Juri Lotman’s Analysis of the Poetic Text: Its Censorship History and an Unpublished Chapter on Marina Tsvetaeva

Abstract

Based on archival materials and Juri Lotman’s correspondence with publishers and colleagues, this article reconstructs the editorial history of his Analysis of the Poetic Text (1972) and examines how ideological constraints influenced the book’s final form. The selection of poems for analysis emerged as a central issue in the author’s negotiations with the Leningrad branch of the Prosveshchenie publishing house: editors and reviewers urged the inclusion of poets from the nineteenth-century Romantic and Realist canon and pressed for the reduction or removal of twentiethcentury Modernist authors, most notably Marina Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak. These interventions affected not only the corpus of examples but also the logic of Lotman’s argument, which was oriented toward demonstrating the methods and scope of immanent analysis rather than offering representative coverage of all periods of Russian literary history. The article also introduces Lotman’s previously unpublished chapter on Tsvetaeva’s poem “Ty, menja ljubivshij fal’sh’ju...” (“You, who loved me with the falseness...”). Read in the context of Lotman’s theoretical vocabulary and his readings of other poets in Analysis of the Poetic Text, this chapter offers a particularly clear illustration of his structuralist method.