I am grateful to colleagues and students at the University of California at Berkeley, Wesleyan University, Notre Dame University, and Harvard University, and to the two readers for Slavic Review, who responded to various versions of this article with helpful suggestions, corrections, and questions

1. An argument about the distinct creation of a sense of self in Russian and Polish lyric poetry appears in several essays by Cavanagh, Clare: “The Death of the Book à la Russe: The Acmeists under Stalin,” Slavic Review 55, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 125–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “The Forms of the Ordinary: Bakhtin, Prosaics and the Lyric,” Slavic and East European Journal 41, no. 1 (1997): 40-56; and “Lyrical Ethics: The Poetry of Adam Zagajewski,” Slavic Review 59, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 1-15. Rather than her view that postmodernism has little affected the idea of selfhood in Russian and eastern European lyric poetry, I use psychoanalytic and feminist theory as it has been shaped by postmodernism to identify the processes of erosion and recreation of identity in the work of three contemporary poets.

2. Irigaray, Luce, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gill, Gillian C. (Ithaca, 1985)Google Scholar; Kofman, Sarah, The Enigma of Woman: Woman inFreud's Writings, trans. Porter, Catherine (Ithaca, 1985)Google Scholar. See also Todd, Jane Marie, “The Veiled Woman in Freud's ‘Das Unheimliche,'” Signs 11, no. 3 (Spring 1986): 519–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Running-Johnson, Cynthia, “The Medusa's Tale: Feminine Writing and ‘La Genet,'” Romanic Review 80, no. 3 (May 1989): 483–95Google Scholar.

3. Abraham, Nicholas and Torok, Maria, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, ed. and trans. Rand, Nicholas T., vol. 1 (Chicago, 1994)Google Scholar; Abraham, , “Notes on the Phantom: A Complement to Freud's Metapsychology,” Critical Inquiry 13, no. 2 (1987): 287–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. Monk, Samuel, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in Eighteenth-Century England (1935; reprint, Ann Arbor, 1960)Google Scholar; Hertz, Neil, The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysisand the Sublime (New York, 1985)Google Scholar; Bloom, Harold, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (New York, 1982)Google Scholar; Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychologyof Transcendence (Baltimore, 1976, 1986).

5. Harold Bloom's earlier work on poetic influence has explored a particular aspect of this fear: what happens when poets compare their talents to those of their predecessors. See Bloom, , The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York, 1973)Google Scholar. Although some feminists have tried to adapt Bloom's specifically masculine myth of agonistic creativity, for example, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writerand the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, 1979), I have not found such work useful in understanding contemporary Russian women poets. Where Bloom's work remains valuable to my project is its insight into the connections between the philosophical theory of the sublime and Freudian psychoanalysis, as I suggest here.

6. “The Uncanny” may seem more pertinent to literary versions of supernatural experience than to the analysis of actual human emotions, and thus it has engendered many productive discussions of gothic fiction, for example, Mladen Dolar, ‘“I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding-Night´: Lacan and the Uncanny,” October58 (Fall 1991): 5-23; Tatar, Maria M., “The Houses of Fiction: Toward a Definition of the Uncanny,” Comparative Literature 33, no. 2 (Spring 1981): 167–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sarah Webster Goodwin, “Domesticity and Uncanny Kitsch in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner´ and Frankenstein,” Tulsa Studies in Women´s Literature 10, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 93-108. But scholars have also seen the usefulness of Freud's theories in reading lyric poetry, particularly romantic lyric poetry: see Hopkins, Brooke, “Keats and the Uncanny: ‘This Living Hand,'” The Kenyon Review 9, no. 4 (Fall 1989): 28–40; Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime, 83-106Google Scholar.

7. Price, Martin, “The Sublime Poem: Pictures and Powers,” in Bloom, Harold, ed., Poets of Sensibility and the Sublime (New York, 1986), 31–32 Google Scholar. Price draws on traditions in western philosophy that link reflection and self-reflection as foundational acts. These are well discussed in Gasché, Rodolphe, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), esp. 1–105 Google Scholar.

8. Lisnianskaia, Inna, Stikhotvoreniia (Moscow, 1991), 16–17. The words in boldface are spaced out for emphasis in the original.Google Scholar

9. For a more typical poem in length and tone, see “la v zerkalo vzglanu, byvalo,—“ in Lisnianskaia, Stikhotvoreniia, 30; the presence of a mirror in the poem makes it an apt counterpart to the “Fourth Postscript.” Compare especially its brave ending: “I gorlo, gotovoe k plakhe, / Otkryto i vol´no poet.“

10. Important work has been done on narcissism and identity, especially from a feminist perspective. See Morrison, Andrew P., ed., Essential Papers on Narcissism (New York, 1986)Google Scholar for a good compendium of papers by psychologists; and, for feminist perspectives, Kofman, The Enigma of Woman; Barbara Johnson, “The Quicksands of the Self: Larsen, Nella and Kohut, Heinz,” The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 37–60 Google Scholar.

