Showing posts with label Annensky. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Annensky. Show all posts

Thursday, 22 November 2018

Mandel'shtam


For the time being I've put my 1973 Mandel'shtam translations here.

Like Annensky, Mandel'shtam was spiritually and psychologically rooted in St Petersburg -- the city named Pietari in Finnish, and at one time in many respects a cultural and economic region of Finland.

Monday, 14 August 2017

Annensky

Not strictly a Nordic item, though it has many Finnish echoes and connections*: the Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA) has made available a complete downloadable scan of my 1971 doctoral dissertation on the poetry and poetics of Innokenty Annensky.

It’s interesting to see this work again after such a long time.  My writing style has changed somewhat in the interim, but I can still recognise the author as myself. The dissertation is detailed and academically disciplined – there's also some application of the structuralist principles current in literary criticism at that time – but I wasn’t afraid to let my emotions speak now and then. The introduction was written last of all, in 1970, after my return from a second study period in Moscow, and some of the gloom that surrounded politics and literature in the Soviet Union at that time can be detected in the text.

*See, for example, the Imatra page on the Мир Иннокентия Анненского website.