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Hieroglyphs of Another World: On Poetry, Swedenborg, and Other Matters
Contributor(s): Kutik, Ilya (Author), Wachtel, Andrew (Editor)
ISBN: 0810117770     ISBN-13: 9780810117778
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
OUR PRICE:   $25.16  
Product Type: Hardcover
Published: October 2000
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Temporarily out of stock - Will ship within 2 to 5 weeks
Annotation: The author of several volumes of poetry in Russian and English, Ilya Kutik is also a consummate essayist in the Russian tradition: aphoristic, allusive, deploying unlikely juxtapositions and poetic measures to arrive at surprising and gratifying insights. In this first English-language collection of Kutik's essays, readers encounter one of the best and most original contemporary Russian stylists.

As compact as prose poems, Kutik's essays contribute to ongoing efforts to build contemporary theories of image, metaphor, meter, rhythm, and other key concepts of avant-garde and postmodern poetry that define contemporary poetics and critical theory. The essays provide formulas for decoding these complex aspects of contemporary literature; they reveal the poetry of scholarly prose, the metaphoric potential of the concepts and terms so commonly applied to poetry in a nonpoetic way.

The essays also introduce American readers to Scandinavian and Russian poets, such as Stagnelius and Aigi. His choice of poets highlights what he believes to be the major trends in poetic evolution in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The intersections of Russian and Swedish poetic traditions, as well as Kutik's own accomplishments as a translator of Scandinavian poetry, draw together the "national" elements of this book.

The final section, "Twelve Stories about Swedenborg", is both a continuation and a culmination of Kutik's project, in which the poetic elements discussed earlier in conceptual and historical terms reveal their mystical dimension. Here the life of Swedenborg, the great Swedish mystic, becomes a poetic narrative that exemplifies the laws of epic poetry articulated by Kutik in the book'sprevious essays.

Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Collections | Essays
- Poetry | Russian & Former Soviet Union
Dewey: 891.745
LCCN: 00008148
Physical Information: 0.71" H x 5.75" W x 8.73" (0.76 lbs) 148 pages
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:
The author of several volumes of poetry in Russian and English, Ilya Kutik is also a consummate essayist in the Russian tradition: aphoristic, allusive, deploying unlikely juxtapositions and poetic measures to arrive at surprising and gratifying insights. In this first English-language collection of Kutik's essays, readers encounter one of the best and most original contemporary Russian stylists.