Writing Without Words: Blok’s Contextual Poetics

Abstract

This article presents a brief sketch of Lidiia Ginzburg’s particular contribution to the extensive Russian and Western scholarship on the poetry of Aleksandr Blok, perhaps the most famous Russian poet of the twentieth century.  The author, noting that Ginzburg is better known for her groundbreaking study of nineteenth-century prose, summarizes her equally groundbreaking insight into the mechanism of Blok’s poetry, in which the repetition of key words in a gradually changing context creates a potentially infinite chain of interconnected meanings. Consideration is also given to possible parallels in the Anglo-American tradition, opening new paths for further comparative study.