Slavic Studies congratulates Melissa Azari, who recently defended her dissertation, which is titled “Mapping the Auditory Landscape of Natalya Gorbanevskaya’s Pre-Emigration Poetry.”
We interviewed Melissa to find out more about her topic.
What’s your dissertation about? Please give us the elevator pitch.
My dissertation establishes sound and music as foundational elements of Russian poet and dissident Natalya Gorbanevskaya’s poetry written before she emigrated to the West in 1975. Gorbanevskaya has an impressive legacy of human rights activism that has somewhat eclipsed her poetic oeuvre. Following in the footsteps of scholars such as Allan Reid and Georgy Levinton, I intended for my dissertation to contribute to the recentering of Gorbanevskaya’s poetry as a critical component of her legacy and as a rich topic of study.
As a basis for analysis, my dissertation uses sound studies research that considers both how a person’s specific personal and cultural context influences their perception of sound and how sound emerges as a reflection of culture. From there, I focus on the cultural significance attached to specific sounds and music within Gorbanevskaya’s auditory context. By exploring these connections, my dissertation illustrates that sound images form the basis of one of Gorbanevskaya’s primary poetic themes: the eternal endurance of those principles that give her life meaning (artistic creation, cultural memory, religious faith, personal freedom) in the face of the looming, seemingly apocalyptic trauma of twentieth-century life, which threatens the repression and devastation of these principles.
How did you come to this topic?
I took a seminar on the Russian elegy with Professor Andrew Reynolds during my first year of graduate school. When I was planning my final paper for that class, I asked Professor Reynolds for suggestions on more contemporary Russian poets to explore—Gorbanevskaya’s name was included on the list he gave me and I ended up writing my seminar paper on her poetry. Throughout the rest of my graduate career, I kept coming back to Gorbanevskaya’s work and felt that there was a lot more to say about it, so it seemed a natural choice for a dissertation topic. I came to the sound and music aspect of my dissertation only during the first few years of writing and research. I began to see, through interviews she had given and in her poetry itself, that sound and music were very important to Gorbanevskaya as a poet.
What’s next for you as a new PhD?
I’m currently working as the Interim Program Manager for the Russian Flagship Program at UW-Madison this semester and I’m excited to explore future opportunities in academia. In the long-term, I hope to turn this dissertation into a book studying Natalya Gorbanevskaya’s life and work more broadly.