Snapshots of the Soul: Photo-Poetic Encounters in Modern Russian Culture

Research output: Book/ReportBookpeer-review

Abstract

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.
Original languageAmerican English
Place of PublicationIthaca and London
Number of pages328
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 15 2021

Bibliographical note

Blasing, Molly Thomasy. Snapshots of the Soul: Photo-Poetic Encounters in Modern Russian Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501753718

Keywords

  • Russian Poetry
  • Russia
  • Poetry
  • Photography
  • Photo-poetics
  • Russian Literature
  • 20th century
  • 21st century
  • Literature and linguistics
  • Literature
  • poetics
  • visual arts
  • visual culture
  • Russian poetry -- 20th century -- History and criticism
  • Literature and photography -- Russia -- History -- 20th century
  • Literature and photography -- Soviet Union -- History
  • Photography in literature
  • Literature and photography
  • Soviet Union

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