Tekstualni subjekt u poeziji Marije Stepanove od 2001. do 2017. godine

Maria Stepanova (b. 1972) is a contemporary Russian poet who has emerged in recent decades as one of the most original and complex voices on the poetically highly heterogeneous and polymorphic contemporary Russian poetic scene. Her lyric poetry is characterized by the formation of a poetic subject that emphasizes its simultaneous inner fragmentation and wholeness, thus distancing itself both from the dispersive fragmentation of the poetic subject in the poetics of conceptualism and from the formation of the Romantic poetic subject as a source of poetic discourse that can be identified with the biographical author. The return to the configuration of the poetic subject as lyrical “I” and its simultaneous conceptualization not as autobiographical, centered, complete and confessional, but as fictional, decentered, multilayered, polyfocal and potentially polyphonic textual instance is one of the reasons why Stepanova’s lyric poetry can be figuratively described as a laboratory of poetic subjectivity articulated as the lyrical “I”. The doctoral dissertation investigates the possibilities of displacement and transformation of the lyrical “I” in Stepanova's poetry across different levels and domains of the poetic text that becomes more extensive due to the linking of lyric poems into more complex compositions such as the poetic cycle and the poetry book. The research corpus consists of the poetry books On Twins (O bliznecah), Here-world (Tut-svet), Physiology and Small History (Fiziologija i malaja istorija), Lyric, Voice (Lirika, golos) and Kireevsky, as well as the poetic cycles Happiness (Schast’e) and O. The research develops the thesis that the lyrical “I” in Stepanova’s poetry from the beginning of its development is not formed as the center and source of poetic utterance, but either as an object of description and imitation located at lower levels of the poetic text, or as a witness and commentator displaced to the margins of the artistic world of the poetic text, or as an invisible superordinate instance of the entire poetic composition. In addition to the thesis about the displacement of the lyrical “I” across different levels of the poetic text, the dissertation posits a thesis about the openness of Stepanova's poetic subject toward the Other, which is considered as its distinctive and recognizable characteristic in all phases of development of Stepanova's lyric poetry. The investigation of the peculiarities of the poetic subject of Maria Stepanova’s lyric poetry pays special attention to the instance of the textual subject that is identical with the organization of the poetry book and cycle, and which ensures the integrity of Stepanova’s post-conceptualist post-romantic poetic subject. The first chapter situates Stepanova's lyrical poetic within a literary-historical context, emphasizing the heterogeneity and polymorphism of lyrical poetics that developed at the turn of 20th and 21st centuries. The overview places Stepanova's poetics within the poetry of the so-called “younger bronze age” which inherits the poetics of Soviet uncensored poetry, and which was particularly influenced by the poetry of Russian conceptualism. While Russian conceptualism negated the uniqueness and authenticity of the poetic subject, poetry at the turn of the centuries utilizes the fragmented conceptualist poetic discourse as a discourse of confession and self expression. Thus, it constructs a unique poetic subject that simultaneously acknowledges its own situatedness, internal fragmentation, and heterogeneity. However, in returning to the lyrical subject as a confessional instance, contemporary poets abandon the strong and rhetorical lyrical “I” that was characteristic of conventional poetics which inherited the Romantic conception of lyrical text as the confession of the biographical poet. Therefore, the dominant poetic paradigm of contemporary Russian poetry in this dissertation is characterized as post-conceptualist-post romantic. The literary-historical overview also highlights the importance of the so-called new social poetry in which the lyrical subject does not appear as a political tribune but as an uncertain, weak, and internally divided subject who, due to the recognition of the Other as part of their own identity, carries a subversive potential. Furthermore, the literary-historical overview emphasizes the tendency of contemporary Russian poetry toward existence in large form, due to which poetry books and cycles have become the predominant poetic genres. The second chapter provides an overview and reflection on current theoretical approaches to the analysis of lyric poetry and the lyrical subject. The emphasis is put on new theoretical paradigms of lyric poetry, which do not describe this literary genre as a psychological and philosophical study of man – the lyrical self, author and reader. Instead, they conceptualize lyric poetry as an experimental literary discourse that constantly challenges and transcends its own boundaries, a discourse that is open to the most diverse languages of extra-literary reality and which does not represent a predetermined subject and world but constructs and configures them in both mimetic and performative artistic gestures. Those key sites of lyric reconceptualization enable a proper understanding of complex contemporary lyrical poetics such as that of Maria Stepanova. Furthermore, drawing on both somewhat older and the most recent research on the category of the lyrical subject, the doctoral dissertation will present, instead of the established terms lyrical self and lyrical subject, concepts such as biographical legend, fictional and autofictional lyrical hero, subjective syncretism, and poetic subject as its methodological framework. The latter concept, taken from the study by Varja Balžalorsky Antić (2022), is particularly applicable to the analysis of Stepanova’s lyrical poetics because it decentralizes the category of the lyrical subject from the monopolistic position of the lyrical persona (or, as Stepanova says, the actor or center) toward different points of articulation of subjectivity that can be compared with Stepanova’s metaphors of cameras, voices, intonations, installations, and radiuses. Balžalorsky Antić’s research stratifies the category of the poetic subject into different instances: the subject of the enounced, the subject of enunciation, and the textual subject, distinguishing the possibilities of shaping the subject of the enounced and the subject of enunciation as extradiegetic and intradiegetic, as well as autodiegetic, homodiegetic, or heterodiegetic. The instance of the textual subject is highlighted as a still insufficiently researched aspect of the poetic subject, to which special attention is devoted in the analytical section. The third chapter presents an analysis of Stepanova's early lyric poetry, which distances itself from the conceptualist discreditation of unified poetic consciousness by shaping an autodiegetic subject of enunciation that figures in the poetic diegesis as an anthropomorphic subject of