"Погасло дневное светило..."

My first response paper in graduate school. I would like to think it's not totally all over the place, but I think I'm fooling myself. Oh, well. There will most certainly be others. This is not particularly polished, but I think that is all right, considering it is supposed to be a "reading diary" of sorts.

A good portion of this entry was brought to you by my notes from Intro to Polish Lit at UCL. Thanks, Romanticism and Mickiewicz!

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As opposed to the dominance of reason we would expect in the philosophy of many pre-Pushkinian writers, in Pushkin's "Pogaslo dnevnoe svetilo," we observe the preeminence of emotion and the senses characteristic of the Romantic style: "ia vizhu ... s volnen'em i toskoi ... i chuvstvuiu." The inclusion of "slezy," the physical manifestation of powerful emotion, underlines this point. The speaker does not hesitate to mourn his "poteriannaia mladost'" in the most colorful of extremes, appealing to such terms as "stradan'e," "zhertvoval," and "ran" in order to express the depths of his misfortune. There is no attempt on the part of the poet to appeal to his rational faculties -- instead, "dusha kipit i zamiraet" before memories of "bezumnuiu liubov'."

Explicit expressions of the speaker's feelings are accompanied by an example of pathetic fallacy. A complex interplay between the speaker's own person and the environment around him unfolds from the very first couplet: daylight has faded and a mist has descended upon the dark blue sea, setting an appropriate scene for -- or perhaps reflecting -- the poet's melancholic musings in a way reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich's painting Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer. The sail and the ocean of the repeated couplet are, in a sense, given life by their attributions of "poslushnoe" and "ugriumyi"; in particular, the waters are explicitly linked to the speaker's memories of "vse, chto serdtsu milo, / zhelanii i nadezhd tomitel'nyi obman" with the speaker's plea to his ship to transport him "po groznoi prikhoti obmanchivykh morei." Juan Eduardo Cirlot, in his Dictionary of Symbols, provides that "the stormy sea, as a poetic image or a dream, is a sign of an analogous state in the lower depths of the affective unconscious"; it is possible that the poet, amidst the mysterious, even mystical air of darkness, mist, and the open ocean, is using direct address of "vetrilo" and "okean" as an attempt to achieve a dialogue with himself in which he confronts the regrets of his past and his desires for the future.

Although Kahn states that he "will emphatically not argue that Pushkin's aesthetic evolves from the classical to the Romantic," Pushkin's use of the term "muzy" in reference to "bregam pechal'nym / tumannoi rodiny moei" may constitute a subtle indication of a desire on his part to dispense with classical tradition. Since the imagery throughout the poem is powerfully evocative of Romantic tendencies, "Pogaslo dnevnoe svetilo" might, in fact, foreshadow a movement in Pushkin's aesthetic to the Romantic -- even in such an early work -- but that claim cannot be substantiated without a deeper acquaintance of his oeuvre.

There also exist links between this poem and the idea of moving "per realia ad realiora" in the thought of future symbolists, e.g. in Konstantin Bal'mont's "Na raznykh iazykakh." It might be argued that Bal'mont, in his use of the imagery of "ty pesok na mertvykh beregakh" in opposition to "vozdushnyi sad ispolnen aromata ... moia dusha bogata" evokes the Pushkin of this poem, located in the liminal geography of the sea between "otecheski kraia" and "bereg otdalennyi, zemli poludennoi volshebnye kraia" and desiring to leave behind the "napersnitsy porochnykh zabluzhdenii" and "prezhnikh serdtsa ran, glubokikh ran liubvi" of his past in favor of regaining "sebia, pokoi, slava, svoboda, i dusha." The speakers of both poems aspire to absolution, the sea serving in both cases as a mediator between two shores, one representing an ideal and the other enshrouded in the darkness of vice.

For now, a reading log.

I think I will just take note here of what I read that might be vaguely relevant to research and learning, because it would probably be a good place to serve as that sort of repository.

Tempest, Richard. "The Young Pushkin and Chaadaev" in Issues in Russian Literature Before 1917 (Slavica 1989). Slavic Library, Building 240.

Not much to say here except I should probably start looking into what exact political questions the Russian intelligentsia concerned itself with in the beginning of the 19th century, and it might be helpful to find a biography of Pushkin at some point. If I had even heard of Chaadaev before reading this article, I might have more insights, though the author references a work of his (Philosophical Letters) in which Chaadaev "declared that, in a sense, his country did not exist," which frankly sounds rather intriguing (58). To what extent did Chaadaev serve as an influence on Pushkin? This is something to keep in mind when reading Evgenii Onegin next month. I will need to look up some more about the Napoleonic wars and serfdom at some point.

Stones in place of bread.

Quick note of possible reministsenziia in Akhmatova's Pesenka, of Lermontov's Nishchii.


Песенка

Я на солнечном восходе
Про любовь пою,
На коленях в огороде
Лебеду полю.

Вырываю и бросаю -
Пусть простит меня.
Вижу, девочка босая
Плачет у плетня.

Страшно мне от звонких воплей
Голоса беды,
Все сильнее запах теплый
Мертвой лебеды.

Будет камень вместо хлеба
Мне наградой злой.
Надо мною только небо,
А со мною голос твой.

-- Анна Ахматова


Нищий

У врат обители святой
Стоял просящий подаянья
Бедняк иссохший, чуть живой
От глада, жажды и страданья.

Куска лишь хлеба он просил,
И взор являл живую муку,
И кто-то камень положил
В его протянутую руку.

Так я молил твоей любви
С слезами горькими, с тоскою;
Так чувства лучшие мои
Обмануты навек тобою!

-- Михаил Лермонтов


Just something to think about.

The restored pronunciation of classical Greek.

So I realize this first "real" post is long overdue, and that its "reality" as such could easily be contested, as I'm only here to make note of the Society for the Oral Reading of Greek and Latin Literature, which I found through a Google search for Sappho 1. I've been meaning to look for reconstructed classical pronunciation for quite some time, and found it -- tones and all. Of interest here are Sappho 1 itself as well as a section from Euripides' Trojan Women. Worth a visit, even assuming no knowledge of Greek whatsoever (I have yet to poke around the Latin section) -- it's amazing how melodic and foreign it can sound when efforts are made to approximate how it was actually spoken.

Hello, world!

As if I had too much time on my hands, I've decided to start this blog specifically for thoughts that come to mind about literature. I have a personal blog or two lying around elsewhere, so this will not be the place for "this is what I did today" posts.

Me: I am graduating from Williams College in a month or so with a major in linguistics and a certificate in Russian language and culture. In September I will enter the M.A./Ph.D. program in Slavic languages and literatures at Stanford University. My focus will necessarily be on some aspect of Russian literature, probably something in the late 19th or early 20th centuries; I consider myself fairly well-read in the French canon, and am interested in exploring possibilities in Polish literature and Japanese literature.

This blog: Perseus gives the definition of perinoesis as shrewdness, subtlety; sustained thought. I thought this was vaguely appropriate, as I doubt this blog will ever become popular (or really known to much of anyone other than myself), and it is being created in order to encourage me to think a bit more about the work I do, as well as the things I read that don't necessarily constitute my work.

And that is all for now. Hello, world!