Michael Wachtel
In this thoughtful, pioneering book, Molly Thomasy Blasing demonstrates the extent to which photography has impacted the last hundred years of Russian poetry. Through close readings and careful contextualization, Blasing opens up new approaches to some of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, providing a multifaceted discussion of the relationship between text and image and a rich source material on the history and theory of photography.
Jenifer Presto
Snapshots of the Soul is a prodigiously researched and elegantly argued monograph that makes a compelling case for a Russian photo-poetics. Moving deftly between poems and photographs by Russia's leading twentieth- and twenty-first-century poets, Molly Thomasy Blasing convincingly demonstrates that the encounter between poetry and photography was central to Russian literary culture.
Stephanie Sandler
A deeply researched and utterly compelling work of scholarship. Case studies provide close-ups of major poets, with dozens more to fill in a varied and persuasive context. The poets conjure up photographs real and imagined, and photography is shown as a metaphor for writing practice. We come away from this splendid book with a richer sense of modern Russian poetry, and we get to reread and rethink poems that associate photography with mourning and memory, with fluidity and freedom, with a flickering sense of being and of knowing.
