Riccardo Mini

My dissertation aims to analyse the genre of the malen’kaya poėma (short poėma) within the poetic work of Elena Shvarts. The study develops in three main directions. Firstly, it follows the evolution of Elena Shvarts’s career as a poet, with particular attention to the context of the Leningrad Underground and the main characteristics of Shvarts’s poetics. Secondly, it revolves around a comprehensive examination of the genre of the malen’kaya poėma, including its historical antecedents within the Russian poetic tradition. Finally, ten out of the fourteen poems of the Malen’kie poėmy collection, published in the second volume of the poet’s complete works, are analysed. As mentioned, the thesis unfolds across three principal dimensions, with the following specific aims: 1. To identify the main features of Elena Shvarts’s poetics using examples from the malen’kie poėmy, the poems and the poėmy, as well as her prose and essays. 2. To retrace the sources of the genre of the malen’kaya poėma and explain Elena Shvarts’s own interpretation of the genre. After identifying the characteristics of the genre with reference to theoretical and scientific literature, these characteristics are identified and analysed in comparison with selected works by the most influential poets for Shvarts, namely Marina Tsvetaeva, Mikhail Kuzmin and Velimir Khlebnikov. 3. To conduct an exhaustive analysis of a selection of malen’kie poėmy to demonstrate in which way the previously identified characteristics of the poetics and genre manifest within the poetic texts. This analysis accentuates Elena Shvarts’s connections with the Silver Age while highlighting the distinctiveness of her contributions in terms of genre and thematical elements. Therefore, the thesis is composed of three chapters dedicated to the study of the abovementioned questions. The first chapter, titled “Characteristics and specificity of Elena Shvarts’s poetics”, opens with an exploration of the poet’s biography and the context in which Shvarts matured and developed as a poet. Following this detailed introduction to the poet’s biography and the non-official milieu, the first chapter is also dedicated to a comprehensive exploration of the fundamental characteristics of Elena Shvarts’s poetics. Specifically, this section aims at understanding how Shvarts’s poetics is based on contrasts and contradictions, and therefore finds its main expression in the juxtaposition of divergent elements, realities and categories that create a vast poetic universe. Finally, this analysis demonstrates how the literary device of metamorphosis underpins the previously mentioned thematic and stylistic elements. The chapter concludes with two sections dedicated to poet’s relationship with the city of Leningrad-Petersburg, which functions as the setting for most of her works, and the poet’s characteristics use of authorial masks. The second chapter, titled “The Malen’kaya poėma as a genre in the work of Elena Shvarts”, seeks to delineate the main features of Shvarts’s short poėmas and identifies its sources in the Russian poetic tradition. After scrutinising the characteristics elucidated by Shvarts, the research transitions towards a comprehensive investigation of the sources. The most significant theoretical foundations are rooted in Mikahil Bakhtin’s theories concerning genre memory and Boris Tomashevsky’s theories regarding genre signs. The genre of the early 20th-century lyric poėma is considered, with particular emphasis placed on the scientific work of Vladimir Markov a Leonid Dolgopolov devoted to this topic. Notably, these analyses discern three distinctive attributes of the liricheskaya poėma: the weakening of the fabula element, its inherent fragmentation and the lyrical development. Considering these analyses, a more in-depth investigation has been conducted on the structure of Elena Shvarts’s malen’kie poėmy, with a specific focus on rhythm and polymetric versification, to illustrate the connection of these poems with the works of the Silver Age. The second part of the second chapter is dedicated to the examination of selected works by three prominent figures of the Silver Age: Marina Tsvetaeva, Mikhail Kuzmin and Velimir Khlebnikov. These three poets are cited by Shvarts as models for her poetic style and for the malen’kaya poėma. The third and final chapter, titled „The analysis of Elena Shvarts’s Malen’kie poėmy”, consists in the analysis of ten out of the fourteen poems included in the “Malen’kie poėmy” collection. The analysis has been conducted not chronologically, but following the order of appearance in the collection, established by Shvarts. The analysis is oriented towards an exploration of both stylistic and thematic elements and aims at showing in detail how the characteristics and theoretical frameworks articulated in the previous two chapters find expression in the malen’kie poėmy. In particular, the poems selected point out the variety and multifaceted nature of the themes, such as the interplay between categories, the bond between the physical and the metaphysical, and the poet’s relationship with both the divine and her surrounding environment. The aim of the analysis is also to illustrate how Shvarts’s poetics and the concept of “vision-adventure” reach their full potential in the genre of the malen’kaya poėma, through the characteristically rigorous structure and a recurring phonetic and metrical organisation that manipulates rhythm shifts.