This forum focusing on the prose of Elena Shvarts (1948–2010), a leading poet of the late Soviet “second culture,” includes an introduction by Stephanie Sandler and three articles on writings by Shvarts that have received little or no scholarly attention: “Seeing beyond the Cyclops: Elena Shvarts’s Biography of Gabriele D’Annunzio” by Sarah Clovis Bishop, “Masked and Unmasked: Elena Shvarts’s Historical Drama about Vasilii Mirovich and Emperor Ioann Antonovich (Ivan VI)” by Thomas Epstein, and “Starry-Eyed: Elena Shvarts as ‘The Girl with One Hundred Forty-Eight Birthmarks’” by Laura Little.

Stephanie Sandler is Ernest E. Monrad Professor in the Slavic Department at Harvard University. She was a co-author, with Andrew Kahn, Mark Lipovetsky, and Irina Reyfman of A History of Russian Literature (Oxford University Press). She is completing a monograph on contemporary Russian poetry, and co-editing with Catherine Ciepiela and Luba Golburt a new Oxford Handbook of Russian Poetry.

A central figure of the Leningrad underground of the 1970s and 1980s, Elena Shvarts became a widely published and publicly heralded poet in the post-Soviet period, producing six books of verse between 1995 and 2007. This new work, while continuing to explore themes from her Soviet-era verse, is more closely tied to her personal life, particularly after the death of her mother in 1998. This autobiographical turn is made explicit in her prose writings, particularly her 2003 memoir Vidimaia storona zhizni (The Visible Side of Life). Shvarts continued to write verse until the last days of her life, but her final book was a biography of Gabriele D’Annunzio, the Italian poet, war hero, and politician. A massive undertaking, Gabriele D’Annuntsio. Krylatyi tsiklop (Gabriele D’Annunzio: Winged Cyclops) was published posthumously in May 2010. In the biography, Shvarts focuses on D’Annunzio’s life as a form of artistic invention and simultaneously contemplates her own creative journey. Initially drawn to his fearless, anarchistic nature, reminiscent of her own rebellious youth, she becomes increasingly disillusioned, even horrified, by his spiritual and physical demise. This essay examines the biography alongside her contemporaneous diaries and final poems, arguing that it extends the autobiographical direction of her late poetic and memoiristic work. It reveals her trepidation at her own poetic and physical mortality. Unlike D’Annunzio, however, Shvarts rejects the path of material indulgence and degradation and arrives at an unwavering conviction of faith.

Sarah Clovis Bishop is Associate Professor of Russian at Willamette University. Her research focuses on twentieth and twenty-first century poetry and theater.

In 1968, Elena Shvarts (1948–2010) wrote her only play, which takes up the unhappy fate of Russian Emperor Ivan VI Antonovich and his would-be rescuer, Vasilii Mirovich. Drawing on a myriad of historical and literary sources, and experimenting in a variety of styles, this historical tragicomedy demonstrates both the young author’s mastery of dramatic form and her (post)modern penchant for quotation, paradox, and collisions of meaning. Drawing from commedia dell’arte and Modernist balagan, engaging Pushkin, Gogol, and Shakespeare, deploying absurdist humor and classical tragedy, politics and puppets, Shvarts’s supersaturated play is revealing both of the author and her times. This essay attempts to elucidate several of these connections, to clarify some of the author’s intentions, and to place this early, unusual work within the overall context of Shvarts’s oeuvre.

Thomas Epstein is Professor of the Practice in the Classics Department at Boston College. His book of translations of selected prose and poetry of Elena Shvarts is due for publication in 2023.

