Lyric Complicity is one of a rare company of scholarly books that combine ease, pace, and true pleasure of reading with seriousness, conceptual ambition, and depth. The central tenet of Daria Khitrova's study is that to fully understand a poem, we have to understand not only what it means “in itself,” and not only what it meant (semantically) for given readerships and readers or a potential “intended reader,” but what its contemporaries did with it, how it existed within a cultural metabolism extending beyond initial completion or passive reception, within a matrix of writer(s)—text(s)—reader(s) that, particularly in the given period studied—the so-called Golden Age—had unusually fluid boundaries. In other words, the author is invested, first and foremost, in restoring the “historical pragmatics” of the text, its use and performances: written, oral, musical, and occasional, “doctored or intact” (167). Khitrova's book is highly unusual, and quite possibly unique, in the sustained focus with which it goes about this, departing from both more narrowly textual studies and the sociological approach to the reader exemplified, for instance, by Abram Reitblat (see also p. 16 on western studies of poetry's pragmatics, which habitually exclude high literature.)
Khitrova sets the stage by drawing upon William James, J. L. Austin, Jonathan Culler, Roman Jakobson, and Yuri Tynianov, among others, to establish a theoretical framework for understanding the “dual felicity of verse,” poetic and pragmatic, and then cogently demonstrate a tacit demand for this dual felicity in the Russian Golden Age. She also provides literary-historical background for the thematic, stylistic, and genre “downshifting” that prepared and dominated the age, with its “thematic megalophobia” (48). She charts an epoch-defining fluidity of boundaries between such spheres as poetry and conversation, poetry and epistolary, whole and parts (the imminently memorable, disseminated and repurposed line, stanza, pointe), as well as boundaries of authorship, particularly given the era's workshop-like literary culture.
In the chapter “Situations and Occasions,” she describes a complex world of readers as “productively” reading—reciting, singing, copying, writing—subjects. In support of her argument, Khitrova offers, time and again, precise, salient, and striking examples. One comes away convinced that the phenomena she demonstrates (diverse modalities of lyric as “performative act and performable script” (87); “grafting” of the self onto others’ texts, thoughts, emotions) are real and quite pervasive. True, Khitrova's prose has a tendency to suggest, in each given instance, a uniformity of approaches to texts that is hard to countenance. For instance, how does the way the Golden Age elegy is structured as a maximally relatable template supplying “blanks and masks” (168), or “authority” lies with the “poem performed, not penned” (93), that is, most frequently, not with its author accord with a thirst for Romantic literary biography and the demand that the poem be “an authentic projection of the poet's personal situation” (106)? These seeming contradictions, however, dictate a sophisticated picture of the interplay of the individual, generic, and personal in the initial decades of the nineteenth century.
The case studies of the book's second half open with “The Extended Self,” which examines the pragmatics of “I to I” and “I to We” underlying the lyric meditation (doleful elegy), directed, Khitrova argues following Lotman, toward self-transformation, the friendly epistle—which, Khitrova argues, is always addressed beyond its addressee to a cohort—and the age's poetic extensions of the drinking song. Paradoxically, neither elegy nor epistle hinges grammatically on these particular constellations of pronouns—pragmatics transcends grammar (128–32). The next chapter, “You and I” is a particular highlight of the book with its fascinating look at Pushkin's graphic and textual dialogue with the libertine pragmatics potentially underlying Baratynsky's loveless elegy and its narrative echoes, as well as a preceding сase study of Sofia Del΄vig and Aleksei Vul΄f's amorous redeployments and implicit readings of the Baratynsky's “Razuverenie.”
The final chapter, focusing primarily on Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, develops the author's idiosyncratic concept of epilogue, by which Khitrova means a text appended to the main text as an unassimilated element that serves as counterpoint, refusing to allow the author's voice to be bound up into complete identification, not only with his characters but his own, now past-tense authorial positioning and strategies (as the madrigal Pushkin insistently attaches to his ode “Vol΄nost’”). The central reading of Lensky's portrayal feels more incremental in terms of the previous scholarship than other readings, but this chapter too is full of beautifully written and insightful passages.
Khitrova's bold attempt to study in-depth the social pragmatics of specific poetic texts, their situational uses by writers and readers; to do this within a conceptual frame coherently organizing constellations of potential relationships; and to understand on this basis the idiosyncrasies of Golden Age reader and writer (and reader-as-writer) interactions with poetry is highly compelling and sure to propel new scholarship. Moreover, her cogent and economical placement of these interventions within a context of formalist and more recent writings on poetry, both Russian and western, as well as the range of authors considered, from Karamzin and Dmitriev to Baratynsky and Pushkin, make her book a potentially fruitful introduction to Golden Age poetic culture more generally.
