In a now classic 1994 article Victor Zhivov counters the idea that the eighteenth-century quest to create a modern Russian literature represented a wholesale rejection of Russia’s previous literary tradition. He shows instead how poets appropriated elements of Orthodox liturgical tradition in a bid to adapt the classical notion of ‘furor poeticus’, marking it by the eruption of Church Slavonic norms into modern poetics. This chapter demonstrates how, as Zhivov contends, elements of Orthodox liturgical culture have continued to shape the modern Russian poetic tradition from the eighteenth century into the present. In particular, Russian poets have long presented poetry as uniquely able to transform the world by drawing on Orthodox imagery of theosis or divinization—the transfiguration of human life and thus the world, by the divine light and being. The liturgically inflected religious concerns of Russian poetry that sections address include prophecy, human co-creation with God, the problem of the body, and the role of silence.
Complete Poetry of Osip Emilevich Mandelstam. Translated by Burton Raffel and Alia Burago. Introduction and notes by Sidney Monas. Russian Literature in Translation, no. 2. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1973. x, 353 pp. $15.00.