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#Divine Spirits

Every in-library item filed under this tag, newest first, with its research summary and organization.

2 itemsTag: #Divine Spirits · newest first
  1. PDF

    They Sold Their Shadows

    Alexander Voloshin’s 1953 rhyming mock epic Sidetracked: Exile in Hollywood traces the upheavals from the Bolshevik Revolution to Pearl Harbor through the precarious lives of Russian émigrés in Los Angeles. The writer connects the poem’s satire to Voloshin’s own itinerant career, including work as a Hollywood extra and taxi driver, and emphasizes its depiction of refugees who offered their labor and images to the film industry while struggling to survive. Judging Boris Dralyuk’s English translation brilliant, the writer argues that this publication should rescue Voloshin from obscurity and establish his reputation in the West.

    Literature & Criticism#DivineSpirits#Post-WWI/IIEra
  2. PDF

    At Leopardi’s House

    Tim Parks uses a visit to Giacomo Leopardi’s house in Recanati to examine what happens when writers lose faith in their community of readers. Leopardi’s pursuit of truth led him from youthful scholarship to a bleak view of existence, yet he believed people still required consciously cultivated illusions, including his own hope for literary glory. Repeated disappointments persuaded him that original literature is recognized by only a tiny minority and that posterity offers no reliable consolation, a predicament Parks connects to other alienated authors and to the erosion of a shared vision between writers and readers. Recanati’s largely superficial commemoration of Leopardi sharpens the irony, while his imagined robotic companion prompts Parks’s closing suggestion that neglected writers may seek appreciative readers in AI.

    Literature & Criticism#DivineSpirits