Status Updates From Lyric Poetry and Modern Pol...

Slow going, and I’m going to let you know every step of the way. Basically, Russian lyric poetry of the Stalinist era was unique and special, and many western postmodern theorists of the “death of the author” sound mighty dumb when you reflect that Stalin was killing authors, both literally and in a might as well be dead civic sense (censorship, harassment, imprisonment, disappearance). Russia is different.

I do these things too backwards sometimes. I read the biography before I read the novels; I read the criticism before I read the poetry. Non-fiction comes first. Backwards.