Moscow: RGGU, 2005: 654 pp.

Alexander  ZHOLKOVSKY

Summary

The book by the University of Southern California Professor Alexander Zholkovsky collects 25 articles representative of his major contributions to literary scholarship over three decades. They comprise his 1970s-1980s studies in the poetcis of expressiveness, co-founded by him and Yuri Shcheglov, his post-structuralist and deconstructive essays of the 1990s, and a sampling of his recent explorations in infinitive poetry that defined this new field of study. Lyrics by Alexander Pushkin, Anna Akhmatova, Vladislav Khodasevich, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandel’shtam, Vladimir Maiakovskii, Vadim Shershenevich, Bulat Okudzhava, Iosif Brodskii, and Eduard Limonov are analyzed with respect to their thematic and structural invariants, self-fashioning strategies and textual interrelations with one another and with genres of poetic discourse. The formal textual analysis draws on the author’s linguistic experience as one of the founders of the “Meaning – Text” theory. The book targets a wide range of readers interested in linguistic and literary studies.

Table of Contents

Introduction

I

On the poetic world of Alexander Pushkin
Pushkin’s “I loved you once…”: Invariants and structure
“I drink to the military asters…”: Osip Mandel’shtam’s poetic self-portrait
Keyboard strolls without a pass: Mandel’shtam’s “Do not compare – a living one is incomparable…”
A poetics of arbitrariness and the arbitrariness of poetics: Vladimir Maiakovskii’s “A countryhouse incident”
“Paradise disguised as a courtyard”: Notes on the poetic world of Bulat Okudzhava

II

Anna Akhmatova — fifty years later
Boris Pasternak’s book of books: On the title trope of “My sister — life”
On genius, villainy, a stupid hag, and the all-Russian scale (Deconstructing Maiakovskii)
Akhmatova and Maiakovskii: Towards a theory of parody
Eduard Limonov at literary Olympics: Limonov vs. Mandel’shtam
In the minus first and minus second mirrors: Tatiana Tolstaia and Viktor Erofeev vs. Anna Akhmatova

III

Structure and quoting: Akhmatova’s intertextual techniques
To spin, to conceal: On a Vladislav Khodasevich translation from Adam Mickiewicz
“I loved you once…” Iosif Brodskii style
Intetextual malgre lui: Limonov’s “I will hold another person in my thoughts…”
A theme and variations: Pasternak vs. Okudzhava
Soviet nonconformist classics in post-soviet perspective: Rethinking the canon

IV

Notes on Pushkin’s “A statue in Tsarskoe Selo”
The intertextual progeny of Pushkin’s “I loved you once…”
Happiness and rights sub specie infinitivi: Pushkin’s “From Pindemonti”
Infinitive writing in Vadim Shershenevich
Infinitives and the structure of a poem: Brodskii’s “Leiklos”
From notes on the poetry of grammar: Pasternak’s figurative voices
A ballad of self-control: verse and meaning in Pasternak’s “Ballad” for Genrikh Neigauz
Notes
References
Index