ABSTRACT
This chapter explores that paradox of self-disclosure, particularly to clarify its reliance on religious concepts and on the work of Russia’s poets. It also explores these questions through close examination of four short poems from the early 1980s. The shorter poems treated in this chapter offer samples of Elena Shvarts’s flair for handling such material, and in a more compressed and compact way. In addition, these poems expose the paradoxes of comprehending the poet’s psyche; their patterns for thematizing distances between self and other, poet and reader can help us recognize the patterns of self-disclosure that define her work. In Pushkin’s poem, the Castalian spring gives water to those banished to its deserts, but rather than identifying with the exiled wanderer or with the mourned poets in Zabolotskii’s poem, Shvarts undertakes to incarnate the Castalian source.
