Marina Tsvetaeva is often described as a poet of keen aural sensibilities, while the visual world has been thought to be of secondary importance to her. This study of the influence of photography on Tsvetaeva's poetic writing contributes new evidence of the role of visual culture in her creative world. In detailing Tsvetaeva's experiences with the material and metaphysical properties of photographic imagery, Molly Thomasy Blasing argues that photography played a significant role in shaping the poet's elegiac writings on death, loss, and separation. The article makes available a number of previously unpublished archival photographs taken by Tsvetaeva—images that are directly linked to her cycle of poems dedicated to Nikolai Gronskii, Nadgrobie. Blasing contextualizes this discovery within a network of other photo-poetic encounters in Tsvetaeva's life and works, revealing the extent to which the poet's thinking about photography relates to the goals of her poetic practice.

One of the greatest controversies in Dante scholarship concerns the authenticity of the epistle to Cangrande della Scala, in which the poet (if it is indeed him) provides his patron with exegetical and epistemological strategies to be applied in approaching Paradiso,the third part of his Divine Comedy.Accompanying this section as a gift to della Scala, the epistle in itself would not have appeared in any sense out of the ordinary had it not followed its requisite dedication with an extensive commentary on the poem. It is hardly surprising, then, that scholars heatedly debate the authorship of this letter, which purports no less than to prescribe how the Paradisoshould be read, claiming authority of and over the text. Most significantly, the epistle contends that, just like scripture, the Divine Comedyis “polysemous, that is, having many meanings,” requiring a manifold approach; specifically, the author of the letter cites the availability of literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical readings.

In this essay I explore how Soviet policymakers, biologists, and writers negotiated the borderline dividing the human and animal domains and conceptualized the animal world for ideological purposes. I link the classic Soviet clash between stikhiinost’ (spontaneity) and soznatel'nost’ (consciousness) with biological experiments of the 1920s that were set to deconstruct the human-animal hierarchy and to create a vision of “classless” biology. I show why Dzhan, one of Andrei Platonov's first earnest attempts to evolve into a socialist realist writer glorifying the Soviet state's firm strides toward the communist future, fails to achieve the semantic certitude of the Stalinist text. Various recurrent and profoundly unconventional themes, often connected with animality and corporeality, drastically muddle the ideological coordinates of the text and preclude the possibility of a clear passage from stikhiinost’ to soznatel'nost'. The (a)political status of the Dzhan people as a newly formed Soviet collective body manifests itself in the complex interplay between two rather commonplace categories: body and soul. The body acquires abstract political qualities by becoming collective, while the soul, as a designator for the Dzhan people and as a category, gains flesh. The novella reveals the “Turkmen“ nation as a site of bare life itself in its indestructible corporeal glory.

In contemporary Georgia and beyond, nostalgia for the Soviet past is often ridiculed and dismissed as a reactionary wish to turn back time. In this article, however, I explore generational nostalgia as temporal displacement of present political struggles. Drawing on life story interviews with middle-aged and elderly people in the provincial town of Gori, I argue that nostalgic longings may be understood as active attempts to presence personal pasts and futures that have publicly been rendered absent by an official rhetoric and practice that explicitly rejects the Soviet past. From this perspective, post-Soviet generational nostalgia temporally connects several dimensions of absence: the experience of one’s personal past being publicly cast as void; a perceived lack of social security, influence, and significance in the present; and a dynamic whereby these two dimensions render former dreams and visions for the future obsolete.

In the Soviet cultural geography of the early 1930s, the Kara-Kum desert of Turkmenistan–the setting of Andrei Platonov's novella Dzhan–represented an environmental challenge to Soviet technological utopianism, just as its nomadic inhabitants challenged Stalinist narratives of political development. In this article, I offer new contexts for reading Dzhan, locating it within Russian and Soviet discourses of natural and national development and within the context of Platonov's second profession as a meliorator (land reclamation engineer). I argue that Dzhan offers a vision of vernacular socialism, first, in its attention to the specific ecology of the desert and its inhabitants, and second, in its resistance to two totalizing Soviet master narratives forming in the early 1930s: in the political domain, new Stalinist doctrine on modes of production, and in the literary domain, the socialist realist plot.

