Classical Allusions in the Russian Poetry of the Early 20th Century: A Critical Survey of Research Practices

Abstract

As befits a proper Renaissance, the revival of Russian poetry in late 19th — early 20th century was marked by an increasing interest in Greco-Roman antiquity. The vigorous and enthusiastic exploration of classical subjects, motifs and topoi, from accurate stylization to radical rethink ing, emerged as an important feature of Russian modernist poetics. It is thus not surprising that the last decades have seen multiple and various investigations into classical reminiscences in Silver age poetry. The author of this polemical survey aims to draw attention to the vulnerable aspects of such research practices and to formulate a “code of conduct” for studying intertextual parallels between ancient authors and the Russian poets of the early Novecento. The paper was written in conjunction with the 25th anniversary of the methodologically important but not sufficiently well-known book by M. L. Gasparov Antichnost’ v russkoi poezii nachala XX veka (“Antiquity in the Russian Poetry of the Early 20th Century”). It examines such questions as the development and limits of knowledge about antiquity among the Russian litterati, the link between reception studies and the history of classical education, the ranking and weighing of intertextual parallels, the search for the intermediate sources, the importance of translations of ancient authors into European languages, the need to incorporate philological scholarship contemporary to the author and not the researcher, etc. The discussion is interspersed with case studies proposing new (or complementing old) interpretations of the poems by Ossip Mandel’shtam, Vladimir Shileiko, Vasilii Komarovskii et al.