A study guide for Marina Tsvetayeva's "An Attempt at Jealousy", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students series. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • An extraordinary, harrowing, endlessly surprising novel set in 1946, starring two brothers and a Jewish girl who fall into alignment in pogrom-poised Moscow—from "one of the most gifted novelists of his generation” (Time). “A bullet train of a novel that barrels deep into the heart of darkness that was the Soviet gulag and takes the reader along on an unnerving journey into one of history’s most harrowing chapters.” —The New York Times The brothers' fraternal conflict then marinates in Norlag, a slave-labor camp above the Arctic Circle, where a tryst will haunt all three lovers long after the brothers are released. And for the narrator, the sole survivor, the reverberations continue into the new century.
Taking its name from the moon's dark plains, misidentified as seas by early astronomers, The Black Maria investigates African diasporic histories, the consequences of racism within American culture, and the question of human identity. Central to this project is a desire to recognize the lives of Eritrean refugees who have been made invisible by years of immigration crisis, refugee status, exile, and resulting statelessness. The recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award for Poetry, Girmay's newest collection elegizes and celebrates life, while wrestling with the humanistic notion of seeing beyond: seeing violence, seeing grace, and seeing each other better. "to the sea" great storage house, history on which we rode, we touched the brief pulse of your fluttering pages, spelled with salt & life, your rage, your indifference your gentleness washing our feet, all of you going on whether or not we live, to you we bring our carnations yellow & pink, how they float like bright sentences atop your memory's dark hair Aracelis Girmay is the author of two poetry collections, Teeth and Kingdom Animalia, which won the Isabella Gardner Award and was a finalist for the NBCC Award. The recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award, she has received grants and fellowships from the Jerome, Cave Canem, and Watson foundations, as well as Civitella Ranieri and the NEA. She currently teaches at Hampshire College's School for Interdisciplinary Arts and in Drew University's low residency MFA program. Originally from Santa Ana, California, she splits her time between New York and Amherst, Massachusetts.
Edited by Yevgeny Pasternak, Yelena Pasternak, and Konstantin M. Azadovsky The summer of 1926 was a time of trouble and uncertainty for each of the three poets whose correspondence is collected in this moving volume. Marina Tsvetayeva was living in exile in France and struggling to get by. Boris Pasternak was in Moscow, trying to come to terms with the new Bolshevik regime. Rainer Maria Rilke, in Switzerland, was dying. Though hardly known to each other, they began to correspond, exchanging a series of searching letters in which every aspect of life and work is discussed with extraordinary intensity and passion. Letters: Summer 1926 takes the reader into the hearts and minds of three of the twentieth century's greatest poets at a moment of maximum emotional and creative pressure.
A moving collection of autobiographical essays from a Russian poet and refugee of the Bolshevik Revolution. Marina Tsvetaeva ranks with Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Boris Pasternak as one of Russia’s greatest twentieth-century poets. Her suicide at the age of forty-eight was the tragic culmination of a life buffeted by political upheaval. The essays collected in this volume are based on diaries she kept during the turbulent years of the Revolution and Civil War. In them she records conversations of women in the markets, soldiers and peasants on the train traveling from the Crimea to Moscow in October 1917, fighting in the streets of Moscow, a frantic scramble with co-workers to dig frozen potatoes out of a cellar, and poetry readings organized by a newly minted Soviet bohemia. Alone in Moscow with two small children, no income, and a missing husband, Tsvetaeva struggled to feed her daughters (one of whom died of malnutrition in an orphanage), find employment in the Soviet bureaucracy, and keep writing poetry. Her keen and ruthless eye observes with compassion and humor—bringing the social, economic, and cultural chaos of the period to life. These autobiographical writings not only give a vivid eyewitness account of Russian history but provide vital insights into the workings of Tsvetaeva’s unique poetics. Includes black and white photographs.
