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Karin Grelz

Publications

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

  • Nabokov on socialist and cinematic realism

    2016. Karin Grelz. Baltic Worlds IX (4), 35-42

    Article

    The aim of this article is to show to what extent Nabokov’s relations to the two phenomena Soviet art and cinematic art were interrelated and subtly intertwined. Focusing on a cinematic scene in Nabokov’s first novel, Mary (1926), the analysis traces how the themes of cinematic deception techniques and mimetic violence are developed by Nabokov. It is shown how cinematic effects in Nabokov addresses the violence inherent in socialist realist aesthetics: political censorship and manipulation on the one hand, and the programmatic extinction of artists labeled as “bourgeois” on the other.

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  • Živago’s 'Intoxication'

    2015. Karin Grelz. Russian literature 78 (3-4), 737-747

    Article

    The article explores the links to Tsvetaeva in two of Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago poems – ‘Chmel’ (‘Intoxication’/‘Hops’) and ‘Veter’ (‘The Wind’). Earlier analyses have revealed themes and scenes in the novel that may be read as conscious attempts to commemorate Tsvetaeva and the special relation Pasternak had to her. However, little attention has been paid in the context of the Tsvetaeva connection to Zhivago's poems. Joseph Brodsky noted echoes of Tsvetaeva in ‘Magdalina’ (‘Mary Magdalene’), but the multivalent status of Zhivago's poems seems to have made researchers hesitant to follow this lead. However, the poems in the novel deserve to be read as having been written precisely from this position: from within a fiction – but a fiction created for very specific artistic reasons. By presenting the poems in this way, Pasternak managed to contextualize his poetic expression in a way that was congenial to his personal relationship with Tsvetaeva and the artistic worldview which he shared with her, and which both regarded as a common heritage received from Rilke.

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  • Beyond the noise of time

    2004. Karin Grelz, Peter Alberg Jensen, Lars Kleberg.

    Thesis (Doc)

    Although quite a few researchers have pointed to the significance of the childhood theme in Tsvetaeva’s work, no systematic analysis of her work has been done from this perspective. Nor have her childhood reminiscences been treated as a thematically consistent whole, but have rather been read as instances of the poet’s prose in general. The present study examines Marina Tsvetaeva’s memories of childhood in the context of her work and in the context of the cultural and political reality to which these reminiscences refer and in which they were written—i.e., Russia around the turn of the century and the Russian émigré world of 1930–1937.

    In the introductory investigation of the presence of the childhood theme in Tsvetaeva’s oeuvre, it is found that idealization of the naive, innocent state is a relatively constant feature and that the childhood memories can be read as a culmination of this set of motives. It is also stated that Tsvetaeva’s continuous striving in her poetry away from the world, out of time, is an integral part of the childhood thematics. This tendency is traced, in connection with the childhood theme, to the influence of writers of the late Russian Symbolist movement as well as to Boris Pasternak and Rainer Maria Rilke—all with roots in literary Romanticism. Childhood is moreover found to be something of a key theme that reveals fundamental differences in the relation to memory and language among the authors of Russian modernism. In Tsvetaeva' s case it is shown that her childhood memories contain the romantic essence of her aesthetics.

    The study also touches upon the symbolic and allegorical dimension of the texts—Tsvetaeva’s “otherspeak” in her prose. It is shown that the central scenes of these texts can be read as illustrations of an artistic and linguistic experience. In this regard the author’s narrative of childhood also appears to have been a suitable medium for articulating controversial aesthetic statements and taking a stand for an historical past and literary tradition that at the time seemed doomed to oblivion.

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