the enounced, as a lyrical heroine situated in a concrete poetic diegesis, her own private sphere. In the books On Twins and Here-world, the fictional lyrical heroine serves as the unifying principle of such poetic diegesis. She is characterized by a focus on her somatic characteristics rather than psychological states. Such phenomenologization of her character frustrates the conventional expectations of confessionality that are usually placed before the monological lyrical poem. Instead of connecting with the biographical author and reader, the concretization of the lyrical heroine as an internally split, heterogeneous, metamorphic instance attracts other elements of the poetic diegesis or her internal addressees with whom she enters into ambiguous relationships of simultaneous fusion and separation. Above the perspective of the lyrical heroine in Stepanova's early books of lyrical poetry looms the perspective of the subject of enunciation who expresses skepticism toward her bodily states or amorous emotions and, through pronounced stylistic inconsistency, emphasizes her constructedness in poetic discourse, while through its emphasized citationality positions her as an artificial construct that by no means precedes the lyrical text but emerges within it. The textual subject of the early poetry books is the instance responsible for positioning the voice and viewpoint of the subject of the enounced and the subject of enunciation and their interrelationship. The textual subject as a compositional principle emphasizes the placement of the lyrical heroine at the intradiegetic level of the poetry book, that is, in the position of an object of mimesis rather than the source of enunciation. This metapoetic preoccupation proves to be the main intention of the textual subject of Stepanova’s early books of lyric poetry. Moreover, their textual subject is shaped as an abstract textual body that, by placing significant poems that thematize the penetration of the world of the dead into the world of the living, symbolically extends a hand to the textual subject from the second phase of development of Stepanova’s lyric poetry. The fourth chapter presents an analysis of Stepanova’s more mature lyric poetry, which shapes an autofictional lyrical heroine comparable to the biographical author, while simultaneously cloaking her in fantastical elements such as the ability to transcend the boundaries between this world and the other world. By emphasizing the autofictionality of the lyrical heroine, Stepanova's more mature poetry books Physiology and Small History and Lyric, Voice as well as the poetic cycle O configure an autoreferential subject of enunciation that can be found not only at the level of poetic diegesis but also at the level of poetic discourse. At this level, the subject assumes the position of a homodiegetic subject of enunciation, moving from the center of poetic utterance to its periphery, referring not to the lyrical heroine but to other elements of the poetic diegesis. When it appears as an autodiegetic subject of enunciation, it regularly indicates through deictic oscillations not the openness of the lyrical heroine to identification with the author or reader, but rather the interpenetration of her voice and perspective with other lyric personas that appear in the poetic diegesis. Furthermore, in the more mature phase of Stepanova’s lyric poetry development, the characteristics of the lyrical heroine – such as duality, internal heterogeneity, and metamorphic nature – are connected not only with the metapoetic gesture of decentering the lyric enunciation, but also with the ethical mission of Stepanova's poetry. Her autofictional lyrical heroine, thanks to her internal instability and uncertainty, liberates herself from personal boundaries and adopts the perspective of the Other, very often that of collective consciousness. In this phase of Stepanova’s lyric poetry development, her poetic subject is also preoccupied with social criticism, which, through the introduction of elements from current social and political reality into the poetic diegesis, becomes (and remains) its important characteristic. The textual subject of Stepanova’s more mature lyric poetry is shaped as a more concrete textual body compared to the textual subject of her earlier books, and ethical preoccupations join its metapoetic concerns. With the aim of reaching the consciousness of the Other, the textual subject of the more mature Stepanova’s lyric poetry expresses a tendency to move away from the sphere of written poetry and approach the sphere of oral poetry. In such tendency, the interweaving of the metapoetic and the ethical in the new social poetry of Maria Stepanova is best manifested. Fifth chapter presents an analysis of Stepanova’s collection of lyric poetry Kireevsky, after which the dominant mode of her poetics becomes the genre of the fragmentary poem. In Kireevsky, a multi-subject poetic diegesis takes shape, whose organizing principle is no longer the fictional or autofictional lyrical heroine. Instead, lyrical heroine appears as an equal subject of the enounced alongside numerous other members of the poetic diegesis, each of whom also acquires a distinct voice and viewpoint. Thus, beyond the decentralization of the poetic diegesis, at the level of poetic discourse emerges a poetic polyphony that Stepanova scholars have termed the “manner of speaking in voices.” Above these diverse voices – whether belonging to the deceased or to society’s marginalized – is the overarching perspective of a heterodiegetic subject of enunciation, who, in shaping poetic polyphony, collaborates with the superior instance of the textual subject. A close reading of Kireevsky reveals that the characteristics of the lyrical heroine from Stepanova’s earlier poetry books (corporeality, autofictionality, the fantasticality, metamorphicity, heterogeneity) are transmitted across multiple layers of the poetic subject. In Kireevsky, both the subject of enunciation and the textual subject are configured as a hidden center of subjectivity that governs the dispersed subjects of the enounced at lower levels of the poetic configuration. The analysis of the book’s final section underscores the necessity of attending to this concealed presence of a unified yet internally heterogeneous textual subject not only in studies of Stepanova’s lyric poetry but also in interpretations of her experimental fragmentary poems, which characterize her most recent poetics. The analysis of the three phases of the development of Maria Stepanova’s lyric poetry confirms the thesis that the lyrical “I” does not shape itself as the center or source of poetic expression; rather, it relocates across various strata and regions of the poetic text and engages in complex relations with other subjective instances. The lyrical “I” thus appears only as one element within a far more intricate configuration of the poetic subject, whose main intentions and perspectives are not formed explicitly but subtly, at the level of the textual subject – that is, in the very conceptualization of the poetry book or poetry cycle.