From Subversion to Affirmation: The Prose Poem as a Russian Genre

Abstract

The Russian prose poem was officially born in December 1882, when the journalVestnik Evropypublished Ivan Turgenev’s last work, a collection of fifty “poems in prose”(stikhotvoreniia v proze). Although the generic title of Turgenev’s prose miniatures seems to echo Charles Baudelaire’sPetits Poemès en prose(1869), the fate of the prose poem in Russia turned out very differently from that in its country of origin. Whereas the Frenchpoème en prosehas become a mainstay of modernist poetry, the Russian stikhotvorenie v proze looks at first sight like a rather anemic plant struggling to survive in an inhospitable environment. In many respects, it constitutes a marginal genre par excellence: located in the no-man’s-land between poetry and prose, it was practiced mainly by minor writers, or by major writers only in early youth or old age (note the title Turgenev originally proposed for his prose poems:Senilia).