UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines three modernist Russian poets’ engagement with ancient mythology to illuminate the conceptual effects of lyric poetry. In a series of close readings, I argue that these poets (Viacheslav Ivanov, Osip Mandelstam, Joseph Brodsky) deploy a variety of mythic material and modes (Dionysian revelry, epic quests, modern centaurs) in their writings in order to perform intellectual work (historiography, philosophical inquiry, deconstruction) and ultimately reveal the lyric genre’s constitutive devices (metaphor and sound patterning, apostrophe, metonymy) to be ancient technologies of thought.

In the process, I demonstrate that these modernist Russian lyrics reckon with – and invite us to perform – a reflexive conceptual feat. Engaging with the conditions of their own emergence, reaching for their connections with the Hellenic past, the lyrical works of Ivanov, Mandelstam, and Brodsky explore the links between classical myth and modern poetic expression, exposing the power of the poetic word to unite the fragmentary, and to make mystical the mundane. By investigating how these works each enter a mythic mode, deploy a lyrical device by which the mythic mode is thought through, and then engender a resulting conceptual effect, this dissertation proposes connections stretching from classical antiquity to the twentieth century, from structuralist studies of myth to ecocriticism to new media studies.

While the affinity between ancient myth and poetic expression is a well-known feature of Russian lyric modernism, this dissertation examines how these lyrical works limn their own constitutive devices as technologies of human thought and apperception. Ivanov’s, Mandelstam’s, and Brodsky’s investments in antiquity adumbrates how lyric can reflexively pursue itself as both an object and medium of thought. In this way, the poems this dissertation examines conjure myth as a resource, and invite the reader to participate in the prevailing cognitive mode they represent.