The poetic self

Abstract

This chapter looks at the poetic self in Berggol′ts's writing as a literary construct, informed not purely by biographical experience, but by literary tradition and other texts. An outline of Berggol′ts's views on lyric poetry is followed by a discussion of how the poetic self is constituted in her work, and an exploration of the multiple and conflicting discourses which construct the ‘I’ in her early writing, as well as of the preoccupation with contrast and contradiction in her poetic self-representation during the 1930s and 1940s. The rest of the chapter focuses on Berggol′ts's exploration of the possibilities for creating a unified poetic self which is capable of assuming a representative role as the voice of a generation. The whole discussion is informed by the question of the female poetic voice and its associations within Russian literary culture.