Anxiety of Post-Imperial Memory: Semyon Khanin’s Poetics of Fragility

• In Event: Contemporary Russophone Literature: History, Memory, and Language

Abstract

The presentation will focus on memory as a key feature of Semyon Khanin’s lyrical oeuvre. In the texts of the Latvian Russophone poet, memory emerges as fragile; a central metaphor for the description of this condition is that of a badly damaged and disintegrating statue. Inscribed in this metaphor, or rather in this oxymoron, is the tension between stability, the durability of culture and cultural memory and their fragility, which will be analyzed against the backdrop of Latvia’s situation as a post-imperial state. Far from any sense of nostalgia or notions of loss and grief, for the poet this tension is what generates culture in the first place. It will be thus argued that this fragility is a conditio sine qua non for the production of culture and is what fuels the production of poetic text.

Author

• Miriam Finkelstein, U of Konstanz (Germany)