Call for Panel Declarations, AATSEEL 2002

[Elena Mikhailik]

Dear Karen,

I hope I am not to late to offer this abstract for the Literary Genealogy
panel.  I have also forwarded a copy to Lyudmila Parts, the panel chair.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely yours,

Elena Mikhailik

Mikhail Svetlov "Grenada": "Turning the imperialistic war into civil war"

In this paper we would like to discuss some aspects of literary genealogy
of Mikhail Svetlov's "Grenada".  This subject has been touched by Michael
Wachtel, Mikhail Gasparov and Mikhail Zolotonosov, however we think that
further study of the poem's metric aureole and motif structure can yield
more conclusive results.

In his article "'The Black Shawl' and its metric aureole", Michael Wachtel
showed that amphibrachic tetrameter with strictly masculine rhymes, first
introduced by Zhukovsky to translate ballades by Uhland and Goethe, had
been immediately appropriated by Pushkin; and that it was Pushkin's ballade
that has ever since dominated the aureole of the meter both thematically
and lexically.  Wachtel also demonstrated that "despite its civic pathos
Svetlov's poem is clearly linked to Pushkin's ballade."  The same
conclusion appears in Mikhail Gasparov's "Meter and meaning".

However there are some aspects that do not allow us to accept "The Black
Shawl" as the main formative influence on "Grenada".
a)      The poem contains two major divergences from the conventional
Pushkin-based plot. Unlike most of the "Black Shawl" derivatives "Grenada"
ends not with the death of the "exotic" heroine, but with the death of a
hero. And it is the hero who in a sense commits a betrayal, for in dying he
abandons both his dream and his song.  These divergences seem very
important because the semantic aureole of amphibrachic tetrameter had been
proven to be very powerful - the tradition of the "amphibrachic plot" had
even forced young Lermontov to change the fabula of Schiller's "Diver".
b)      There is also a major graphical divergence. Visually, Svetlov's
poem is organised not into amphibrachic tetrameter couplets, but into
amphibrachic dimeter double quatrains. This change in inexplicable within
the context of the poem itself, and the audience has consistently treated
"Grenada" as amphibrachic tetrameter (for example, in the "Modern Folklore
and Colloquial Music" collection "Grenada" is quoted as an example of an
amphibrachic tetrameter).
This permits us to suggest that Svetlov was also reacting to some source
other than the "Black Shawl" and its immediate derivatives - and that that
source was organised into quatrains, rather then couplets.

In his article "O huello, or the secret meaning of a regimental serenade"
Mikhail Zolotonosov claimed that the "matrix" of Svetlov's poem was the
cheerfully homosexual "Song of law students" and that "Grenada" was build
on a cyphered opposition of vulva and anus. Leaving aside some interesting
erotic associations found by Zolotonosov, we'd like to say that it is
highly unlikely that in 1926 Svetlov was familiar with the "Song of law
students".

However, looking for the secondary source in popular, rather than high
culture seemed a fruitful idea. In a soldier's songbook of a WW1 soldier
Maxim Kruglov we found a song beginning "Proshchaite, rodnyje, proshchaite,
druzja, proshchai, dorogaja nevesta moja." Such closeness cannot be a
coincidence.

We are going to discuss possible relationship between Svetlov's "Grenada"
and this new source.  We shall try to demonstrate that Svetlov's reliance
on the Pushkin's motifs noted by Wachtel stems to a large extent from his
attempt to overcome the unideological irony of the "soldier's song" and to
"turn Imperialistic war into the Civil war".   In doing so Svetlov both
relied on and once again reaffirmed the romantic aureole of the meter.

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