Poetry and didactics: about Victor Sosnora’s poem “Longing for the Motherland”

Abstract

The paper analyzes the poem by the poet Viktor Sosnora “Longing for the Motherland,” part of the book “The Ides of March” (1983). The title and one line directly refer to the poem of the same name by Marina Tsvetaeva. It is shown that Tsvetaeva’s name is a key for interpreting the poem. The poem metonymically refers to her versioning laboratory in the interpretation of Andrei Bely, who singled out and analyzed the specifics of the choriamb as the metrical dominant of the book in his review of the collection “Separation.” This analysis focuses on the manifestation of the choriambic sound and the system of deviations from the four-syllable meter, unusual in Russian poetry, making the poem sound like a song. The first couplet only potentially contains the choriamb, and the reader has to return to the beginning of the poem after reaching the end for the end-to-end choriambic sound to occur, compared by Bely with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. This study describes deep and non-obvious phonetic consonances and rolls and indicates thematic echoes with individual poems and motifs of Tsvetaeva’s poetry. It is noted how the poet shows the reader the main principle of the text’s metrical division by using two hyphens that seem pretentious at first sight. It is shown that the poem is an independent and self-sufficient poetic work, a score for its performance, and a tutorial with which to teach the reader to hear the sound of choriamb, uncommon for Russian poetry.