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

Your abandonment of me—
Entire, entire abandonment.
As the book comes to a close, Lavinia explicitly returns to the central aspects of
the book first invoked in the title, epigraphs and title poem. She revisits the metaphor of
the circumcision of the heart, describing God's violent penetration of her breast; she
highlights the extreme ecumenism of her convent by combining Buddhist and Christian
elements in her final poems. In the next and last poem, "Скит," she will move beyond
this sense of violent abandonment and provide something of a resolution.
Роман воспитания: the Abbess's lessons
In her 1997 book Определение в дурную погоду, Shvarts describes the bible as a
"гигантский роман воспитания" (giant bildungsroman); it demonstrates the growth of
God, via the sufferings of Job, from the terrible Yahweh of the Old Testament to the
merciful Christ of the New Testament. 248
In a similar way, Труды и дни Лавинии can be
seen as Lavinia's small роман воспитания—it describes a mad nun's spiritual
development through temptation and suffering toward a unique state of enlightenment
modeled both on Christ's resurrection and the Buddhist state of nirvana.
Lavinia undergoes an explicitly formal education in the book. Just as Lavinia's
encounters with her guardian angel provide a sequential, if fragmented, narrative thread
across the book, so does her series of lessons with another central character, the abbess of
her convent. 249
The Abbess's lessons are described in three of the book's poems: the
248 Shvarts, Определение в дурную погоду, 54.
249 Abbesses played an important role in Buddhist as well as Christian tradition. Cloistered Buddhist
communities (samghas) revolve around the authority of its abbot or abbess who is enlightened enough to
lead the others. For a discussion of monastic orders in Buddhism, see Christopher Lamb's chapter, "Rites
of Passage" in Harvey, Buddhism, 156-162.
185