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Speakers): Nariman Skakov

Please join us on Monday, October 2, 6-8 pm in the Humanities Center Boardroom for our annual Lost Classic event, in which we visit a neglected but important contribution to poetic theory and criticism. We’ll be discussing two short texts by the Russian literary theorist Alexander Veselovsky (1838-1906). 

Prof. Nariman Skakov (Slavic/DLCL) will be offering a short introduction. 

Assigned translations were recently published in Persistent Forms: Explorations in Historical Poetics, edited by Ilya Kliger and Boris Maslov. Here are short descriptions of both texts by the editors:

1. “From the Introduction to Historical Poetics” (1894): “Veselovsky offers a far-reaching reflection on the non-synchronous quality of cultural memory in which older elements are preserved in a passive state, ready to be reawakened in response to ‘an urgent call of the times.’”
2. “The Age of Sensibility” (1904): “Veselovsky offers a profound commentary on how culture and tradition are perpetuated in and through the lives of individual historical agents."
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