Bella Akhmadulina Research Articles

Rossica w Dziennikach Jarosława Iwaszkiewicza. Dwudziestowieczność. Wybrane aspekty

The article is devoted to the analysis of broadly understood twentieth-century russica appearing in Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s Journals. Individual russica were combined into thematic blocks that cover such spheres of cultural reality as literary life, literary studies, the times of the thaw, the condition of a writer in the Soviet Union, and Ilya Erenburg’s reception of specific Russian writers (Ilya Erenburg, Konstantin Paustowski, Andrei Vozniesienski, Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova, Bella Akhmadulina). The basic phenomena are considered through the lens of cultural comparative studies, which assume that the research object is embedded in specific historical, political and aesthetic realities. The presence of the figure of the diarist clearly outlined in the Diaries allows us to look at the discussed problems not from an “isolating” encyclopaedic perspective, but from a personal perspective, enriched with an emotional layer. This approach is additionally supported by the selection of para-literary materials – i.e. diaries and ephemeral texts.

Север как Запад: литературный образ Карелии и практики позднесоветской вненаходимости

The article examines the peculiarities of the literary representation of Karelia in the late Soviet literature. The research involves texts by Yury Kazakov, Andrey Voznesensky, Bella Akhmadulina, Lev Ozerov, Viktor Starkov, and others, which were written based on trips to Karelia in the period from the 1960s to the 1980s. The historical and cultural features of the area often became significant for writers and poets who came from other regions. These features (bilingualism, dialogue of cultures, historically and geographically determined European influence) emphasized the region’s uniqueness against the background of other territories of the North of Russia. Reflection of the specificity of the region - both natural and cultural - forms the general tone of the essays and lyrics of the late 1960s - early 1980s, realistic in their poetics. Some details of the literary image of Karelia that developed during this period (including the motif of travel, Finno-Ugric and Scandinavian realities and toponyms) reflect the late Soviet practices of “outsideness” (Rus. vnenakhodimost’, a term by Alexei Yurchak), in addition to the development of earlier post-romantic topics. In Ozerov’s, Voznesensky’s, Starkov’s prose and lyrics, the representation of a journey to Karelia acquires the features of time travel, the character’s contact with antiquity/eternity. This position of the character in relation to their time correlates with the mechanisms that developed during that period of the Soviet people’s escape from the haunting day-to-day reality without direct resistance or opposition to the ideological system. In Kazakov’s and Akhmadullina’s Karelian plots, due to the introduction of Finno-Ugric place names, motives, vocabulary, the image of the place sometimes acquires the features of “our abroad,” the “imaginary West.” Unlike the West itself, Karelia was not exclusively imaginary: one could visit it and see it with one’s own eyes, just like the Soviet Baltic states. A trip to Karelia was at the same time consistent with the ideologically acceptable and approved practices of domestic tourism and literary exploration of the North. The features of the “imaginary West” in this case were organically included in the general tendency of romanticizing and mythologizing Karelia in its literary representation of the late Soviet period, developing and complicating the image that had formed back in the 19th century. The cultural multilayeredness of Karelia is obviously attractive for the generation of authors of the Thaw with its heterogeneous culture, which sometimes combined opposite tendencies (interest in the West and the East, in the past and the future, physics and lyrics, socialism and the human face, etc.) and shaped the practice of outsideness. The literary texts of popular authors widely broadcast this image, spreading it among readers. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

Художественная интерпретация реальных событий в стихотворениях Беллы Ахмадулиной, написанных в Тарусе в 1981 году

Художественная интерпретация реальных событий в стихотворениях Беллы Ахмадулиной, написанных в Тарусе в 1981 году

EL GRECO IN RUSSIAN POETRY

The name El Greco (Doménikos Theotokópoulos) is rarely found in Russian poetry, although French romanticism included him in the canon of world classics. This article assumes that El Greco’s reception in Russian poetry is due not so much to the infl uence of French romanticism or Spanish surrealism as to the stylistic features of the artist himself, who inherited Cretan icon painting, while in his mature period he followed the Renaissance principles of life-like and rivalry. As a result, El Greco is perceived in Russian culture as a classic imitating nature, and stylistic features are then interpreted as existentially signifi cant rather than a strange and bizarre artist. El Greco is then compared with the characters of his paintings, such as the apostles and evangelists, and is considered to be an artist, communicating something existentially signifi cant about fate. His landscape style was then interpreted as the transformation of artistic conventions into ontologically signifi cant constructions. A close reading of poetic texts dedicated to El Greco (Konstantin Balmont, Anna Akhmatova, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Viktor Krivulin, Bella Akhmadulina, Svetlana Kekova), and taking into account the theoretical statements about El Greco (Alexandre Benois, Dmitry Likhachov) allows us to show that El Greco was not perceived within the framework of expressionism or surrealism, but in the key of icon-painting ontologism. The techniques of El Greco were then understood in Russian poetry as plotsignifi cant: chiaroscuro and colour turned out to be symbols of life’s upheavals, and the mission of the apostle and Orpheus was then identifi ed as a model for a poetic attitude to everyday life.

