbara Heldt,
"The Poetry of Elena Shvarts," World Literature Today 63, no. 3 (Summer 1989): 381-2.
190 Sandler writes, "Lavinia proceeds as a novel—and very much a twentieth-century novel. Affinities with
the novel mark both its psychological intensity and its evocative yet utterly earthy language." Stephanie
Sandler, "Elena Shvarts," in Russian Women Writers, ed. Christine Tomei (New York: Garland, 1999),
1462. Darra Goldstein has described it as "like a fragmentary novel in verse." Darra Goldstein, "Shvarts,
Elena Andreevna," in Dictionary of Russian Women Writers, ed. Marina Ledkovsky, Charlotte Rosenthal,
and Mary Zirin (Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Press, 1994), 599. Heldt calls it a "sort of diary novel," "a
modern novel in verse, with no plot, but rather a central character who changes daily." Heldt, "The Poetry
of Elena Shvarts," 382-383.
143