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Speaker(s): Luba Golburt Associate Professor (UC Berkeley)

How might one write a history of the nature lyric in Russia? Drawn from a larger project that attempts precisely such a history, this talk outlines one of its central threads: the short lyric form with the somewhat downplayed or diffused lyric subject, associated in the Russian lyrical tradition with Fedor Tiutchev, but recently renewed, as Golburt argues, in the work of the contemporary poet Anna Glazova. Positing brevity as a constitutive category for a particular kind of lyric engagement with nature, the talk presents three case studies of poets who, while drawing on very different sources in natural science and philosophy, share specific philosophical preoccupations with poetry as a form of cognition.
 
Luba Golburt received her Ph. D. in Comparative Literature from èצӰ�� and is currently Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley. She is the author of The First Epoch: The Eighteenth Century and the Russian Cultural Imagination (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), which received the AATSEEL prize for best book in Literary/Cultural Studies (2015), the Marc Raeff Book Prize from the Eighteenth-Century Russian Studies Association (2014), and the Heldt Prize for best book by a woman in any area of Slavic/East European/Eurasian Studies (2015). She is currently at work on two new book projects: The Russian Nature Lyric, a case-study-based critical history of the nature lyric in Russia and The Critical Epoch: The 1830s and Russian Literary History, a book on the critical reception of late Romanticism and the categories of ‘transition’, ‘tendency’, and ‘lateness’ in Russian literary history.