The Mystery of Death and the Spark of the Self

The Mystery of Death and the Spark of the Self is the first monograph on the emergence of the lyric "I" in East Slavic and Russian poetry of early modernity. Considering poems by male and female authors from Slavia Orientalis (today's Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and parts of Eastern Poland and the Baltic states), Erica Camisa Morale explores the origins of the lyric and the emergence of selfhood in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She analyzes this phenomenon against the backdrop of the transculturalism of East Slavic early modern culture, working at the intersection of different disciplines—literature and linguistics and art, philosophy, and anthropology. Illuminating the encounter of heterogeneous cultural trends—including baroque and neoclassicism and Orthodoxy and the Enlightenment—Camisa Morale shows how self-awareness stems from consciousness of death. From the first linguistic traces of subjectivity to its emotional and psychological manifestation, Camisa Morale follows the evolution of the lyric "I" as it celebrates the glory of sovereigns and prominent people, cries the passing of dear ones, and erects a monument to itself and its poetry.