Through the lens of loss: Marina Tsvetaeva's Elegiac photo-poetics

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 The article makes available a number of previously unpublished archival photographs taken by Tsvetaeva-images that are directly linked to her cycle of poems dedicated to Nikolai Gronskii, Nadgrobie.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.