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The dissertation examines the representation of Petersburg in the poetry (late 1960s to early 1980s) of three prominent Leningrad Underground poets: Viktor Krivulin, Elena Shvarts, and Sergey Stratanovskii. For these poets, the city's image represents the cultural and poetic legacy of pre-revolutionary Russian literature as shaped by 19th-century and Russian Modernist historiosophical thought.
We approach their creative interpretations of Petersburg using what Vladimir Toporov terms the “Petersburg Text,” which, as we argue, reflects various authors’ views on Petersburg’s destiny as informed by Russian historiosophical thought concerned the fulfillment of history's purpose, the attaining of the Kingdom of God, and questions of personal and collective agency in the historical process. The messianic stance of the Leningrad Underground poets is directed towards the city’s role in any quest to change a stagnant Soviet reality. Krivulin, Shvarts, and Stratanovskii engage with and simultaneously contest the question of Petersburg’s significance in the unfolding of Russia’s history and the importance of the poet's messianic status and the power of the poetic word in relation to the city and its creator.
The dissertation contextualizes the work of the Leningrad Underground poets within their immediate literary and social environment and the broader framework of Russian thought, offering a more nuanced understanding of their individual talents’ relationship to tradition, intertextuality, and influence, and illuminating a greater complexity of approaches toward the necessity and the possibility of simultaneous preservation and continuation of the tradition than that suggested by existing scholarship.
Chapter 1 begins by discussing the poets’ shared cultural and intellectual background. The second part of the chapter provides an in-depth analysis of Krivulin’s essays of the 1970s, which are dedicated to the theoretical discussion of the quest to preserve and continue the prerevolutionary poetic tradition.
Chapter 2 focuses on Krivulin’s representation of Petersburg/Leningrad through an Apocalyptic lens and discusses the main parallels with and differences from the texts of his fellow poets.
Chapter 3 examines the theme of salvation and apokatastasis in connection with the city’s image in Shvarts’s poetry, comparing her texts with those of Krivulin and Stratanovskii.