Bibliographic record
Abstract
The unspecified visual art referent in Akhmatova’s enigmatic poem, “An Old Portrait” (Staryi portret, 1910), dedicated to the painter Aleksandra Ekster, has long inspired critical speculation. scholars (superfin and Timenchik, Rosslyn, Rubins) have proposed numerous readings, but none has entirely resolved the poem’s mysteries. I will argue that the ballets Le Pavillon d’Armide and Cléopâtre, performed in the first Paris season of the Ballets Russes, provide hitherto unexplored subtexts for the spare but dramatic poem. Considered within the context of the ballets, the poem’s characters and details take on more specific and meaningful contours. By analyzing these ballets’ respective libretti, costume designs and stage sets, it becomes possible to detect in the poem references to the Gobelins portrait depicting the deadly enchantress in Le Pavillon d’Armide, the poisoning of Amoun at the conclusion of Cléopâtre, and Vaclav Nijinsky’s performances as Armida’s servant in Le Pavillon d’Armide and Cleopatra’s slave in Cléopâtre. The poem also demonstrates Akhmatova’s early fascination with portraiture, especially the complex relationship between artist and sitter. In this sense, “An Old Portrait” anticipates the poet’s eventual cultivation of her own image in portraits painted by her contemporaries.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".