Mutual Friends: Networks of Russian Poetry, 1820s and 2020s

Abstract

Dissertation Advisor: Stephanie Sandler Anna Ivanov Mutual Friends: Networks of Russian Poetry, 1820s and 2020s Abstract This dissertation argues that Russian literature has always operated as a network, and that mapping these networks, and attending to the links between poets, illuminates both patterns of connection in the public sphere and the connective nature of the poetry within this sphere. The project compares two moments of intensely networked Russian poetic culture: the Golden Age of the 1820s–40s and the digital present of the 2020s. Though separated by two centuries and by radically different media, both periods reveal literature as constituted by, and constitutive of, social connection. Combining the distant reading of social network analysis with close reading of individual poems, I construct and analyze two networks: one drawn from 20,000 documented connections among poets of the 1820s–40s, and one built from the public Facebook interactions of contemporary Russian-language poets in 2022–23. In both, I use the same set of network metrics to identify figures whose structural position within the network illuminates the poetics of their moment, and I read poems by these figures as instances that exemplify, or complicate, the networked conditions of their production. Chapter One, “With My Lyre, with Faithful Friends,” examines the Golden Age network through three principal sites of literary sociability: the Tsarskoe Selo Lyceum, the salon, and poems addressed explicitly "To Friends,” reading Aleksandr Pushkin, Anton Del'vig, Konstantin Batiushkov, and Dmitrii Venevitinov alongside elegiac responses to loss by Aleksandr Odoevsky and Zinaida Volkonskaia, arguing that these networks become most visible precisely at moments of separation, exile, or death. Chapter Two, “You and I Have Mutual Friends,” turns to the 2020s, where "network" and "site" collapse into the same platform, Facebook, and where Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine reshaped both the network's data and its poetry. Reading Aleksandr Skidan, Roman Osminkin, Vera Pavlova, Anna Rodionova, and the Ukrainian poet Lyuba Yakimchuk, whose position bridging otherwise disconnected clusters of Russian and Ukrainian poets makes her poem "Mutual Friends" central to the chapter, I show how the platform's affordances and constraints entered directly into the poetics of wartime connection and rupture. In the afterword, “Terms and Conditions,” I consider the affordances of network theory, using examples of Evdokiia Rostopchina, Karolina Pavlova, and Nika Skandiaka, to discuss what network analysis shares about connections that do not neatly fit a networked mold. Even beyond that mold, these texts remind us of connection’s crucial role in poetry.