Denise Eileen McCoskey

Zara M. Torlone

I hate and I love.' The Roman poet Catullus expressed the disorienting experience of being in love in a stark contradiction that has resonated across the centuries. While his description might seem to modern readers natural and spontaneous, it is actually a response planned with great care and artistry. It is that artistry, and the way in which Roman love poetry works, that this book explores. Focusing on Catullus and on the later genre of elegy - so-called for its metre, and a form of poetry practiced by Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid - Denise Eileen McCoskey and Zara Martirosova Torlone discuss the devices used by the major Roman love poets, as well as the literary and historical contexts that helped shape their work. Setting poets and their writings especially against the turbulent backdrop of the Augustan Age (31 BCE-14 CE), the book examines the origins of Latin elegy; highlights the poets' key themes; and traces their reception by later writers and readers.

Latin Love Poetry

Zara Martirosova Torlone

This important study, the first in a new series on "Classical Diaspora", explores the reception of classical antiquity in Russian poetry with a particular focus on the writings of several significant twentieth-century poets: Innokentii Annenskii, Viacheslav Ivanov, Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelshtam and Joseph Brodsky. These poets' engagement with the classics is analysed within the wider context of Russia's relationship with Greco-Roman heritage as a gateway to European culture. The earlier phase of the development of classical reception in Russian poetry is traced from Antiokh Kantemir and Mikhailo Lomonosov to Alexander Pushkin. Thus the book offers a concise chronology of Russian poetry's self-construction as a legitimate Euopean heir to the legacy of Greece and Rome. The Russian poetic reception of classical literature has its own distinctive features such as a preoccupation with mythological tragedy and with the reception of Ovid's poetry of exile, setting it apart from the traditions and movements associated with Western European classicism.This fascinating study combines historicist scholarship with a sophisticated alertness to recent developments in reception theory, producing a compelling account of a hitherto neglected aspect of the classical tradition.

Poetry's Foreign Muse

Russia and the Classics

The Russian reception of the greatest Roman poet, Vergil, provided Russian thinkers with a way in which to define Russian-European features. This volume looks to uncover the nature of Russian reception of Vergil, and argues that the best way to analyse his presence in Russian letters is to view it in the context of the formation and development of Russian national and literary identity. Russian reception of Vergil began to play an integral role in the eighteenth century -- starting with the reforms of Peter the Great -- and continued to be an important point of reference for Russian writers well into the last part of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it took on a spiritual, almost messianic mission, while towards the end of the millennium the post-modernist Vergil of Joseph Brodsky contemplated the fate of a poet in the world. However, Russian reception of Vergil offers significantly more than mere foreign importation or imitation of the beliefs and attitudes towards Vergil developed in Europe. It provides a gateway to understanding Russian eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thought about national identity and values, and uncovers important sources of later thinking about the character and destiny of Russia. Vergil in Russia reveals that at the centre of Russian reception of Vergil is Russia's challenge to define the character and validity of their own civilization. Vergil's poems, especially the Aeneid, gave Russian men of letters an opportunity to think about and act upon national self-determination in both political and cultural terms.

National Identity and Classical Reception

Vergil in Russia

Stephen M. Norris

Identifying who was "inside" and who was "outside" the Soviet/Russian body politic has been a matter of intense and violent urgency, especially in the high Stalinist and post-Soviet periods. It is a theme encountered prominently in film. Employing a range of interpretive methods practiced in Russian/Soviet film studies, Insiders and Outsiders in Russian Cinema highlights the varied ways that Russian and Soviet cinema constructed otherness and foreignness. While the essays explore the "us versus them" binary well known to students of Russian culture and the ways in which Russian films depicted these distinctions, the book demonstrates just how impossible maintaining this binary proved to be. Contributors are Anthony Anemone, Julian Graffy, Peter Kenez, Joan Neuberger, Stephen M. Norris, Oleg Sulkin, Yuri Tsivian, Emma Widdis, and Josephine Woll.

Zara M. Torlone

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