The formation of A. Shteiger’s lyrical diary (“This Day” – “This Life”)

This study investigates the development of a diary strategy in the early works of Anatoly Shteiger, a poet of the younger generation of emigration of the first wave. As a representative of the “Paris Note,” the foremost poetic movement within the Russian diaspora, Shteiger sought to preserve the spiritual essence of poetry by aligning it more closely with the literature of the “human document.” A comparative analysis of two early poetic collections, “This Day” (1928) and “This Life” (1932), illuminates the formation and evolution of the lyrical diary. This analysis considers themes and key motives, such as emigration, illness, death, nature, God, love, memory, creativity, and maturation, as well as worldviews, and diary form specifics. This development is found to involve a departure from the literary style inherited from St. Petersburg poetics and transcending the duality inherent in the oppositions of the earthly and the afterlife, reality and culture, past and present. Furthermore, it entails a focus on individual experience in addressing philosophical questions such as the existence of God as the essence of ethics and axiology, and the possibility of dialogue both with higher powers and with an equal Other. A comparison of Steiger’s lyrical diary with the poetic systems of his mentors, Adamovich and Ivanov, reveals both his assimilation of “Parisian note” aesthetics and the originality of his creative method, in which poetry serves to absolutize personal experience.

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