#38 - JRL 2006-101 - JRL Home
From: "Najat Idrissi" <n.idrissi@rodopi.nl>
Subject: New book: Montaging Pushkin: Pushkin and
Visions of Modernity in Russian Twentieth-Century Poetry by Alexandra Smith
Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2006
Montaging Pushkin: Pushkin and Visions of Modernity in Russian
TwentiethCentury Poetry.
Alexandra Smith
Amsterdam/New York, NY 2006. 361 pp. (Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics
46)
ISBN-10: 90-420-2012-1 € 72,-/$ 90.-
ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2012-2
Online info:
http://www.rodopi.nl/senj.asp?BookId=SSLP+46
Montaging Pushkin offers for the first time a coherent view of Pushkin’s
legacy to Russian twentieth-century poetry, giving many new insights. Pushkin is
shown to be a Russian forerunner of Baudelaire. Furthermore it is argued that
the rise of the Russian and European novel largely changed the ways Russian
poets have looked at themselves and at poetic language; that novelisation of
poetry is detectable in the major works of poetry that engaged in a creative
dialogue with Pushkin, and that polyphonic lyric has been achieved. Alexandra
Smith locates significant examples of Pushkin’s cinematographic cognition of
reality, suggesting that such dynamic descriptions of Petersburg helped create a
highly original animated image of the city as comic apocalypse, which followers
of Pushkin appropriated very successfully even as far as the late twentieth
century. Montaging Pushkin will be of interest to all students of Russian
poetry, as well as specialists in literary theory, European studies and the
history of ideas.
“Smith's thesis is both startling and original: that Pushkin, for all his
Mozart-like fluidity and perfection, can be productively read as a poet of pain
and violence. His reflex was to respond to the totalizing, authoritative public
landscape of his era with an equally severe but specifically private,
individualizing, disciplined set of demands on the Poet. The recurring attention
that later generations have paid toward those aspects of Pushkin's life and
texts governed by the private right to resist or to initiate violence (his duel,
his struggles with the bureaucracy, his failed pursuit of service with honour)
suggest that this mythologeme is among the most productive in Pushkin's
astonishing legacy”
CARYL EMERSON (A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages
and Literatures, Chair of the Slavic Department, Professor of Comparative
Literature at Princeton University)
“Smith's innovative study offers a wonderful analysis of how cinematographic
editing and polyphony are detected in Russian twentieth-century poetry... It
views Pushkin as a “référence obligée” of contemporary urban poetry”
VÉRONIQUE LOSSKY (Professor Emeritus of Russian Literature at the Université
de Paris-Sorbonne IV)
* SSLP is a series of monographs and occasional collections of papers in the
field of descriptive and theoretical Slavic poetics. SSLP appears at irregular
intervals.
For subscription and review copy please refer to our website
http://www.rodopi.nl/oi.asp#review
N. Idrissi
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