Anastasia Tsvetaeva`s novel Amor: the lyrical genre model as the embodiment of spiritual resistance

The study looks at Anastasia Tsvetaeva’s novel Amor, the first draft of which (1939–1941) was composed when the author was incarcerated in Amurlag, a labor camp located in the Soviet Far East. Tsvetaeva resumed work on the manuscript, which was smuggled to Moscow by some free workers employed in the camp, in 1960, after she had served her term of “perpetual exile” in Siberia. Yet the definitive, canonical text was completed only in the 1980s. The novel was first published in the journal Moskva. The paper examines the novel from a concrete, genre-based perspective and interprets it as a lyrical work, owing to its focus on the psychological depiction of the consciousness of the protagonist, Nikki, Tsvetaeva’s alter ego. The genre of the lyrical novel, to which the work conforms, determines its poetics. Amor exhibits a degree of multilayered lyrical fragmentation that frames several of its aspects: narrational and compositional structure (a multilayered chronotope), mythopoetic dimension (a novel about the authorial self, the poem about Moritz, and the author’s own verse productions), discursive design (complex monologues of a voiced and interior kind), portrait sketches, and landscapes notes. By making use of this lyrical genre during a period of the totalitarian enslavement of the individual, Tsvetaeva asserts the value of every human being and gives expression of her axiological and humanistic stance, aimed at defending personhood under any historical and social circumstances.