One of the very first Persian poets was a woman (Rabe’eh, who lived over a thousand years ago) and there have been women poets writing in Persian in virtually every generation since that time until the present. Before the twentieth century they tended to come from society’s social extremes. Many were princesses, a good number were hired entertainers of one kind or another, and they were active in many different countries – Iran of course, but also India, Afghanistan, and areas of central Asia that are now Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan. Not surprisingly, a lot of their poetry sounds like that of their male counterparts, but a lot doesn’t; there are distinctively bawdy and flirtatious poems by medieval women poets, poems from virtually every era in which the poet complains about her husband (sometimes light-heartedly, sometimes with poignant seriousness), touching poems on the death of a child, and many epigrams centered on little details that bring a life from hundreds of years ago vividly before our eyes. This new bilingual edition of The Mirror of My Heart – the poems in Persian and English on facing pages – is a unique and captivating collection introduced and translated by Dick Davis, an acclaimed scholar and translator of Persian literature as well as a gifted poet in his own right. In his introduction he provides fascinating background detail on Persian poetry written by women through the ages, including common themes and motifs and a brief overview of Iranian history showing how women poets have been affected by the changing dynasties. From Rabe’eh in the tenth century to Fatemeh Ekhtesari in the twenty-first, each of the eighty-four poets in this volume is introduced in a short biographical note, while explanatory notes give further insight into the poems themselves.
This book is a major critical biography of the poet Maria Tsvetaeva by one of the foremost authorities on her work. It draws on a profusion of recent documentation and research, some of it hitherto unpublished, and encompasses the whole course of her life. Professor Karlinsky is careful to supply the reader with the necessary context for understanding the work by setting out the historical, political and literary background against which Tsvetaeva's life and literary development evolved. A particular feature of the book is a discussion of Tsvetaeva's relationships with her literary contemporaries, especially Mandelstam, Rilke, Akhmatova, Pasternak, and Mayakovsky, and of her emotional involvement with various men and women that are reflected in her poetry, plays and prose. Interest in Tsvetaeva's work has grown considerably and this important book will be essential reading both to scholars of twentieth-century Russian literature and cultural studies and to all serious students of modern literature.
Nominee for the 2021 NAACP Image Award in Poetry An elegiac and moving meditation on the ways in which we witness "bodies" of grief and healing. Poems and photographs collide in this intimate collection, challenging the invisible, indefinable ways mourning takes up residence in a body, both before and after life-altering loss. In radiant poems—set against the evocative and desperate backdrop of contemporary events, pop culture, and politics—Rachel Eliza Griffiths reckons with her mother’s death, aging, authority, art, black womanhood, memory, and the American imagination. The poems take shape in the space where public and private mourning converge, finding there magic and music alongside brutality and trauma. Griffiths braids a moving narrative of identity and its possibilities for rebirth through image and through loss. A photographer as well as a poet, Griffiths accompanies the fierce rhythm of her verses with a series of ghostly, imaginative self-portraits, blurring the body’s internal wilderness with landscapes alive with beauty and terror. The collision of text and imagery offers an associative autobiography, in which narratives of language, absence, and presence are at once saved, revised, and often erased. Seeing the Body dismantles personal and public masks of silence and self-destruction to visualize and celebrate the imperfect freedom of radical self-love.
This is a long overdue examination of a poet whose career offers a case study in the complexities facing Soviet writers in the Stalin era. Ol'ga Berggol'ts (1910-1975) was a prominent Russian Soviet poet, whose accounts of heroism in wartime Leningrad brought her fame. This volume addresses her position as a writer whose Party loyalties were frequently in conflict with the demands of artistic and personal integrity. Writers who pursued their careers under the restrictions of the Stalin era have been categorized as 'official' figures whose work is assumed to be drab, inept, and opportunistic; but such assumptions impose a uniformity on the work of Soviet writers that the censors and the Writers Union could not achieve. An exploration of Berggol'ts's work shows that the borders between 'official' and 'unofficial' literature were in fact permeable and shifting. This book draws on unpublished sources such as diaries and notebooks to reveal the range and scope of her work, and to show how conflict and ambiguity functioned as a creative structuring principle. Dr Hodgson discusses how Berggol'ts's lyric poetry constructs the subject from multiple, conflicting discourses, and examines the poet's treatment of genres such as narrative verse, verse tragedy, and prose in the changing cultural context of the 1950s. Berggol'ts's use of inter-textual, and especially intra-textual, reference is also investigated; the intensively self-referential nature of her work creates a web of allusion which connects texts of different genres, 'official' as well as 'unofficial' writing. This study will provoke readers into reassessing the cultural heritage of an era that can seem remote and impenetrable, but which (like Ol'ga Berggol'ts) was far more complex and intriguing.