11. Lisnianskaia has a well-known predecessor in the Russian tradition who has used the image of a broken mirror to represent her shattered sense of self, Anna Akhmatova. This aspect of Akhmatova's poetics is well discussed in Amert, Susan, In a Shattered Mirror:The Later Poetry of Anna Akhmatova (Stanford, 1992)Google Scholar.

12. One line is rhythmically irregular, 1. 11, “Zerkalo, videvshee menia.” Its oddity is semantically appropriate in that die line announces a mirror that sees a person, rather than the other way around.

13. Hertz, The End of the Line, 40.

14. The repetitions involve lexical items (for example, the word zerkalo intoned six times; the word zerkalo seems to give rise to the dactylic rhythm almost single-handedly; litso appears four times, forms of the verb prostit’ / proshchaf four times) and line position (as in the three cases of anaphora).

15. The dissolution of the Soviet Union, rather than the dissolution of the poet´s self, was of course to happen in the next decade. Lisnianskaia has flourished as a poet in these new circumstances. Despite failing health, she has written and published prolifically. Recent volumes include Posh vsego (St. Petersburg, 1994), Veterpokoia (St. Petersburg, 1998), Muzyka i bereg (St. Petersburg, 2000), and the substantial collection of old and new poems kpervykhust (Moscow, 1995).

16. Some of the shorter poems explore similar themes, for example “I pishu nikomu, potomu chto sama ia nikto” (1989), in Lisnianskaia, Stikhotvoreniia, 222. Because the shorter poems contain the fears more tightly, they also conceal more than the longer poem I have chosen to discuss.

17. Shvarts´s response to her mother's death can be seen in the poems of Solo na raskalennoitrube: Novye stikhotvoreniia (St. Petersburg, 1998), and Dikopis´ poslednego vremeni (St. Petersburg, 2001).

18. See especially the second poem in book 1, addressed to Cynthia's father and contemplating his murder; and the last poem in book 1, which ends “Kinfiiu obidet´—ochen´ strashno“: Shvarts, Stikhotvoreniia ipoemy (St. Petersburg, 1999), 455.

19. Ibid., 379-444.

20. Examples of scary poems would include “Zharenyi anglichanin v Moskve (Migkak sfera)” (1990), a poem about overcoming fear; see Shvarts, Dikopis´poslednego vremeni, 43-45. Also intriguing is the four-part sequence “Elegii na storony sveta,” particularly in its images of corpses watching movies of their past; the elegy associates the self with meekness, quietness (“I ia i tak uzhe tikhaia do otvrashcheniia“). See Shvarts, Stikhotvoreniia ipoemy, 92-98.

21. Unlike Lisnianskaia, who invokes the theme of childhood easily and writes about herself as a mother, Shvarts does so only occasionally, but in her 1998 collection, Solo naraskalennoi trube, images of children and childbirth are quite significant.

22. Shvarts, , Pesniaptitsy na dne morskom (St. Petersburg, 1995), 21.Google Scholar

23. “Kindergarten” recounts the poet´s visit to the desolate site of her kindergarten: images of rusted machinery and animal carcasses powerfully convey the poet´s feeling that this landscape, and the culture it represents, have horribly shaped her psyche. For the full text of the poem, see Shvarts, Stikhotvoreniia ipoemy, 187-88. A good translation appears in Shvarts, Elena, “Paradise“: Selected Poems, trans. Molnar, Michael (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1993), 19–22 Google Scholar. I discuss the poem in detail in “Cultural Memory and Self-Forgetting in a Poem by Elena Shvarts,” in Sandler, Stephanie, ed., Rereading Russian Poetry (New Haven, 1999), 256–69Google Scholar.

24. For example, Tiutchev's “O chem ty voesh´, veter nochnoi” (1836). On the mysticism of his representations of natural chaos, see Pratt, Sarah, Russian Metaphysical Romanticism:The Poetry of Tiutchev and Boratynskii (Stanford, 1984), 152–70Google Scholar; and Pratt, , “Two Dialogues with Chaos: Tiutchev and Gippius,” in Gasparov, Boris, Hughes, Robert P., and Paperno, Irina, eds., Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism: From the Golden Age to the Silver Age (Berkeley, 1992), 315–26Google Scholar.

25. Best of all, Shvarts shows herself to be a tough match for any demons. See especially “Kogda za mnoiu demony golodnye pomchalis´” (1982), in Shvarts, Stikhotvoreniia ipoemy, 118.

26. For grotesque self-images, see “Elegiia na rentgenovskii snimok moego cherepa“ (1972) and “Nevidimyi okhotnik” (1975), in Shvarts, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy, 24-26, 23.

27. Smith, Allan Lloyd, “The Phantoms of Brood and Rebecca: The Uncanny Reencountered through Abraham and Torok's ‘Cryptonymy,'” Poetics Today 13, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 291.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28. “Slepota” (1993), in Shvarts, Stikhotvoreniia ipoemy, 215.

