Poetry of the night: Púchkin, Blok, Tsvetáieva

Abstract

In this paper, I intend to approach the history of the study of the night text in Russian literary theory since the mid-nineteenth century, especially in the oeuvre of Aleksandr Veselovsky, as well as the formation of the very concept of "night text" in the works of scholars of the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School in the second half of the twentieth century (among them Yuri Lotman, Vladimir Toporov and Eleazar Meletinsky). In the sequence, I intend to analyze the presence of such kind of text in three poems belonging to two different eras: “Verses composed during a night of insomnia (1830) by Aleksandr Pushkin; “Night, streets, the lantern, the drugstore” (1912) by Aleksandr Blok and “In my huge city there is – a night” (1916) by Marina Tsvetaeva. In all three poems, there are similarities that highlight the night text, but there are also some differences, and the last two poems can be clearly trace back to Pushkin's verses.