'I am a geographer of the sleeping kingdom'. Psychopoetics in Vera Pavlova's 'Proverochnoe slovo' ('Control word') (2018)

This paper proposes a new approach to the concept of psychopoetics, i.e., the psychological treatment of poetical writing based on its relationship with the psyche on the one hand, and the world on the other. This approach discerns an allegorical relation between the cosmos and the soul, which goes back to Freud’s idea that the soul treats impressions from the outside as differences from a symbolic relation between the universe and the psyche. This method was developed by Jung in order to look for correspondences between the inside of the human being and the context. Symbolical psychopoetics is exemplified with Vera Pavlova’s 2018 anthology of poetry and prose Proverochnoe slovo (Control Word). The anthology consists of poetical cycles and prose passages, which in different ways imagine the relation between the soul and the world.