Event Details

Shaul Tchernichovsky, writing in war-torn Odessa in 1919, chose to articulate his world-view as a vitalistic pantheist and to address large issues of culture and history in a demanding poetic form inherited from the Italian Renaissance, a corona of fifteen tightly interlocked sonnets. The result was one of the outstanding longer poems written in the 20th century. The paganism it expresses does not seem to be ideological gesturing, like the use of pagan motifs elsewhere in modern literature, but an authentic response to the nature of the world as he saw it.