Bella Akhmadulina and the Sixtiers: Contacts, contexts, and poems

The article offers a close look at Bella Akhmadulina’s poetic dedications to her contemporaries: A. Akhmatova, B. Pasternak, A. Bitov, V. Vysotsky, A. Kushner, and B. Okudzhava. The scholars employ two methods: a bibliographical and a philological one. The former helps to reconstruct the context for Akhmadulina’s interactions with her predecessors and her Sixtiers peers, while the latter, applied to her texts, shows the way in which the dedicatee’s personality and their ties to Moscow or St. Petersburg determine the poem’s metaphors and intonation. A detailed analysis of her dedications to friends and older poets reveals customized, dedicatee-driven communication strategies, as well as invariant features of the poetic dialogue between Akhmadulina and a whole of Russian literature.

Notes about Inna Lisnyanskaya and Semyon Lipkin

Spanning over a decade from 1990 until 2003, the transcripts of interviews with Inna Lisnyanskaya and Semyon Lipkin mostly deal with literary topics. I. Lisnyanskaya discusses her works and poetic methods and talks about her friends and acquaintances in the literary world. Featuring on these pages are 20th-century authors: Sergey Averintsev, Vasily Aksyonov, Bella Akhmadulina, Anna Akhmatova, Eduard Bagritsky, Andrey Bitov, Joseph Brodsky, Elena Bulgakova, Igor Vinogradov, Andrey Vosnesensky, Rasul Gamzatov, Lidia Ginsburg, Evgeny Evtushenko, Olga Ivinskaya, Yury Kublanovsky, Feliks Kuznetsov, Vladimir Maksimov, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Osip Mandelstam, Yury Nagibin, Boris Pasternak, Maria Petrovykh, Evgeny Popov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Arseny Tarkovsky, Korney Chukovsky, Anastasia Tsvetaeva, and Marina Tsvetaeva. I. Lisnyan skaya’s opinions are often biased and extremely subjective: they are interesting not despite, but because of it. Another important topic is the repercussions of publishing the Metropol almanac. The transcripts also help reconstruct the history of some of Lisyanskaya’s poems.

Ekphrasis in Photography Lyrics: Methods of Representation

The article deals with ekphrasis (verbal description of visual artworks) in lyrics about photography. The purpose of this article is to clarify the possibility of using the term “ekphrasis” in relation to photographic lyrics and to divide the phenomena of photopoetics and photoekphrasis. The difference becomes obvious as we analyze the following texts: “Photograph from September 11” and “Hitler’s First Photograph” by Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, “A Snapshot” by Russian poet Bella Akhmadulina and “From the Album” by Russian poet Genrikh Sapgir. The four texts are characterized by a special timing structure: past, present and future, with some regularity, exist within the description of the same photographs. In addition, the space of all four texts is open. This is a feature not only of photoekphrasis, but also of photopoetics as a type of visual poetry, which does not depend on the type of description. In all four texts, the author's position is inevitably present and recognized. In the first three cases, we know the picture or the person to which the subject refers. In the fourth one, the poet refers to his personal archives or memories. But “Hitler’s First Photograph” refers to the well-known historical personality only in the title and some mentions in the text. Thus, in our opinion, only “Photograph from September 11” by Wislawa Szymborska and “A Snapshot” by Bella Akhmadulina can be considered as ekphrasis. However, “From the Album” by Genrikh Sapgir and “Hitler’s First Photograph” by Szymborska features photographic discourse and fragmentary descriptions to create a photopoetic text, but not an ekphrasis. Apparently, the ekphrasis of a photograph is not only a description of one specific and existing in common culture photograph, but also a restoration of its poetics in a lyrical text.

Женственность и феномен времени в поэзии Б. Ахмадулиной

The articles studies Bella Akhmadulina ´s attitude to the phenomenon of time and concludes that the poetess was more attracted by the artistic past and the atmosphere associated with it: La Belles Dame culture and chivalry; the nobility, who were free from any obligation and could have all the time for themselves; the existential choice of eternity and the feeling of involvement with reality. The author demonstrates how femininity determines Akhmadulina´s choice of temporal and spacial continuum, and studies the links between the poetess´s perception of time and existential philosophy.

