Selvinsky’s Ulyalaevshchina in 1924–1927

A detailed reconstruction of the history behind the creation and publication of I. Selvinsky’s Ulyalaevshchina, a narrative poem about the Russian civil war in the Urals, following the 1917 revolution. Composed in 1924, Ulyalaevshchina was first published in 1927 and then underwent numerous alterations by Selvinsky, to a detrimental effect. The 1920s–1930s saw four publications of the poem as a separate book; the poem was considered a masterpiece of Selvinsky’s and of contemporary Soviet poetic output in general. However, its subsequent publications in the 1930s were unofficially vetoed up until the early Thaw years, when, in 1956, the poem was published again upon radical redrafting by the author. The scholar makes a meticulous comparison between various archive versions of Ulyalaevshchina, comments on textual juxtapositions and finds that the poem, conceived as a ‘verse novel’ about the Russian civil war and the Bolshevik pillaging of rural settlements during the food confiscation campaign (prodrazvyorstka), was intentionally rewritten by Selvinsky as an exemplary Soviet epic, which could not but damage the poem’s quality and intonation.

War on Dirt: Aesthetics, Empire, and Infrastructure in the Low Nineteenth Century

This essay considers the politico-aesthetics of infrastructure by focusing on poems that anticipate, justify, and critique internal improvements, from Joel Barlow’s early Republican vision of the Erie and Panama Canals to texts that document the ruin caused by the works Barlow imagined as glorious. Historical scholarship has long assessed the mania for cutting roads and canals into the landscape. But engaging an emerging infrastructuralism—and turning to imaginative texts that exist underneath the ground typically trod by US literary studies, from Philip Freneau’s celebratory ode to the Erie Canal to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ironic canal travel sketches to Margarita Engle’s recent historical verse-novel tallying the devastations of the Panama Canal—this essay identifies an infrastructural dialectic in which writers view infrastructure, initially, as awesome so as to justify its ecological and social violence and, subsequently, as banal so as to render it invisible within the settler state. Oscillating between awe and irritation, the sublime and the stuplime, then, these texts both expose the rhythm of infrastructure’s long—that is, low—relation to the structure of coloniality and, in Engle’s case, model how to disrupt it so as to imagine a more just life “after” infrastructure.

Five Poems

Vladimir Gandelsman was born in 1948 in Leningrad. His poetry writtenduring the Soviet period was intended for the literary underground. Aftercoming to the United States in 1991, he was first able to publish his work, andis now highly acclaimed in Russia, where he won the Moscow ReckoningPrize, the highest award for poetry, in 2011. He lives outside New York City.He is the author of eighteen poetry collections, one verse novel, severalimportant translations into Russian that include Macbeth, and a volume ofcollected works. In English translation, his works have been published in orare forthcoming from Modern Poetry in Translation, The Common, TheNotre Dame Review, and The Mad Hatters’ Review.

Genre, History, and the Stolen Generations: Three Australian Stories

This article explores the role that genre plays in fictional depictions of the Stolen Generations (Australian Indigenous children removed from their homes) in three twenty-first-century Australian middle-grade novels: Who Am I?: The Diary of Mary Talence, Sydney 1937 by Anita Heiss (2001) ; The Poppy Stories: Four Books in One by Gabrielle Wang (2016) ; and Sister Heart by Sally Morgan (2016) . It argues that the genres of fictional diary, adventure story and verse novel invite different reading practices and approaches to history, and shape the ways in which the texts depict, for children, the suffering and resilience of the Stolen Generations.

La voix et la lettre dans les romans arthuriens de la seconde moitié du XIIe siècle

The perplexing question of the interrelations between hearing and sight looms large in the verse novel of the second half of the twelfth century, a newly promoted genre of literary fiction, no longer sung but written and intended for public reading in small circles, it seems, permanently shaped by the written word, yet brought to life by a fleeting voice. In what is commonly and sometimes abusively referred to as the Arthurian romance in verse of the second half of the twelfth century – the Arthurian part of Wace’s romance of Brut (in fact, a text between the chronicle and the romance in terms of style), the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, the romances of Tristan by Thomas and Béroul – the ‘soundtrack’ of the Arthurian literary world is poor: the human voice in particular, the sole focus of my study, is rarely mentioned, while discourse proliferates. For multiple reasons, above all because it is an acoustic phenomenon of physiological origin which is linked to breathing, the voice, as an undeniable vital force, seems to be stifled: this is what will be examined to start with. The paradoxes haunting the voice need to be addressed and assessed. In fact, it is as if vocality gave way to a rustle of words, both those of the characters and those of the narrative instances. A second step of the analysis will therefore consider how orality, patently obvious as it is, tends to mask the vocality of the text to draw attention to itself: if the voice, in its materiality, appears neglected, it is because it is henceforth subsumed under the spoken word. Yet, the voice is most saliently causing distinct stylistic traits or modes of writing which animate the jongleresque performance. The latter is having its heyday, since, at the turn of the thirteenth century, prose and the advent of silent reading would soon bring about a substantial change in the production and reception of fictional literary works: a third and last point will deal with how, until the book is to enjoy the prestige that the voice once possessed, the letter will not be that irreducibly separated from the very voice from which it originates. Far from being independent from each other, voice and letter converge in the same collaboration, that of the reading experience that allows us, to this day, to make these texts our own.

