Voicing the distant

"The presence of Shakespearean themes and images in Russian modernist poetry, still largely overlooked, provides valuable insight into the general mechanisms of assimilation of foreign texts by Russian modernist poetry. The present study offers extensive bilingual analysis of a large volume of poems (by Akhmatova, Blok, Mandelstam, and Pasternak among others), many of which have not yet been discovered by American readers. Through close textual readings and parallels with the preceding historical periods, the book demonstrates how the dialogical interaction between Russian modernist poets and Shakespeare leads to the expansion of meaning of the canonical texts." "The study aims to show that, within Russian cultural context, all functions of the Shakespearean text came to full actualization only at the time of literary modernism. In Russian modernist poetry, Shakespearean themes and images broke out beyond the constraints of the plot, gained a personal immediacy, and reached the level of a linguistic system capable of generating potentially endless meanings. The semiotic character of the Shakespearean text, brought to the foreground by Russian modernists, was conducive to generic, cultural, and stylistic transpositions (from the tragic to the lyric, from the social to the personal, the from the plot to the word) taking place in Russian poetry of the period. The unique nature of the treatment of Shakespeare during Russian literary modernism consisted in the Shakespearean text being allowed to become a full-fledged participant in a dialogue between cultures. Shakespeare's works proved to function both as litmus paper bringing out the pivotal characteristics of Russian modernist poetry and simultaneously as a catalyst accelerating literary innovation."--BOOK JACKET.