POES 40: There's a Bell in Moscow

The title of this book comes from the poem ‘The Shandon Bells’ by the English poet Francis Silvester Mahoney (1804-1866). The bell in Moscow suggests something of the attraction Russia, and more specifically Russian literature, has always had on Weststeijn, but at the same time – we write 2024 – has an ominous ring. Like the previous collections of essays in the Pegasus Oost-Europese Studies series: It seems to me. Essays on literary theory and analysis (2018), Filling the Unfathom¬able Full of the Unknown. Essays on Velimir Chlebnikov (2020) and Not Every ‘I’ is Me. Essays on the Lyric Subject (2023), the texts assembled in There’s a Bell in Moscow were written over a period of more than forty years, the first one being published in 1980, the last one recently, in 2023. I updated them only marginally, for instance changing, where necessary, ‘in the beginning of this century’ into ‘in the beginning of the twentieth century’, and did not adapt the contents or the argumentation.

Many of the essays collected in this book are based on papers read at conferences in Moscow. The topics of the essays vary considerably; the twentieth century is slightly more represented than the nineteenth.