Aleksander Blok's Ital'ianskie Stikhi: Confrontation and Disillusionment

This study is chiefly concerned with the organization of the Italian Poems into a coherent meaningful structure. It demonstrates how the very order of the poems was determined by a conception of evolution which paralleled that of Blok's total oeuvre. Studied in this way, there emerges from the cycle a pattern charged with meaning and grounded in much larger issues concerned with the Symbolists' views on language and Blok's own place in the tradition of the European love lyric. "...fine textual analysis ... this work offers perhaps the most exciting approach to Blok to have appeared recently in English." (SEEJ) "...it simply cannot be overlooked by any self-respecting Blok scholar, whether in the Soviet Union or elsewhere. This is the definitive explication of the Italian Poems..." (Poetics Today)