Beginnings and Endings in Russian Poetry: Progressions, Portrayals, Potentials

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The logic of beginnings and endings forms the very basis of artistic biography, of formal narrative theory, and of most theorizations of “texts” as coherent objects of study, tout court. This panel examines the functional role of such inceptions and terminations. Each of the papers aims to challenge the reflexivity of the hermeneutic gestures by which “beginnings” and “endings”—with their ostensibly intrinsic suggestion of teleology and fixity—are ascribed significance. Zachary Deming explores the pragmatics of E. A. Boratynskii’s peculiarly tortured speech-instance to derive a framework for the designation of “progressions” when assessing the plots of non-eventful lyric poetry, reading even Boratynskii’s more hermetic post-1832 lyrics as distinctly “emplotted.” Melaniia Kalinina demonstrates how Andrei Bely’s study of the “curve of the rhythm” of Pushkin’s poetry became a way of reinterpreting his own creative biography. Elizaveta Dvortsova examines iconicity in portrayals of “beginnings and ends” as coherent themes and topoi throughout the Russian poetry of the 19th and 20th centuries. Benjamin Musachio discusses the early careers of the shestidesiatniki, reading their very first published poems as career beginnings that may (or may not) illuminate their future professional and poetic directions. Together, these papers complicate the relationship between poetic artifacts in toto and the points of emanation and closure that ostensibly bind them together—formulating a vision of poetic “beginnings” and “endings” altogether more fluid and generative than these words, themselves, seem to imply.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 19th Century

Chair

• Veniamin Vadimovich Gushchin, Columbia U

Papers

• Assessing Narrativity in the Lyric Speech Instance: Dialogical Plot and Progression in E. A. Boratynskii’s 'Sumerki' - Zachary J. Deming, Columbia U

• Where the End Begins: Iconicity in Russian Poetry - Elizaveta Dvortsova, U of Southern California

• First Poems as Career Beginnings: The Case of the Shestidesiatniki - Benjamin Musachio, Princeton U

• The Line of Life and the Gesture of Rhythm: An Idea of 'Curve' in Andrei Bely's Writings of the 1920s - Melaniia Kalinina, U of Oxford (UK)

Discussant

• Daria Khitrova, Harvard U