Slavic Colloquium: Daria Khitrova

Speaker(s): Daria Khitrova (Harvard University)

Things Untimely: Death, Birth, and Poetry in Evgenii Baratynsky's "Nedonosok"
 
Among Evgenii Baratynsky’s lyric poems, “Nedonosok” (“The Stillborn,” 1835) is famous for being eccentric and enigmatic. The questions Khitrova poses concern the literary genesis of “Nedonosok” and its generic strangeness. Taken separately, every line and every stanza of the poem is semantically clear; what causes us to perceive the text as a whole as enigmatic? What leaves the reader, post-reading, with a feeling that there must be more to what the poem says? I explore the pockets of ambiguity that might be responsible for this effect: lexical ambiguity (what did the word nedonosok communicate to Baratynsky’s contemporaries when used directly and figuratively?); generic ambiguity (what is it that signals that “Nedonosok” is not a canonical lyric poem?); and the pragmatic ambiguity related to the text’s speech situation (who is speaking in “Nedonosok,” and to whom?).