This article analyzes “The Girl with One Hundred Forty-Eight Birthmarks” (“Devochka so sta soroka vosem'iu rodinkami,” 1961) a work of juvenilia by Elena Shvarts, a prominent poet and participant in Leningrad’s unofficial cultural scene in the 1970s and 1980s. The autobiographical narrative, a work of self-imposed and self-regulated literary apprenticeship, depicts Shvarts’s daily experiences on tour and on holiday with the Bolshoi Drama Theater, where her mother Dina Shvarts was chief dramaturg. The lyrical travelogue shows the young Shvarts to be actively engaged with literary trends of the Thaw era: newly available translations, documentary and youth prose, and the self-expression advocated by Ol'ga Berggol'ts, Vladimir Pomerants, and others. Even as she explicitly drew on contemporary sources for inspiration, mixing them in an early display of eclecticism, Shvarts’s own future poetics are visible in the story, which harmonizes seemingly disharmonious modes of writing and forms of self-presentation: lyrical and documentary, performative and sincere, masculine and feminine. The metaphor of her title, meanwhile, anticipates a figure deployed in Shvarts’s mature poetry: the skin as palimpsestic text and map of the astral body.

Laura Little Laura Little is Lecturer of Slavic Studies at Connecticut College. Her 2021 dissertation, “Becoming an Andegraund Poet: Elena Shvarts and the Literary Environment of the Late Soviet Era,” traces Shvarts’s formation and rise to prominence. Little’s current research examines the role of the spoken word in Leningrad unofficial poetry.

The article explores how Dmitry Grigorovich invented peasant subjectivity in his novella The Village (1846). The author operationalizes Jacques Rancière’s and Georges Didi-Huberman’s concept of “the sensible” and their studies of the representation of subaltern people in art and literature to trace how speech, feelings, and thoughts are represented in Grigorovich’s narration. Unlike his predecessors in the genre (Karamzin, Pogodin, Polevoi, and others), Grigorovich splits introspections into the heroine’s inner world into feelings and thoughts, depicted separately. While the feelings are portrayed as available for “reading” by the narrator, the latter prove to be at best semi-transparent, but mostly opaque. Protagonist Akulina appears in the story almost wordless: serfdom and family violence harden her and lead to a refusal to speak. The heroine’s “muteness” and the chain of sufferings reflect what Peter Brooks called the melodramatic mode of representation, which affects and plays with the feelings of readers. All this together explains how Grigorovich managed to create an innovative narrative about peasants and why it is possible to consider his representation a new type of peasant subjectivity.

Alexey Vdovin is Associate Professor in the School of Philological Studies at HSE University in Moscow, Russia. He is the author of Ladies without Camellias: Private Correspondence between Sex Workers and Nikolai Dobroliubov and Nikolai Chernyshevsky (Moscow: HSE University Press, 2022, in Russian), Dobroliubov: A Raznochinets between the Spirit and the Flesh (Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia, 2017, in Russian), and numerous articles on Russian literature in the age of Realism.

This article uses Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the hidden polemic to investigate how Anna Karenina contests themes, situations, characterizations, and particulars of language of Piotr Boborykin’s novel Polzhizni (Half a Life, 1873). Boborykin recounts a married Muscovite countess’s seduction and prolonged affair with a middle-class agronomist from the mid-Volga region. The work anticipated the unusual cluster of three major concerns of Anna Karenina: marital infidelity, farming, and Russian vacationing in Italy. More specifically, Half a Life set a model of the aesthetics of adultery, the interpenetration of art and sex that first emerged as a problem in Tolstoy’s oeuvre in Anna Karenina and then evolved in The Kreutzer Sonata and What Is Art?. In parallel to Tolstoy’s Anna, Boborykin’s adulteress appears as a work of art, a practitioner of art, and a Grand Tourist art consumer. Both adulteresses form a “criminal liaison.” Boborykin’s heroine, however, suffers little punishment, in deviation from the generic tendency for the “novel of adultery,” as invented in the West, to condemn the wayward wife to death. Anna Karenina, on the other hand, steadily constructs the self-destructive sinfulness of adultery, in counterpoint to the Levin-Kitty marriage. In killing Anna, Tolstoy reinstated the conventional death penalty, a choice related to the notable role that Half a Life played as a mediator of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and lesser French novels about wives cheating on their husbands.

Susan Layton is a research associate at the Centre d’études des mondes russe, caucasien, et centre-européen, Paris. She has published Contested Russian Tourism: Cosmopolitanism, Nation, and Empire in the Nineteenth Century (2021), Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (1994), and numerous articles. Her current projects include an investigation of Russian poets in the army during the Romantic era.

