Rebecca Pyatkevich Mehr, Ph. D.
Whereas prose aspires to the fiction of its descriptive, objective power, poetry continually betrays its origin as social act. Speaking very broadly, my research engages with the modes through which the poetic word manifests its active nature: performativity, rhetoric, apostrophe and poetic address, ekphrasis, and reader response. These concerns are key to understanding the importance of the poetic word in twentieth-century Russia.
Osip Mandelstam’s famous statement, “Only in Russia is poetry respected, it gets people killed,” has an obverse side: in the turbulent, but rhetorically hyper-aware, context of the Russian twentieth century, Russian poets maximized and underlined the active features of their craft to create an alternate discursive social space where the interactions between poet and reader (or poet and listener) challenged the predominant rhetorical environment.
My research deals with those poets – Joseph Brodsky and Marina Tsvetaeva – whose work was driven by their awareness of the communicative efficacy of the poetic word. This approach is complemented by my work on the unofficial poets of the 1960s, which addresses these issues from the point of view of a linguistic community, rather than individual authors.
Putin’s catastrophic decision to invade Ukraine in February of 2022 has radically altered the context within which I and most US-based scholars conduct our work — highlighting the need to recognize the imperial impulse as a key constitutive feature of the Russian literary creative space. It is a seismic shift. Although I am used to characterizing the poets I work on as existing outside or beyond the cultural/political mainstream and as deriving their linguistic power from that opposition, with Brodsky and the unofficial poets of the 1960s, the imperialist impulse is very much constitutive of their projects as well. Not so for Tsvetaeva, best as I can see. I am currently rethinking how to honestly, authentically, and productively address the question of these poets' relevance in the current historical situation.