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Snapshots of the Soul
Photo-Poetic Encounters in Modern Russian Culture
Molly Thomasy Blasing (Author)
9781501753695
Hardback, published 15 July 2021
328 pages, 61 b&w halftones - 61 Halftones, black and white
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.9 cm, 0.907 kg
The book includes a bountiful selection of photographs closely related to the text. Highly recommended. Blasing's work demonstrates an amazing knowledge of an array of archival evidence, from photographs to literary manuscripts, spread across the United States, Europe, and the Russian Federation.
Snapshots of the Soul considers how photography has shaped Russian poetry from the early twentieth century to the present day. Drawing on theories of the lyric and the elegy, the social history of technology, and little-known archival materials, Molly Thomasy Blasing offers close readings of poems by Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, Joseph Brodsky, and Bella Akhmadulina, as well as by the late and post-Soviet poets Andrei Sen-Sen'kov, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, and Kirill Medvedev, to understand their fascination with the visual language, representational power, and metaphorical possibilities offered by the camera and the photographic image. Within the context of long-standing anxieties about the threat that visual media pose to literary culture, Blasing finds that these poets were attracted to the affinities and tensions that exist between the lyric or elegy and the snapshot. Snapshots of the Soul reveals that at the core of each poet's approach to "writing the photograph" is the urge to demonstrate the superior ability of poetic language to capture and convey human experience. Open Access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Introduction. Poetry and Photography: Encounters, Connections, and Change
1. Illuminating Consciousness: Pasternak's Poetics of Photography
2. Through the Lens of Loss: Tsvetaeva's Elegiac Photo-Poetics
3. Framing Memory: Brodskyand Photographic Time
4. Poetic Mothers in the Photo Frame: Akhmadulina's Lyric Dialogue with Silver Age Snapshots
5. Darkroom of Dreams: Poetry, Photography, and the Optical Unconscious
Coda. Digital Denied: Poetry and Photography after 1999