Individualization in poetic book review

We present the individual results of a qualitative, comprehensive reviews analysis of collections of poems published in Russian literary periodicals of recent years. We formulate the goal of the reviewer – to attract the reader to his text and through it to the poetic work; the task of the reviewer is to detect and convey to the reader such signs of the author’s style and poetic work (book) as the essence of this style, which make it possible to speak of the author and book as unique, different from all others (“Pushkin is Pushkin”). We emphasize that a literary critic works primarily on the individualization of an artistic work. In this regard, we unfold the analogy of the work of the critic with the work of the forensics analyst on the identification of an unknown object: as such object (identifiable) serves not yet written content of the review, as an object for comparison (identifying) serves the poetic text. We list the features that are being compared, we indicate that these features are not accidental, but are strictly due to the task of individualization. We sum up that the poems review is not a simple reflection of the poems peculiarities, plus the critic’s subjective attitude towards them; for a deeper understanding of how a literary-critical work is created, it is necessary to borrow a number of concepts from another field of knowledge – the forensic identification theory.

theory of literature, literature studies, literary criticism, poetic book review, forensic identification theory, identity