This article investigates the role of revision in Pasternak’s poetic practice through a detailed analysis of the early poem “City” (1916). While critical accounts of this aspect of Pasternak’s work usually focus on changes made between successive manuscripts, I pursue an account of revision that ties it directly to the incoherence it is usually expected to clarify. When placed in the context of the artistic experiments and debates of its time, I argue, the often chaotic, disorderly quality of Pasternak’s earliest work reads as a metapoetic exploration of the specific qualities of poetic language, the work of which it makes newly visible. The article is split into two parts. The first demonstrates how the poem rewrites nineteenth-century urban prose according to the non-linear temporality of poetry. The second part of the article turns to consider the poem’s spatial dimension, which relates to avant-garde debates about the frame. I end by briefly considering the 1928 version of the poem, which I conclude does not so much revise the original as extend and reiterate its central theme.

Isobel Palmer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham, U.K. Her research focuses on twentieth-century poetry, modernist culture, and performance. She is currently completing a monograph on intermediality in Russian modernist poetry. She is PI on the British Academy-funded research project “Poetry in Public: The Social Life of Russian Verse 1900–1991.”

In this article I examine the hundreds of citations and allusions to the Song of Songs contained in seventeenth-century Ukrainian sermons. I place these quotations within their historical and intellectual context, exploring how that very context affected and shaped the complexity of the Song’s appeal to some of the most influential early modern Ruthenian preachers: Lazar Baranovych, Ioanykii Galiatovs'kyi, Stefan Iavors'kyi, Simeon Polotskii, Antonii Radyvylovs'kyi, and Dymytrii Tuptalo (Dimitrii Rostovskii). Among the leading representatives of the Ruthenian Baroque, they left behind a multilingual literary legacy, drawing from different literary and cultural traditions (Orthodox Slavic, Polish, and Latin), maneuvering between competing allegiances, and enriching Ruthenian, Polish-Lithuanian, and Muscovite culture at the same time. I will argue here that a different concept of human nature as a composite of bodily senses and intellectual faculties, along with a rethinking of affect and imagination, provided a fertile context for their reading of the Song, one that allows us to characterize this group of clerical writers as an “emotional community” (Rosenwein) with a set of shared values and modes of expression. Although this is necessarily only a preliminary effort, I hope to show that there was a connection between the interest in the Song, the newly discovered power of emotions, and the perception of spiritual experience in nuptial terms and that this connection was a central aspect of seventeenth-century Ruthenian Orthodox religious discourse.

Maria Grazia Bartolini is an Associate Professor of Medieval Slavic Culture at the University of Milan. Her research focuses on the intersection of preaching and visual arts in seventeenth-century Ukraine, and she has published various articles on the religious culture of early modern Ukraine. Bartolini is the author of Piznai samoho sebe (Kyiv, 2017), a monograph on Hryhorii Skovoroda and Christian Neoplatonism, which was awarded the 2019 Ivan Franko International Prize.

Advertised as breaking all taboos on male homosexual life in Poland, Michał Witkowski’s novel Lovetown became an instant sensation upon its publication in 2005, paving the way for the author’s celebrity status While most existing criticism focuses on issues of gender representation, intertextuality, and post-communist nostalgia, this article posits the adventure experience as the central theme of the novel. Drawing on several cross-disciplinary studies on the role of adventure in life and literature, I argue that Witkowski uses his queer protagonists to explore the alluring yet always already nostalgic idea of adventure as breaking away from everyday existence. Rejecting masculine violence and other markers of the “classical” adventuring subject, the author follows Georg Simmel in defining adventure as a form of experiencing rather than a combination of dispositions, events, and exotic settings. Self-consciously, though, Lovetown evinces the problematic nature of this definition through the liminal figure of the novel’s narrator, who ostensibly endorses the adventurous ethos of his queer protagonists but whose privileged social position allows him to eschew the risks inherent in their marginalized status.

Łukasz Wodzyński is an Assistant Professor of Polish at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests include Polish, Russian, and European modernisms, contemporary Polish literature, postcommunism, and adventure. Currently, he is finishing his book manuscript, Romancing Modernism: Re-Enchantment in Polish and Russian Modernist Novel. His latest project is on the concept of adventure and its representation in contemporary Polish fiction.