Authors

Sara Gargano¹;  ¹ Tor Vergata University of Rome, Italy

Discussion

Poet, prosaist, literary critic, translator and journalist, Ekaterina Bakunina (1889-1976) emigrated to Paris in 1923, where she joined the group of young writers classified by B. Poplavsky as exponents of the ‘Parizhskaya nota’ and to whom V. Varshavsky would later refer as the ‘unnoticed generation’ (Nezamechennoe pokolenie, 1957). Bakunina published her first and only collection of poems, Stikhi, in 1931, before switching to prose and editing the novels Telo (1933) and Lyubov’ k shesterym (1935). Her collection is divided into nine sections devoted respectively to exile, everyday life, and women’s experience in particular, complexity of existence, as far as motherhood and death (I. Rodina; II. Izgnanie; III. Lyudi; IV. Odinochestvo; V. O smerti; VI. Materinstvo; VII. Zhenskoe; VIII. Otrazheniya; IX. Zemlya).

This paper will focus on Bakunina’s poetic legacy, defined by V. Khodasevich as a «human document» (Vozrozhdenie, 1931, 25th June), because of its overwhelming reflection of the author’s personality and its lack of ‘lyrical magic’. In particular, the paper aims to define Bakunina’s contradictory creative identity through the analysis of her poems marked by the constant presence of a lyrical self that will be denied in her later prose. I will emphasise the contrasts brought on by the division into antithetical sections (e.g. Rodina – Izgnanie; O smerti – Materinstvo) that will be examined on the basis of the literary mechanisms of the young Parisian poetic generation.