Russian Poetics (new name for Mandelstam group)

This working group brings together faculty members and graduate students around the Russian poets, translators, and theorists of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938), Dmitry Merezhkovsky (1866-1941), Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1942), Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866-1949), and Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966). We meet once a month to closely read and discuss selections from their poetry and prose, distributed in advance, in the original Russian supplemented by translations, secondary literature, and other materials that members of the group wish to discuss. The working group is open to everyone, and we especially welcome scholars whose primary field of research is not Russian or Slavic. Our aim is to think broadly and contextually about Russian poetics - the Acmeist and Symbolist schools, Soviet Jewish poetry, poetry as dissidence, and other themes. Another aim is comparative: as we collectively work our way through their magisterial corpus, a further goal is to discuss how Russian poetry and ideas can speak to our respective archives, no matter how far removed they are from them in time and space (e.g., premodern Persian literature, Arabic philosophy, etc.).