Lyric Complicity

For many nineteenth-century Russians, poetry was woven into everyday life-in conversation and correspondence, scrapbook albums, and parlor entertainments. Blending close literary analysis with social and cultural history, Daria Khitrova shows how poetry lovers of the period all became nodes in a vast network of literary appreciation and constructed meaning. Poetry during the Golden Age was not a one-way avenue from author to reader. Rather, it was participatory, interactive, and performative.

Lyric Complicity helps modern readers recover Russian poetry’s former uses and functions-life situations that moved people to quote or perform a specific passage from a poem or a forgotten occasion that created unforgettable verse.