Trading Words for Things: Solicitory Poetry in Russian, Ukrainian, and Hebrew
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation provides a comparative history of the genre of solicitory poetry in Russian, Ukrainian, and Hebrew composed from the early eighteenth to early twentieth centuries to aesthetically articulate political and economic aspirations, or make requests of the Russian imperial or Soviet authorities and/or influential individuals for goods and benefits. I explore how solicitory poetry was traditionally used, whether as supplications on ceremonial occasions or as standalone petitions. I argue that poetic solicitations, enhanced with decorative features, had a theurgical aesthetic effect, making positive outcomes more likely. Therefore, I disclose the poems’ material, visual, and textual aspects, suggesting that they were prized not only as cultural capital, but also as luxury goods with tangible characteristics: their ornamentation, length, and the quality of the material they were printed or handwritten on. In the Jewish context, such works were used to solicit social equality, residential, jurisdictional, and occupational rights, or improvements in Jewish education; in the imperial Ukrainian context—administrative or political ends, and military autonomy; while in the Soviet-wide, non-national context—access to elite publishing institutions, stores, pensions, etc.Taking a comparative approach that distinguishes my study from extant research on the subject, I explore how poetry has been used pragmatically within three different national traditions, but under one polity. I trace how the role of poetry in each culture evolved from the eighteenth century—a turning point in the development of Russian, Hebrew, and Ukrainian poetry—through the responses of these literatures to their “shared destiny” in Russia. When theories of value are applied to literature, they are typically developed on monolinguistic and monocultural material; in redressing this methodological lapse, my study is unique. The dissertation’s cross-cultural analysis investigates the politicization and commodification of literature on a linguistically and culturally diverse textual corpus that panoramically encompasses material culture, poetry, art, and constructs of power. The textual and material elements of my samples are dialectically related, as are my interpretations of them. Approaching these writings from the standpoint of poetics, discourse, genre, and material culture, my research results in a transdisciplinary and transcultural analysis, engaging such fields as hybridity, diplomacy, art, literature, and economics.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".