Beyond the Flesh: Alexander Blok, Zinaida Gippius, and the Symbolist Sublimation of Sex [Hardcover]

Jenifer Presto (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 7, 2008

Though the Russian Symbolist movement was dominated by a concern with transcending sex, many of the writers associated with the movement exhibited an intense preoccupation with matters of the flesh. Drawing on poetry, plays, short stories, essays, memoirs, and letters, as well as feminist and psychoanalytic theory, Beyond the Flesh documents the often unexpected form that this obsession with gender and the body took in the life and art of two of the most important Russian Symbolists.

            Jenifer Presto argues that the difficulties encountered in reading Alexander Blok and Zinaida Gippius within either a feminist or a traditional, binary gendered framework derive not only from the peculiarities of their creative personalities but also from the specific Russian cultural context. Although these two poets engaged in gendered practices that, at times, appeared to be highly idiosyncratic and even incited gossip among their contemporaries, they were not operating in a vacuum. Instead, they were responding to philosophical concepts that were central to Russian Symbolism and that would continue to shape modernism in Russia.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“An entirely new and highly productive approach to the study of Symbolist mythologies.”—Catherine Ciepiela, author of The Same Solitude: Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva

“Jenifer Presto’s imaginative pairing of two major Symbolist poets produces all sorts of scholarly rewards, both in her provocative readings of individual texts and in the far-reaching cultural and theoretical contexts she uses to frame these readings. The poetic landscape of Russia’s Silver Age will never look quite the same again.”—Clare Cavanagh, author of Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition

“A sophisticated, elegant, and substantial study of two central figures in the Russian Symbolist movement. The intellectual sparkle of the book is matched by its very thorough scholarly underpinning.”—Sibelan Forrester, Swarthmore College

“Presto takes a fresh tack on the poets. . . . With a nuanced eye she explores the complexities and contradictions of these poets’ construction of gendered selves, in life and art. . . . The study is hugely worth reading; may it produce new generations of scholars whose ‘Blok’ and ‘Gippius’ are informed by refreshing twenty-first-century perspectives.”—Julie de Sherbinin, Slavic Review

About the Author

Jenifer Presto is associate professor of comparative literature and Russian at the University of Oregon.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press; 1 edition (November 7, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0299229505
• ISBN-13: 978-0299229504
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,527,543 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars two Russian Symbolist poets, February 3, 2009

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Henry Berry "Henry Berry" (Southport, CT) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Beyond the Flesh: Alexander Blok, Zinaida Gippius, and the Symbolist Sublimation of Sex (Hardcover)

An associate professor of comparative literature and Russian at the U. of Oregon, Presto engages in a "revisionist reading [of two Russian Symbolist poets'] problematic relationship with matters of the flesh" succeeding studies of this theme of the 1970s and 1980s. The earlier studies from a different era of literary criticism were for the most part feminist studies or gender studies. While illuminating, these studies had a limitation in that applying and referring to such critical principles and theories, they did not--could not--yield the fullness of the poets' ambivalences regarding the flesh; nor discern how they failed in their desires to transcend the flesh.

In their attempts to transcend the flesh--i. e., corporeal reality--the latter 19th-century Russian poets exposed the varied ways they were inevitably bound to it. The strength of their desires to transcend the flesh frequently gave rise to obsessive-like, sometimes lurid poetry. At its heart, transcending corporeal reality meant purging oneself of normal sexuality and with this denying such conditions as identity, relationships, and offspring. Presto exposes, however, that rather than rid themselves of these or flee them, Bloc and Gippius suppressed these; and the author specifies and delineates the aberrant, perverse-like forms these common human qualities and conditions took from this with the poets.

Bloc for example claimed to neither seek nor want any progeny. This gave rise to a quasi-genuine, quasi-forced--an ambivalent--attitude toward women, the mother especially. Bloc made the "mother" into an ogre in order to hate and repel her. "Bloc turned repeatedly in his poetry to the figure of the slumbering or ethereal mother who awakens and inflicts violence on her children." To try to shed her identity, Gippius took the pose of an asexual dandy; and her relationship with her husband was oblique and contorted.

Though focusing on the poets as individuals, Presto sees them to some degree in the context of Russian culture and Russian literary culture of the time. Eschewing the by now largely passe gender and feminist criticism, Presto relies heavily on psychology and aesthetics for her stimulating, trenchant critique of these fascinating Russian symbolist poets. Inherent in her literary criticism are questions of creativity, identity, values, and aspirations.