The masculine “I” in the poetry of Mariya Levberg

The paper introduces the poetry of a forgotten author of the Silver Age - Mariya Levberg, whose poetical texts always feature the masculine “I”. The peculiarities of constructing the lyrical subject and the lyrical world in Levberg’s poetry are analyzed in relation to the problem of constructing gender in Modernist literature in general. The formation of Levberg’s “poetical transvestism” and conscious movement towards poetry and a lyrical subject, with aesthetic effect achieved due to the nuances of the play of “masks” and gender roles, is described. The lyrical subject of “Sly wanderer” evolves from a young man longing for a higher world to the hero-lover seeking to escape from this melancholy into a refined pastime, then to a knight looking for his Holy Grail and, finally, to the monk consecrated to the service of God. However, a fundamental characteristic of this book of poems and its lyrical subject is the incompleteness and non-finality of any choice and any incarnation, their dialectical transformations, and the ambivalence of any emotion. At the same time, the most frequent and pronounced among the variations of the lyrical subject’s masks is that of the knight appearing also in other poems of Levberg. The roles of the knight and the poet prove to be intrinsically linked in her texts. Levberg’s remarkable commitment to the masculine lyrical “I” and, particularly, to the mask of the knight, of the warrior stems from her attempt to obtain the creator’s agency in the frame of the masculine gender order of Modernism.

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