U źródeł gotycyzmu

Polska ballada gotycka [The Polish Gothic Ballad] by Paweł Pluta, is one of a few, and one of the first complete case studies in Polish humanities whose reminiscence has had a huge impact on the shape of modern culture (not only popular culture).Pluta focuses on works created between 1771–1830. The author argues that the gothic ballad has its roots in literary communication, when the translations of Phillippe Habert’s Le Temple de la Mort (1633) (pp. 36–37) by Adam Stanisław Naruszewicz and Mateusz Czarnek were published. Pluta treats these first translations as the “beginning of literary Gothicism in Poland” (p. 37). In the institutional and ideological context, it is a significant statement, as Habert was a part of the Académie des Illustres Bergers group which gathered writers fascinated by pastoral poetry. Thus, such a choice of inspirations of the Polish “gothic poets” makes it possible for Pluta to combine the two types of gothic ballad, one related to horror and the other to history. On the other hand, in the context of importance of 1830, the author alleges the opinion of Zyg-munt Krasiński from 1831 (p. 194); it seems all the more important, as in his youth the writer created gothic horror stories (for instance his debut Grób rodziny Reichstalów [The Tomb of the Reichstal Family] 1828, Mściwy karzeł i Masław książę mazowiecki [The Vindictive Midget and Masław the Mazovian Prince] 1830). It is important to remember that the gothic imaginarium (especially its hor-ror kind) permeated to lyric poetry and other genres (e.g. verse novel) and still left room for creative potential. Thus, the year 1830 marks not the end of some of tendencies, but rather their turning point. It is worth mentioning Pluta’s monograph published by The Institute of Literary Research; its bibliography is not listed in alphabetical order but in a chronological one and the dates of the first edi-tions of each source are included. This indicates not only the scientific meticulousness of the publisher, but also the awareness that in the times of the internet and easy access to library and archival resources, the reader may wish to study not only the modern editions of a given text, but also the original.

Some peculiarities of opera libretto as a potential literary genre

This article analyzes the changes pertaining to such level of literary works as a system of characters, category of space and time, phonetic system and composition; as well as changes in epic and dramatic oeuvres in the process of transformation of the text of literary work into an opera libretto. Analysis is conducted on peculiarities of the aforementioned levels of literary text and libretto. As an example of epic work, the author selected the A. S. Pushkin’s verse novel “Eugene Onegin” and the eponymous opera composed by P. I. Tchaikovsky; as an example of dramatic work, the author picked the two poetic dramas from Pushkin’s cycle “The Stone Guest” and “The Miserly Knight” and the eponymous operas by A. Dargomyzhsky and S. V. Rachmaninoff respectively. The following methods were applied in the course of this study: comparative based on juxtaposition of musical-scenic interpretation and precedent literary text; typological for determination of patterns, classification and generalization of the results. The author comes to the conclusion that the transformation of epic and dramatic literary texts into the opera libretto has similarities and differences on all levels of the text. The possible reasons of such phenomenon are discussed. The author answers a question whether or not libretto can be attributed to as a genre of fiction writing.

REPRESENTATION LEVELS OF THE VISUAL IN THE VERSE NOVEL BY V. IVANOV "MLADENCHESTVO"

The article examines the category of visuality on the example of the novel in verse by V. Ivanov “Mladenchestvo” (Infancy). Visuality is organized by the elements of artistic reality, which are the structure-forming principles of architectonics and belong to the deep-laid level of the work. Visuality in the novel is considered in the context of an intermedia analysis, which involves the study of the interaction between the verbal and the visual. The article is about the visuality role in constructing the artistic and semantic field of the work. While researching the representation levels of visuality were identified and the parameters of their embodiment in the verse novel by V. Ivanov “Mladenchestvo” analyzed.