Poema of Lieutenant Schmidt’s End: Pasternak’s Dialogue with Tsvetaeva through the Prism of Genre.

Boris Pasternak’s poemy are acutely self-conscious of their place in the epic tradition. Lieutenant Schmidt (LS) represents one attempt at exploring the parameters of the poema itself as the poet makes a “difficult” transition from “lyric thinking” to “the epic.” In this article I examine this transition against a contemporaneous example in the genre, Tsvetaeva’s Poema of the End (PE). In LS, structural elements of the poema are counterposed to those of PE. While PE amplifies the individual voice, LS muffles what is personal for the sake of the public voice. While PE is atemporal, LS is historical. While PE unfolds on symbolic planes, with elements of plot kept to a bare minimum (a single moment of separation), LS is a plot-driven account based on concrete, documentary material. Finally, while PE is an “overgrown lyric”—representing the “lyric thinking” that Pasternak hopes to transcend— LS is an exploration of the possibilities that a more traditional model of the poema can offer. Although in the present analysis I draw on several theories of poetic genres, this is by no means an exhaustive study of epic versus lyric forms of poetry. Instead, my analysis focuses on those structural and thematic features of the poema that the poets themselves perceived as central to their texts. Pasternak, for his part, develops the structure and thematics of his poema in ways that are inspired by PE, but also, as we will see, in more significant ways, contrast with it.

The Visual, the Epic, and Pasternak’s ‘Devjat’son pjatyj god’

In this study I consider the role of poetic description in Pasternak’s ‘Deviat’sot piatyi god’ (‘1905’) in the context of the genre of the poema. Descriptive passages in poetic narratives, as a rule, provide a static setting for a protagonist’s actions. In the absence of any single hero in Pasternak’s poema, topography itself begins to move. I examine the categories of stasis and motion, central to ‘1905’, at the intersection of the visual and the verbal. The idea of reanimating the events of the first Russian revolution twenty years after the fact borders on the ekphrastic in places, where the poet transposes techniques and genres from the visual arts into a verse epic. Finally, I suggest that aesthetic perception itself is the dominant principle in the poema, as opposed to documentary faithfulness, which is traditionally emphasized in the scholarship on this work.

Casualty, Causality and Chivalry: the Myth of Chivalry and Racial Violence in Southern Literature

This honors thesis project uses history and literature to analyze the role of the myth of chivalry in mystifying racial violence and oppression in the American South. The central claim is that the myth of chivalry¿ and particularly the exaltation of the white woman¿ is a myth system used to justify racial violence, oppress white womanhood, and allow white patriarchy to maintain political, social and economic dominance. This project traces the role of literature, especially Sir Walter Scott¿s historical romance, in developing the foundational myths of a southern society based in violence, racial hierarchy and gender inequality. It then follows the role of white womanhood in this myth¿ the restrictions on miscegenation, the exaltation of pure white femininity, and the violent actions performed in the name of southern women. With this historical baseline established, this study then explores three works of historical fiction that attempt to subvert this mythology by critiquing and demystifying the myth of chivalry, while also offering counter-narratives to popularized history. These works are Charles Chesnutt¿s 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition¬, which analyzes the 1898 Wilmington N.C. race riot, Gwendolyn Brooks¿ 1960 poem ¿A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon¿ and Lewis Nordan¿s 1993 novel Wolf Whistle, two works about Emmett Till¿s tragic murder in 1955. This study, then, illuminates the intersection of literature and mythology, revealing how literature is useful for both creating and subverting myth¿and revealing how authors undertake this task.