Thursday, February 21, 2019

Literature and Culture Seminar

“Tsvetaeva, Modernism, and Rilke” 

Catherine Ciepiela, Howard M. and Martha P. Mitchell Professor of Russian, Amherst College

CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge Street, Room S354

4:30-5:45 p.m.

When Pasternak introduced Tsvetaeva to Rilke in 1926, she had been reading Rilke for at least a decade.  She read him with special intensity at the start of life in emigration:  we know she acquired a copy of his Early Poems on the day she arrived in Prague in 1923, and several poems in After Russia are clearly re-writes of poems from Rilke’s New Poems.  Catherine Ciepiela take Rilke’s example to be definitive for Tsvetaeva’s émigré career.  For this talk, she consider his influence on her long poems as an approach to characterizing her distinctive modernism.