Loading Events

« All Events

  • This event has passed.

Derzhavin and Freedom

April 30, 2015 @ 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm

Join us on April 30, 2015 for a discussion with Tatiana Smoliarova on “Derzhavin and Freedom”.

The talk is a prelude of sorts to the year 2016, which will mark two hundred years since the death of Gavriil Romanovich Derzhavin, one of the greatest and most versatile authors in the history of Russian poetry and one of the most curious and contradictory figures in the poetry of Russian history. The first fifteen years of the nineteenth century, which were also the last fifteen years of the poet’s life, had more in common with our own young century than one might suppose, including the rise of jingoistic patriotism propagated by the state and attendant anti-Western sentiments, not infrequently held by quite educated people, yet quite at variance with the very essence of a culture built on Western models. In Derzhavin’s time these sentiments were explained and to some extent justified by Russia’s war with Napoleon; their rampant blossoming in the last decade and a half of our own century has been a sadder spectacle. How can political conservatism be expressed through avant-garde poetry? How can sharp hostility to the law on free agriculturists (which, more than anything else, led to Derzhavin’s much deplored retirement) coexist with free word-order, free verse and other manifestations of poetic freedom? We will try to address these questions, drawing examples from both today and two hundred years ago.

Tatiana Smoliarova is an Associate Professor of Russian Literature at Columbia University. Her main area of interest are the Age of the Enlightenment and its legacies in Russia and Europe, and Russian Poetry and Poetics through the ages. Her first book was Paris 1928: Ode returns to the Theater (2000), which examined Sergei Diaghilev’s ballet Ode (1928). She is also the author of Lyrics made visible. Derzhavin (2011), a book on the visual culture in Russia at the turn of the nineteenth century and one of the era’s foremost poets. She has been widely published in the history of Russian and French poetry.

Details

Date:
April 30, 2015
Time:
4:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Event Categories:
,

Venue

NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia
19 University Place, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10003 United States
Phone
212.992.6575