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

This poem can be read as an almost programmatic statement of Shvarts's ecumenical
outlook. Apparent oppositions are synthesized within a universal church: the convent
resembles both a cellar and an attic (подвал, чердак); nuns come together with lamas,
buddhas and demons to worship saints from both the Eastern and Western Christian
traditions (Serafim and Francis). Outside of the physical constraints of space and time,
the convent represents the juncture of two geographically distant forests (Permian and
Thuringian) and the intersection of the present and the past, the past and the future (Он
был сегодня, будет и вчера). 212
Similarly, opposites converge within Lavinia: she
combines light and darkness, like a candle in a pit; she is both wise and stupid (умна,
глупа). 213
These oppositions within the convent and Lavinia herself find a "harmonic
resolution" in spherical images of a ball (шар), a fiery circle (круг огненный), and a
circle of snakes (змеиное кольцо), reminiscent of the ouroboros, the symbol of a snake
with its tail in its mouth representing the eternal circle of life and the wholeness of being.
In fact, the sister's poem provides the clearest moment of harmonic resolution to
be found in the book. The very form of the sister's letter creates a harmony
uncharacteristic of Lavinia's and Shvarts's verse. Written in consistent iambs with a lead
rhyme which repeats in each of the poems three stanzas, the poem stands out in its
normalcy from the shifting, often jarring rhythms typical of Shvarts's verse. 214
This sense
of harmony owes much to the sister's use of repetition: extensive anaphora in the first
seven lines of the poem; the repetition of the phrase "этого довольно" in the final stanza;
212 In Molnar's Paradise translation, poems excerpted from Lavinia are preceded by the following
description of the convent of the Circumcision of the Heart: "На скрещении времен, пространств и
религий стоит вообржаемый монастырь Обрезанья Сердца." (Shvarts, Paradise, 110)
213 This second opposition recalls the equation of madness (signaled here by apparent stupidity) and
wisdom in the first epigraph, and the suggestion by the publisher that Lavinia's record of her decline into
madness will lead to a better understanding of the self.
214 For a discussion of Shvarts's "polyrhythmic verse," see Skidan, "Summa poetiki," 285-7.
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