The book of poems in twentieth-century Russian literature: Khodasevich, Gippius and Shvarts

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Russian symbolists began to pay consistent and particular attention to the organization of their individual poems into integral collections. In this dissertation, I examine the organizing principles behind three post-symbolist books of poetry.;My first two chapters deal with texts from the first half of the century: Vladislav Khodasevich's Way of the Grain (1920; 1921; 1927) and Zinaida Gippius's Radiances (1938). The third chapter addresses a more recent work: Elena Shvarts's The Works and Days of the Nun Lavinia (1987). In all three instances, the poets consciously and deliberately approach the construction of their books. Khodasevich rewrites his book twice, fundamentally changing it in the third edition. Gippius breaks away from her earlier chronologically organized "diaries" and creates a final summational book. Shvarts publishes the poems of a fictional character, thus creating a novel in verse, of sorts.;In identifying the organizing principles underlying each of these individual books, I draw on previous scholarship on the Russian lyric cycle---a form often distinct from the book of poems but one that raises similar questions of composition and influence. The formal approaches proposed by Ronald Vroon, I. V. Fomenko, and M. N. Darvin to the poetic cycle can be applied to the book of poems as well: close attention to titles, subheadings and epigraphs; framing of opening and closing poems; repetition of key words, phrases and images; similarity or juxtaposition of formal features such as meter; marked non-chronological ordering of poems.;In my conclusion, I pose the question of tradition, juxtaposing Shvarts's 1987 work to Khodasevich's and Gippius's in an attempt to describe how the conception of the book of poems has changed over the course of the century.