Photography in the Russian Poetic Imagination

UW Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia (CREECA) lecture.

press release: Dr. Molly Blasing will present material from her recent book, Snapshots of the Soul: Photo-Poetic Encounters in Modern Russian Culture (Cornell UP, 2021). Snapshots of the Soul considers how photography has shaped Russian poetry from the early twentieth century to the present day. In this talk, we will consider examples of photo-poetic writing by Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Brodsky, and other 20th and 21st century poets, to explore how interactions with photographs and photography shaped their poetic writing. Join us to learn about how the camera transformed the visual language, representational power, and metaphorical possibilities available for poetic writing in Russian.

About the Speaker: Molly T. Blasing is Associate Professor of Russian Studies in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Kentucky. She received her PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from UW-Madison in 2014. Her research interests include modern and contemporary Russian poetry, the intersection of literature and the visual arts, Russian cinema, contemporary theater and political performance, and language pedagogy.

https://mcl.as.uky.edu/users/mtbl226

Follow her on Twitter: @mtblasing