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The birth of the modern female bard: Gender and genre in Marina Tsvetaeva's "Perekop"
Abstract
The life and career of the remarkable Russian poet, Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) offers a paradigm for the modern woman writer. Despite the great number of women associated with Western Modernism, the Modernist canon is striking for the paucity of its women representatives. This thesis hopes to redress that situation, starting with a new reading of Tsvetaeva's epic poem of the Russian Civil War, Perekop (1928-1929). Perekop is the culmination of Tsvetaeva's verse experimentation with her culture's received constructs of gender and genre and it is the work in which she realizes the voice of an anonymous female bard. The failure of this poem to attract critical recognition parallels the experience of comparably innovative work among Tsvetaeva's female contemporaries. Tsvetaeva's work, in verse and prose, is a de facto manifesto of a female poetics. Deciphering the terms of this female modernist poetics provides a critical discourse in which to appreciate the comparably innovative and de-valued work of other modernist women writers. My thesis first outlines the cultural obstacles to Tsvetaeva's epic ambition, then explicates the strategies by which she accomplishes it. Through her re-writing of the gender-linked metaphors of Western poetics, Tsvetaeva creates the modern female bard. The trajectory of my analysis is determined by the unifying system of lyric tropes I extract from both prose and verse. This series of tropes is then located in Tsvetaeva's appropriation of western ideas, ranging from the practice of Homer, Herodotus, Hesiod and Heraclitus through the theories of the German Romantics and Nietzsche to the practice of the Russian poets Aleksandr Pushkin and Boris Pasternak. My analysis culminates in the exploration of the medieval Russian text Slovo o polku Igoreve as the unifying sub-text of Tsvetaeva's Perekop.
Subject Area
Comparative literature|Classical studies|Slavic literature
Recommended Citation
Smith, Marilyn Schwinn, "The birth of the modern female bard: Gender and genre in Marina Tsvetaeva's "Perekop"" (1996). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9639030.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9639030