Lessons in Russian and Yiddish

Lessons in Russian and Yiddish Sarah Traister Moskovitz (bio) and Carol V. Davis (bio) Carol: Sarah and I met in a group, CJWA (Creative Jewish Women's Alliance), started by Marcia Cohn Spiegel in Los Angeles in the late 1970s. Although Sarah and I were both born in the U.S., we are of different generations. Sarah was born in the late 1920s; I was born in the early '50s. I joined the group around 1981. Over the years I have come in and out of CJWA, as in 1996, I started living extensive periods in Russia. As we talked the issue of language, place, loss and identity became central to the conversation. Sarah: I experienced a reawakening of my mother tongue and love of poetry in my 60s. Both my parents, with whom I had always spoken Yiddish, had died and I was facing retirement from Cal State Northridge at age 70 and knew I would have time to write. Writing in Yiddish propels me into a rich, deep historical context that involves my family, my people and my own vicarious living of their experiences. For me it is like taking off into another world. I walk and run in English. In Yiddish I'm moving in deeper water against the tide that now requires conscious breathing, stroking and effort to survive. [End Page 70] First Love My mother went into labor in Yiddish in Yiddish her prayers in Yiddish her screams From her mouth and breast Yiddish flowed deep into me I was bathed, fed licked and prettied with her warm Yiddish tongue. My father took me walking in Yiddish to see the peacocks I held on to his Torah pointing finger And from the sky raisins and almonds fell while sitting on his lap to see the letters of the golden peacock's rainbow. We held each letter in our hands with joy as if it were a new born little chick. I envy those who in their youth had lovers caressing, teasing and kissing them in Yiddish, language of first love. My father, the principal of a Yiddish Workmen's Circle School taught me to read and write in Yiddish when I was four. He loved poetry, sang Yiddish songs and was great fun in my young years. As an adult I began to understand his struggles to preserve Yiddish and the pain of both my parents over their losses of family in the Holocaust. I describe him in the following fragment: Autumn 1940 in America He will walk briskly and determinedup the steep hill to his Yiddish schoolhouse at the top. He will unfurl his flag of continuityfor the beloved thousand year old, stateless language he guards as treasure brought from home in Polandto immigrants' children who shout and laugh and play as they swim faster, deeper, further out and far away glad to ride the high tide undertow of English. [End Page 71] Carol: My grandmother had lived in St. Petersburg, Russia in the early 1900s, which was unusual because a strict quota allowed very few Jews to live there. Once my grandparents immigrated, they never spoke Russian again. They spoke Yiddish in the home. Yiddish was my parents' first language, but they abandoned it. I fell in love with Russian literature in college and continued to study it in grad school. After that I began to write poetry seriously and that has been my focus ever since. In the early 1980s, I started to translate Russian poetry. I focused on Russian women poets whose work I felt a close affinity to: Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva and Bella Akhmadulina. My Russian was not very good at that point, but ironically I was confident then, enough to translate and publish some translations. My father worked for the Marshall Plan when I was a very young child and we lived all over Europe, though he left us in other countries when he went to Germany. This experience was very important to me and I wanted my own children to have the experience of living abroad. In I996 I received a Fulbright scholar's grant to teach in St. Petersburg and to work on...

The Poetic Craft of Bella Akhmadulina

The Poetic Craft of Bella Akhmadulina

The Poetic Craft of Bella Akhmadulina

The Poetic Craft of Bella Akhmadulina

The Poetic Craft of Bella Akhmadulina

The Poetic Craft of Bella Akhmadulina

The poetic craft of Bella Akhmadulina

Sonia 1. Ketchian. The Poetic Craft of Bella Akhmadulina. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993. viii, 248 pp. Illustrations. $32.50, cloth. To date this is the only book-length study on one of the most prominent and enigmatic poets in contemporary Russia. The origins of Akhmadulina's poetry are inextricably linked to the cultural mythology of the 1960s, a period of relative creative freedom known as the Thaw. Succeeding the years of Stalinist terror, this period witnessed a mighty revival of lyric poetry, unprecedented since the revolutionary years, and Akhmadulina, together with her brilliant peers and brothers-in-verse Evtushenko and Voznesensky, gave dramatic public readings before enormous audiences in packed stadiums and concert halls. With her striking appearance, foreign-sounding name, exotic Tartar-Italian genealogy, and complex, overtly apolitical verse, Akhmadulina exuded an aura of mystique and sophistication, and soon became an icon for her generation. Ketchian's personal acquaintance with the legendary poetess and her intimate knowledge of Russian literature make her a uniquely qualified interpreter of Akhmadulina's art. She guides the reader through intricate and esoteric imagery and linguistic nuances until all the pieces fit into a single coherent verbal picture. Although the book's main focus is the 1983 collection, The Secret, Ketchian also surveys Akhmadulina's earlier verse, demonstrating the organic continuity between different stages of her poetic development. As is the case with almost every postmodern poet (or, perhaps, any true poet), Akhmadulina's primary preoccupation in The Secret is with her own creative process. Ketchian provides us with a key to Akhmadulina's metapoetic secret, which consists essentially in a belief that verse arises from the beauty of nature. However, the twentieth-century poetess is worlds apart from the Romantics, who also regarded nature as the source of inspiration. As Ketchian's insightful analysis demonstrates, the traditional theme of the poet's communion with nature is complicated and transformed in Akhmadulina's verse by her postmodern sensibility, urban experience, nostalgic awareness of cultural heritage, and intense spiritual life. In Akhmadulina's poetry, nature is understood in very broad terms, not only as the beauty of fields and plants, but also as the dynamic of the seasons and times of day, and the vast spaces of the universe. Ketchian scrupulously unravels the paradigm of the persona's creative process, closely intertwined with the natural cycle. Summer is a period of intense travel, particularly to the bright and exotic region of the Caucasus, a time of accumulating impressions and emotions. …

The Poetic Craft of Bella Akhmadulina

The Poetic Craft of Bella Akhmadulina

Art has Awakened The Creators in Them

This conversation with the poet Bella Akhmadulina took place in the Manezh, at an exhibition of amateur painters.