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

by Molly Thomasy Blasing

Overview

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.

Open Access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501753695
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	07/15/2021
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Molly Thomasy Blasing is Assistant Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Kentucky. Follow her on X @mtblasing.

Table of Contents

Introduction. Poetry and Photography: Encounters, Connections, and Change
1. Illuminating Consciousness: Pasternak's Poetics of Photography
2. Through the Lens of Loss: Tsvetaeva's Elegiac Photo-Poetics
3. Framing Memory: Brodskyand Photographic Time
4. Poetic Mothers in the Photo Frame: Akhmadulina's Lyric Dialogue with Silver Age Snapshots
5. Darkroom of Dreams: Poetry, Photography, and the Optical Unconscious
Coda. Digital Denied: Poetry and Photography after 1999

What People are Saying About This

Michael Wachtel

In this thoughtful, pioneering book, Molly Thomasy Blasing demonstrates the extent to which photography has impacted the last hundred years of Russian poetry. Through close readings and careful contextualization, Blasing opens up new approaches to some of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, providing a multifaceted discussion of the relationship between text and image and a rich source material on the history and theory of photography.

Jenifer Presto

Snapshots of the Soul is a prodigiously researched and elegantly argued monograph that makes a compelling case for a Russian photo-poetics. Moving deftly between poems and photographs by Russia's leading twentieth- and twenty-first-century poets, Molly Thomasy Blasing convincingly demonstrates that the encounter between poetry and photography was central to Russian literary culture.

Stephanie Sandler

A deeply researched and utterly compelling work of scholarship. Case studies provide close-ups of major poets, with dozens more to fill in a varied and persuasive context. The poets conjure up photographs real and imagined, and photography is shown as a metaphor for writing practice. We come away from this splendid book with a richer sense of modern Russian poetry, and we get to reread and rethink poems that associate photography with mourning and memory, with fluidity and freedom, with a flickering sense of being and of knowing.

Editorial Reviews

The book includes a bountiful selection of photographs closely related to the text. Highly recommended.

Choice

Blasing's work demonstrates an amazing knowledge of an array of archival evidence, from photographs to literary manuscripts, spread across the United States, Europe, and the Russian Federation.

The Russian Review