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

forgetting will figure repeatedly in her verse; and Rilke's new kind of geography will
provide a thematic focus for the book.
After the ten epigraphs, Shvarts inserts two more voices before finally producing
Lavinia's own verse. First comes a foreword from the fictitious publisher, identified
grammatically as male. 206
Primarily a publisher of contemporary psychological studies
(труды по современной психологии), he makes an exception in the case of Lavinia's
poetry, seeing in it an example of a psychological event—the spontaneous eruption
(взрыв) of the unconscious within a modern consciousness. Lavinia confronts this
eruption head-on, and, as a result, loses her mind. While the foreword is couched in the
publisher's "mock-pompous tones" 207 and impersonal, pseudo-scientific language, it
nonetheless guides the reader into Lavinia's verse. By referring at the outset to Lavinia's
decline into madness, the publisher takes away some of the narrative tension. No longer
concerned with "what will happen," he can focus his attention on the major themes in
Lavinia's verse: organic ecumenism and unorthodoxy (неортодоксальность) combined
with deep faith—issues not ordinarily attributed to academic works of psychology. The
publisher emphasizes the separateness of Lavinia's poems, referring to them in the plural
(произведения монахини Лавинии, присланные нам ее сестрой) rather than as one
work or collection, but he recognizes their composite power to provide insight not only
into one case study of a mad nun, but into the modern human condition as a whole. He
concludes with an explicit wish that Lavinia's verse reach beyond his typical audience of
206 Midway through the introduction, the editor writes, "я бы даже сказал."
207 Heldt, "The Poetry of Elena Shvarts," 383. Heldt has suggested that the foreword might be in imitation
of Dostoevsky's footnote to Notes from Underground. Here, however, Shvarts creates a fictitious character
(the male publisher) to write the foreword, whereas Dostoevsky claims the footnote as his own. Also,
while concerned with the predicament of "contemporary" man, her publisher ultimately seeks selfknowledge
rather than the societal awareness Dostoevsky calls for in Notes.
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