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

spiritual presence can be felt throughout the book. Also for the first time, Gippius
chooses an overall thematic title, Сияния. Her first two collections are titled simply
Собрание стихов and are organized according to the years the poems were written. The
title of her third collection, Стихи. Дневник 1911-1921, explicitly labels the book a
diary—a collection of chronologically organized entries. 96
The seemingly thematic
headings of its subsections, “У порога,” “Война,” “Революция,” and “Там и здесь,” in
fact refer to periods of Gippius’s life to which the poems correspond in terms of the time
of their writing. With Сияния, Gippius moves away from this diary-type organization.
The poems, written over the course of fifteen years, represent only a small portion of the
poetry she wrote in her later period. They are not arranged chronologically, and Gippius
chooses not to date them in the text. 97
In her previous books, Gippius dated each of her
poems. By leaving out the dates in Сияния, Gippius seems to highlight the
interdependence of the poems. Instead of assigning each poem a distinct moment in time,
she suggests that each is part of the overall course of Сияния.
Gippius thought carefully about the way she structured her poetic collections.
She wrote explicitly about the composition of a book of poetry in the introduction to her
first collection, Собрание стихов 1889-1903, “Необходимое о стихах”: “Мне жаль
создавать нечто совершенно бесцельное и никому не нужное. Собрание, книга
стихов в данное время—есть самая бесцельная, ненужная вещь.” 98
She recalled an
earlier time when books were written as wholes, intended to be read straight through. At
96 Some relatively minor exceptions were made, but groupings of poems were all written within the same
period. Chronology is emphasized in the title of her second book, as well. Like the third, it contains dates
in its title: Собрание стихов. Книга вторая 1903-1909. While the second book is limited to a relatively
short time period, Gippius does not follow a chronological order within the book.
97 Gippius makes two exceptions, dating "Рождение" and "Лазарь," which will be discussed below.
98 Gippius, Stikhotvoreniia, 71. Emphasis, Gippius's.
83