Voicing the Distant: Shakespeare and Russian Modernist PoetryEkaterina Sukhanova
About the Author:
Ekaterina Sukhanova began her academic career at the Department of Philology of the St. Petersburg State University in Russia. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the City University of New York. She is the editor of a Casebook Study on Andrei Bitov's novel Pushkin House for Dalkey Archive Press and the author of a number of articles on Russian and European literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Sukhanova has been teaching courses in Comparative, English, and Russian Literature at CUNY. She is fluent in several European languages and interested in theory and practice of literary translation. Her other scholarly projects include interdisciplinary research on constructs of mental health, in particular on the concept of depression. She lives in Manhattan.
The presence of Shakespearean themes and images in Russian modernist poetry, still largely overlooked, provides valuable insight into the general mechanisms of assimilation of foreign texts by Russian modernist poetry. The present study offers extensive bilingual analysis of a large volume of poems (by Akhmatova, Blok, Mandelstam, and Pasternak among others), many of which have not yet been discovered by American readers. Through close textual readings and parallels with the preceding historical periods, the book demonstrates how the dialogical interaction between Russian modernist poets and Shakespeare leads to the expansion of meaning of the canonical texts. Russian modernists saw the continuity of the literary process as enabling an individual writer to escape the given temporal and geographical limits. When seeking affinities in other literary traditions and epochs, Russian modernists often turned to Shakespeare, not simply because he was a canonical figure or an embodiment of Renaissance humanistic values, but because his work was seen as an especially extensive range of interpretations. Yury Lotman's paradigm of textual functions is used to study the mechanisms of the appropriation of Shakespearean text in Russian literature. Within this framework, a literary text is seen as capable of entering into a complex relationship with its cultural context and readers. A text may cease being a mere piece of information addressed by the transmitter to the recipient and become an independent conversational partner with capacity for memory and for creating new meanings. The study aims to show that, within Russian cultural context, all functions of the Shakespearean text came to full actualization only at the time of literary modernism. In Russian modernist poetry, Shakespearean themes and images broke out beyond the constraints of the plot, gained a personal immediacy, and reached the level of a linguistic system capable of generating potentially endless meanings. The semiotic character of the Shakespearean text, brought to the foreground by Russian modernists, was conductive to generic, cultural, and stylistic transpositions (from the tragic to the lyric, from the social to the personal, and from the plot to the word) taking place in Russian poetry of the period. The unique nature of the treatment of Shakespeare during Russian literary modernism consisted in the Shakespearean text being allowed to become a full-fledged participant in a dialogue between cultures. Shakespeare's works proved to function both at litmus paper bringing out the pivotal characteristics of Russian modernist poetry and simultaneously as a catalyst accelerating literary innovation.
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