Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Leonid Martynov, Boris Slutsky and the Politics of Rhythm

2010; Edinburgh University Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3366/para.2010.0007

1750-0176

Barry P. Scherr,

Russian Literature and Bakhtin Studies

Leonid Martynov (1905–80) and Boris Slutsky (1919–86) began to write during Stalin's reign and were aware of the contemporary official pressure to make literature more broadly accessible as well as of the highly experimental, and thus more difficult, poetry that had come into vogue during the years leading up to the Bolshevik revolution. Martynov's response was to create verse marked by ambiguity; he employs the graphic layout and internal rhyme to avoid predictability and easy interpretation, especially in a poem's opening lines. Slutsky, in contrast, often lacks the sense of rhythmic order that usually emerges in Martynov's poems. He may disrupt the rhythm unexpectedly or vary it so frequently that no overarching pattern appears. Both, whether by unsettling the rhythm or complicating its perception, manage to recall the freer and more experimental artistic milieu of the early twentieth century.