All are invited to join SEELC for the second annual Kalbouss Innovative Approaches to Slavic Cultural Studies Lecture. Immediately preceding the lecture, we will have a tribute to Dr. Kalbouss.
This year's speaker is Dr. Colleen McQuillen (University of Southern California), who will present "Mikhail Zenkevich’s 'Voice of Matter': Poetry and Paleontology in the Era of Russian Modernism." Please see an abstract below.
This talk examines the paleontologically- and geologically-themed poems in Mikhail Zenkevich’s collection Дикая порфира (1912) in the context of key scientific discoveries at the turn of the last century. While linked to the poetic circles Acmeism and Adamism, Zenkevich penned speculative portraits of life on earth before humans that expand the parameters of realism and primitivism characterizing those modernist movements. Through a careful analysis of his “geopoems,” the talk suggests that Zenkevich’s modernist sense of linear temporal progression is a hallmark of a modern worldview and thus critical for understanding Russian modernist culture.
