Vera Pavlova: The Intimate Diary of an Excellent Student as an Experience in Poetic Reflection

This article analyzes the spiritual and creative content of the poet Vera Pavlova and the publisher Igor Zakharov's artistic project - the book of lyrics The Intimate Diary of an Excellent Student (2001). The text grew out of the last segment of Pavlova's book The Fourth Dream (2000), which was perceived as a mystification game. The aim of the project is to confirm the authenticity of authorship and reveal the spiritual and soulful sources of the poetic gift, the living foundations of ethics, aesthetics and philosophy of existence. The book has a foreword “From the Author”, in which the genuine sincerity of Pavlova's lyrics is claimed to be a continuation of Vera Desyatova's childhood diary -a self-reflection of a maturing soul and body. The book can be viewed as an author's credo, because the shocking candidness of Pavlova's lyrics was justified as a child of love and music, of an openness to the world and a steadfast adherence to the ideal of perfection. The article analyzes the composition of the diary, shows the genesis of a number of texts (from the first books The Heavenly Animal (1997) and The Second Language (1998)), and the difference between the 2000 and 2001 editions. The significance of the love lyrics for the poetry of the 1990s is shown in the context of the postmodern revocation of taboo and in the context of physical emancipation. The comparison with Irina Ermakova shows how playing with classical forms turns erotic lyrics into an elevated poetry, but Pavlova's straightforward bodily language is different from the refined and simple metaphors of the Japanese tanka in a conscious equating of the voice of the flesh and the voice of the beauty. The lyrical “I” of the diary's heroine is constructed as a sensitive, spontaneous and willful consciousness that overcomes the tragic trials of the age specific and historical growing-up. The diary form is seen as a literature game for the text's authenticity, the model of lyrical sincerity is a self-reflection of womanhood. The poet perceives womanhood as a self-fulfillment in love and as an affirmation of the spiritual and corporeal wholeness of the “self” in the experiencing of Eros. The distinctive feature of Pavlova's lyricism is defined as an emanation of the cheerful sense of life. The ethics and aesthetics of an absolute freedom follow the immorality of the Silver Age (Ivan Bunin's Light Breathing) by translating the spiritual energy of the creative vitality. The type of Pavlova's creative consciousness is defined as poetical artistry. The creative features correspond to the way of thinking, acting; the form of poet's rhetoric is easiness, perfectionism, freedom of expression, a comical experience of her own gift and a generous suggestion of the aesthetic sensitivity, when the aesthetics of the perfection of the content and form opposes the “vulgarity of the postmodern”.

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