The figure of woman warrior in the poetic dialogue of Valerii Briusov and Nadezhda Lvova

The article considers the development of the story of a duel between a woman warrior and a chosen hero in the poetic dialogue of Valerii Briusov and Nadezhda Lvova. The analysis of the poems constituting this dialogue (“Combat” by Briusov and “Your Helmet Rolled…” by Lvova) is made with reference to three aspects: gender aspect, life-building which was typical for the Symbolists and the topics of Briusov’s and Lvova’s works in general. “Combat”, based on the Eddic plot of Sigurd and Brunhild and submitting to the dominant idea of Briusov’s work (the idea of a hopeless struggle against Fate), gets transformed and the poem’s motifs are included in another plot which is central in Lvova’s work — that of lovers engaged in a fight against each other and fate whilst living and reuniting in the afterlife. The heroine is deprived of her status of half-goddess and becomes an earthly mortal woman. Although Briusov is not afraid to partly “feminize” his lyrical hero by showing him defeated in the combat against woman and Fate, and Lvova gives agency and initiative to the heroine, the gender roles in this male-female dialogue ultimately turn out to be rather traditional. Briusov’s hero dreams of a duel of equals against destiny, while Lvova’s heroine dreams of eternal love, which corresponds to gender stereotypes.

Introduction

Among the topics in Slavic literary scholarship that have emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, the study of Russian modernism, also known as the Silver Age, has been one of the indisputable leaders. The groundwork for the canonization of the Silver Age was laid in the postwar Soviet Union, where young poets like Andrei Voznesenskii and Joseph Brodsky made pilgrimages to Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova. The allure of the Silver Age was increasingly felt in official Soviet culture as well. Just as Vladimir Maiakovskii's canonical status had earlier sanctioned the limited study of other futurists, the official recognition of Aleksandr Blok and Valerii Briusov as the bards of the October revolution provided the cover for scholars in the 1970s and 1980s to undertake a massive excavation of symbolist culture. After the beginning of perestroika, survivors from the Silver Age, from philosopher Aleksei Losev to émigré poet Irina Odoevtseva, came to be revered as emissaries from a lost, better world.

The Impossible Peasant Voice in Russian Culture: Stylization and Mimicry

Unlike the English term “stylization,” Russian stilizatsiia figures prominently in literary theory. Emerging out of debates around Vsevolod Meierkhol'd's theatrical innovations and subsequently elaborated by “Silver Age” writers (Valerii Briusov, Viacheslav Ivanov, Mikhail Kuzmin), formalists (Iurii Tynianov, Boris Eikhenbaum, Viktor Gofman), and Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian concept must be distinguished from cognate terms in other languages—something missing from both Russian and non-Russian discussions. In Russian, stilizatsiia is invoked in two distinct senses: as a critical value judgment (dismissing works considered artificial or “lifeless”) , and as a complex and well-developed strategy of borrowing another's style (thus a sense related to parody and skaz). Works accepted as representing the “voice of the people” have often been exempted from analysis as stilizatsiia; J. Alexander Ogden argues, however, that “peasant poets” (Nikolai Kliuev, Aleksei Kol'tsov, Robert Burns) can best be understood precisely as stylizers in the sense elaborated by Bakhtin and others.

Gender and Genre in Pavlova's A Double Life

The literary reputation of Karolina Pavlova (1807-1893) has fluctuated considerably over the years: she was praised in the 1830s, 1840s and early 1850s, reviled in the 1860s as unprogressive and consigned to oblivion from the 1870s until her death in 1893. At the turn of the century she was rediscovered by the Russian symbolists: Poliakov, Blok and Bely praised her, and Valerii Briusov edited a two-volume edition of her work (1915). Women poets of the time, such as Cherubina de Gabriak (Elisaveta Vasil'eva), Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva and Parnok, cited her and dedicated poems to her. After the revolution Pavlova was reconsigned to oblivion. Two scholarly editions of Pavlova's poetry appeared during the Soviet period (1937 and 1964) but accompanied by introductions deploring her unprogressive views on politics and art. At best they damned her with faint praise as “not first rate but all the same somewhat noteworthy.” The ambivalent attitude toward Pavlova may have reflected a conflict between the Soviet attempt to “claim the classics for the Soviet cause” while downplaying material that could not be construed retroactively to support the Soviet regime; Pavlova was identified with the politically conservative Slavophiles. Only after she had been rediscovered in the west did positive Soviet scholarship about her begin to appear.

Populism and Romantic Agony: A Russian Terrorist's Discovery of Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) has been hailed by followers in many countries as a forerunner of symbolism, if not as the father of modern poetry tout court. In Russia, Andrei Belyi celebrated him together with Nietzsche in 1909 as a "Patriarkh Simvolizma"; and Valerii Briusov wrote in the same year: "Is it possible to question the importance of Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal for the formation of the whole worldview of modernity?" Ellis (L.L. Kobylinskii), the most zealous of all Russian symbolist "Baudelaireans," even tried to convince the menshevik social democrat, N. Valentinov, that Baudelaire was "the greatest revolutionary of the nineteenth century, in comparison with whom all Marxes, Engelses, Bakunins, and the rest of the brotherhood which they created, are simply nothing."