Paper Summary
Share...

Direct link:

'All I Have in My Hands is a Clay Bowl': Conversations about Conspiracy in Acmeism

Thu, November 10, 3:15 to 5:00pm CST (3:15 to 5:00pm CST), The Palmer House Hilton, Floor: 3rd Floor, Salon 10

Abstract

Vladislav Khodasevich concluded his 1921 speech ‘The Shaken Tripod’ by announcing that at the time of cultural and social rupture, the fading Pushkinian tradition became a password for the similarly minded to recognize each other amidst the “encroaching darkness.” Only three years earlier, Khodasevich had given a series of introductory lectures on Pushkin for proletarian students, but the hope for pedagogical success was short-lived: ‘The Shaken Tripod’ casts a sense of isolation, hopelessness, and threat of erasure. This sharp turn in perspective and status, from an educator to a dissident and an outlaw, was quite paradigmatic at the time. This study will take as its focus the poetic conversations about conspiracy between Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam. After the arrest and execution of Nikolai Gumilyov in August 1921, conspiracy narrative permanently became part of Acmeist mythologies. Both in the immediate responses to Gumilyov’s death and in the later works of Akhmatova and Mandelstam, questions about the nature of conspiracy were raised: what does it mean to be a conspirator? What does it do to one’s life and work? Where does one draw the line between conspiracy and peaceful opposition? How does one handle the trauma of living with conspiratorial legacies – in a world where the definition of conspiracy is constantly changing? These conversations, I argue, not only explore the subject of conspiracy – they are, in their own right, a performance of poetry as a conspiratorial practice. Akhmatova and Mandelstam work with Pushkin’s representations of conspiracy to encode their own texts, often relying on Innokenty Annensky’s poetry as an intermediary.

Author