In his fiction written from the 1920s through 1940s Ivan Bunin set a number of stories in Moscow, naming specific places, many of which were closed or destroyed after the 1917 Revolution by the Soviet regime or by Nazi bombing during World War II. In so doing, Bunin used Moscow to map the cultural memory of the Russian emigration, with the ancient city of Moscow standing as its “memory palace” while contributing to the “Moscow text.“ In his 1944 story “Cleansing Monday,” in particular, Bunin conducted this mnemonic project on three levels: historical, spiritual, and didactic. He did so for both a Russian readership—his compatriots abroad and potential (future) readers back home—and a foreign audience increasingly interested in Russia. Through close reading of the story, diary entries, and Bunin's biography, this article explores the idea of a memory palace and four specific memory images, comparing Bunin's depiction of Russia to a 1915 depiction by English traveler Stephen Graham.

This article investigates the relationship between the humanities and science by focusing on Osip Mandel'shtam's “Conversation about Dante.” Noting the importance of natural science for Mandel'shtam's treatise, I argue that Mandel'shtam makes use of the methods of the natural sciences in developing a complex theory of the poetic process. He encounters the scientific method of analysis in his reading of the natural scientists, written about in his travelogue “Journey to Armenia,” as well as various shorter pieces accompanying it. Mandel'shtam begins with a proposition of isomorphism between poetry and nature. Ultimately, I argue that the scientific method allows Mandel'shtam to theorize the poetic process as a dialogue between author and reader in which cultural kinship between its participants is established as a break within their individuality and a recognition of the authority of the “poetic impulse” or “instinct.” In turn, envisioning the poetic process as a dialogue that paradoxically suspends and transcends the individuality of its participants allows Mandel'shtam simultaneously to insist on the necessity of submission to the authority of the poetic message and to endow poetry with political autonomy.

Georgians have long found in the remote mountainous regions of Georgia, Pshavi and Khevsureti, a fragmentary ethnographic image of a romantic and exotic “once upon a time” version of Georgia. Georgians have been particularly tantalized by images of the strange sexual practices of these mountains (called ts‘ats’loba), which represent a kind of paradoxical “sex without sex,” a seeming inversion of normative Georgian sexuality, belonging at the same time to the most “Georgian” part of Georgia. Fragmentary images of this “Georgian ancestral sex” circulate in a complex, multigenred interdiscursive space of citationality, becoming, in this recirculation, a haunting absent presence, representations of a sexual alterity shot through with lacunae and absences, which become full of virtual potentiality as these gaps and absences are filled in with one's own imagination and desire. This article ethnographically traces the citational connections between these fragmentary images of sexuality.

This article explores the prominent role played by visual tropes in Andrei Platonov's Turkmen novella, Dzhan (Soul). While acknowledging Platonov's literary inventiveness, it seeks to identify the equal importance of the gaze as a means of emotional and ideological cognition, thereby arguing that the shift in emphasis in his prose in the mid-1930s entailed not just a move away from explicitly linguistic experimentation but also a greater embrace of visual imagery. With reference to both Dzhan and the author's letters and notebooks, this essay examines how the geographical relocation to Central Asia is accompanied by a heightened engagement with the world through the gaze, which functions principally in terms of gender and national identity. It concludes with a consideration of how the gaze is integral to a theory of Platonov's understanding of language, arguing that the “situatedness” of the individual is predicated on his or her being seen in a visual context by an interlocutor.

Focusing on Vasily Yanovsky's prose fiction as a specific case study, this article sets modernist narratives informed by exile, dislocation, and migration in dialogue with the evolving theory of transnationalism. By engaging with the hybrid, cross-cultural nature of diaspora writing, this research challenges conventional, mono-national classifications based on the author's language and origin. Yanovsky's key texts transcending a range of boundaries (between Russian and English, fiction and nonfiction, Russian spirituality and western thought, science and fantasy) are brought to bear to demonstrate that language can be a matter of a writer's personal aesthetic choice, rather than a fixed marker of his appurtenance to a national canon. This article also argues for transnational identity as an intellectual and emotional, and thus translatable, affiliation, formed across national fault lines and cultural traditions.

This article approaches Osip Mandel'shtam's “Conversation about Dante” as a demonstration of and meditation on reading. As such, Mandel ‘stam's essay addresses the perennial problems of our relationship to the authority of writing and the preservation of literary culture across time, largely through a cluster of metaphors around the central image of a conductor's baton. The visible instrument of musical measure, the baton figures synesthetic transcription in the arts and, most urgently, the undulating line of script traced by the writing pen that becomes realized as waves of sound in the poem's oral performance. “Keeping Time” elucidates the philosophy of notation and performance to which the figure of the baton alludes, and contextualizes it within Mandel'shtam's efforts to reconcile the political and poetical functions of written authority.