29. For poems to Makarova, see “Docheri”(1983), in Lisnianskaia, Stikhotvoreniia, 7 3 - 74; “Elene Makarovoi” (1993), in Lisnianskaia, Izpervykh ust, 294. For poems to Petrovykh, see “A vspomnim li my” (1972), in Lisnianskaia, Iz pervykh ust, 63; “Strannoe derevo“ (1973), “Vot kniga tvoia predo mnoiu lezhit” (1983), and “Mariia Sergeevna! ladomolchalas´“ (1987), in Lisnianskaia, Stikhotvoreniia, 138, 121, 122.

30. Sedakova, Ol´ga, Stikhi (Moscow, 1994), 69–70.Google Scholar

31. See Sedakova, Ol´ga, “Zametki i vospominaniia o raznykh stikhotvoreniiakh, a takzhe POKHVALA POEZII,” Volga, 1991, no. 6:135–64Google Scholar; a shorter version of this essay appears in Sedakova, Stikhi, 317-57.

32. Yet even in “Gornaia oda,” the poem proceeds by reversing the logic of the sublime (it begins with transits of height and depth, the verticality to which sublime works usually aspire, and ends with the horizontal, flat planes of a body being carried out to death).

33. Polukhina, Valentina, “Conform Not to This Age: An Interview with Ol´ga Sedakova,“ in McMillin, Arnold, ed., Reconstructing the Canon: Russian Writing in the 1980s (Amsterdam, 2000), 49.Google Scholar

34. Jakobson, Roman, “Baudelaire's ‘Les Chats´” (with Lévi-Strauss, Claude), in Jakobson, , Language in Literature, ed. Pomorska, Krystyna and Rudy, Stephen (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 180–97.Google Scholar

35. For the text of Baudelaire's poem, see Baudelaire, Charles, Les Fleurs du Mai: TheComplete Text of the Flowers of Evil (Boston, 1982), 232–33Google Scholar; this volume includes a complete translation of Les Fleurs du Mai by Richard Howard, and the English version of “Le chat“ appears on pp. 55-56.

36. de Man, Paul, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, andProust (New Haven, 1979), 20–56.Google Scholar

37. It is tempting to see Nikolai Zabolotskii's 1928 poem “Na lestnitsakh” as an antecedent text (see Zabolotskii, , Stikhotvoreniia ipoemy [Moscow-Leningrad, 1965], 215–16Google Scholar), particularly given its religious themes and given Sedakova's admiring comment about Zabolotskii (in “O Zabolotskom,” Krugchteniia [Moscow, 1995], 83-84). But her admiration is for the later and more clearly spiritual poems, not the grotesque surrealism of his earlier work.

38. Mandel´shtam, O. E., Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii (St. Petersburg, 1995), 258 Google Scholar. Kashchei's cat is ne dlia igry, which in Sedakova's poem produces the phrase zabytaia igra, a nice reversal of the way quotations “forget” their previous contexts.

39. Ronen, Omry, “Mandel´shtam's Kashchei,” in Gribble, Charles E., ed., Studies Presentedto Professor Roman Jakobson by His Students (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 259.Google Scholar

40. See Sandler, Stephanie, “Thinking Self in the Poetry of Ol´ga Sedakova,” in Marsh, Rosalind, ed., Gender and Russian Literature: New Perspectives (Cambridge, Eng., 1996), 302–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

41. Sedakova is not the only woman poet to be mocked. In a 1990 poetry survey by Igor´ Shaitanov, for example, one finds an explanation of others' horror at the poetry of Elena Shvarts, particularly at the nerve of a twenty-two-year-old poet to write an imitation of Nicolas Boileau as if with certainty in the lexicon of classicism. Shaitanov imagines others´ asking “who does Elena Shvarts think she is to imitate Boileau?” See Shaitanov, , ”… no trudnee, kogda mozhno: Poeziia-89,” Literaturnoe obozrenie, 1990, no. 1:25 Google Scholar.

42. Slavetskii, Vladimir, “Dorogi i tropinka,” Novyi mir, 1995, no. 4:235 and 233Google Scholar. Another insulting review of Sedakova's work is Slavianskii, Vladimir, “Iz polnogo do dna v glubokoe do kraev: O stikhakh Ol´gi Sedakovoi,” Novyi mir, 1995, no. 10:224–31Google Scholar.

43. The dangers of self-contemplation are inherent in the very beginnings of the Narcissus story, not just in its ending: Tiresias predicted that Narcissus would have a long life as long as he did not look at his own reflection, so his parents prevented him from ever doing so. For this reason he did not recognize his own image when he gazed into that fatal pool of water. For a concise account of the myth and its variants, see Meletinskii, E. M., ed., Mifologicheskii slovar´ (Moscow, 1990), 382 Google Scholar.