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73 Chapter Two Text, Time, and Place: What, When, Where, How, and Why in Klyuev’s Poetics T H E C o N T R A d I C T o RY biographical narratives constructed by and around Klyuev find many analogues in his poetry. The material texts of his work have often been elusive—lost, or brought to light many years after composition—while conceptual fluidity, thematic instability, and stylistic rupture are also typical of his writing. Klyuev’s poetry is characterized by shifts which often fracture the putative integrity of the lyric, while individual poems frequently gain entirely new meaning through later modifications or when placed in new contexts (for example, within a newly formed cycle or within a new sbornik—a collection of poems, usually marked by relative thematic and chronological unity, and a key feature of Russian modernist poetry). Throughout his career Klyuev’s work, like the stories of his life, also makes claims that are signally contradictory. This is perhaps clearest of all in the key matters of time and place. Klyuev’s artistic and personal identity is, as the examination of his biography has already indicated, profoundly linked to particular ideas of place—the north, the village. It is equally firmly linked to time—the whole, archaic culture of a frequently evoked past; and, later, the recent past, before the joint cataclysms of revolution and industry. Meanwhile , its actual location in capital-city culture, Russian modernism, and the early Soviet period produces a host of key contradictions. Moreover, while his poetry makes abundant gestures to specific times and places, it also undermines such specificity with frequent and opposite gestures toward quite different cultural referents or toward generalities which militate against the specific . The very label often given to Klyuev—“new-peasant poet”—is redolent of contradictions around ideas of time and place, while contentious claims to particular geographical or historical associations are usually foregrounded in any discussion of the poet and his work. An examination of how text, time, and place interact in and around Klyuev’s poetry will highlight key features of his thematics, and provide a context within which to situate the readings of individual texts and forms which follow in the remaining chapters. Moreover, it is clear that the circumstances in which Russian literature Chapter Two 74 of the modern period has been created and transmitted are different from what has obtained in most of what is now called the “first world,” and have had great impact on the content and form of that literature. The literal place of literature—on the page, written or printed—turns out in Russia to be particular, and even peculiar. As is so often the case with Klyuev, his work reveals much that is characteristic of his nation’s literature in general, while also revealing features that are unique and defining of him alone. Textology (more often known in English as “textual criticism”; here the equivalent of the plainer Russian tekstologiya is preferred), the most ancient and, perhaps, most “scientific” of the philological disciplines, often seems to address the most intractable problems in literary studies. Even a cursory examination of old Russian literature (that is, writing in Russia up to the seventeenth century) will confirm the local appositeness of that impression . The student who has struggled with the various versions of the story of Russia’s first native saints, Boris and Gleb, or with the most famous of Russian medieval “problem texts,” the Slovo o polku Igoreve (Lay of Igor’s Campaign), will have entered an area of intricate and potentially circular argument, where detailed knowledge of the linguistic, historical, and material circumstances of the texts (sometimes as physical objects, sometimes as objects with no clear physical existence) may be marshaled in the cause of speculation—and speculation which often has its own particular and very powerful agenda. While the printing press and the growth of publishing gradually reduce the prominence of such problems (at least in the literatures predicated upon widespread literacy and industrial distribution of belles lettres), textual issues often remain pertinent to problems of literary evaluation or canonical identification, even in the modern period. Access to an author’s drafts, unpublished correspondence, and the like; comparison of different published versions; the posthumous discovery of previously unknown works, and their transcription and editing—these and many other such matters help, of course, to shape and reshape not only an author’s reputation but also his or her very oeuvre. Meanwhile, however, many authors...

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