
Witness and Transformation
The Poetics of Gennady Aygi
Sarah Valentine(Author)
Academic Studies Press
Published on 1. October 2015
Book
Hardback
216 pages
978-1-61811-443-3 (ISBN)
Description
Chuvash-born poet Gennady Aygi (1934-2006) is considered the father of late-Soviet avant-garde Russian poetry. This first full-length critical study of his work and poetics in any language brings a new voice into the critical conversation of twentieth-century poetry of witness. It charts the development of Aygi's poetics from his Mayakovsky-inspired verses as a student under the tutelage of Boris Pasternak, to those of a full-fledged poet's poet, drawing equally on the Russian poetic and religious tradition, European literature and philosophy, and Chuvash literature, folk culture, and cosmology. Writing from 1955 until his death in 2006, Aygi bridges the Soviet and post-Soviet, lyrical and avant-garde, personal and political. The transcultural roots and global reach of his work bring together Chuvash, Russian, European, and Volga Tatar languages and traditions to form a truly unique transnational poetics and a model for a new category of Russophone literature.
Reviews / Votes
Valentine moves easily between the broader context of Aygi's work and detailed analysis of a small number of poems in the original and in translation. . . . Sarah Valentine has chosen her topics and her poems to good effect and offers a well-informed, clear and attractively written introduction to the work of a difficult but important poet. -- Times Literary Supplement (April 22, 2016)More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Brighton
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 240 mm
Width: 161 mm
Thickness: 16 mm
Weight
490 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-61811-443-3 (9781618114433)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Sarah Valentine earned a PhD in Russian Literature from Princeton University and has received a research fellowship from the Templeton Foundation from Princeton's Center for the Study of Religion, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Writer in Residence Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. Her peer-reviewed articles have appeared in PMLA, Slavic and East European Journal and Poetics, and her translation from the Russian, Into the Snow: Selected Poems of Gennady Aygi was published by Wave Books in 2011. She teaches English and Comparative Literature at Northwestern University.