This volume explores the range and uses of quotations, echoes, and allusions drawn from thousands of intertextual instances that Kireevskii has recognized in his work. The principal interest of the echoes examined here lies in the revaluation of the poet and the theoretical issues his varied use of them suggests.

Through echoing, Kireevskii embodies and explicates his assertions of continuity in human development, his vision of interchange between the mind and nature. As a poet, he is a person who constantly experiences, sees, hears, suspects, hopes, and dreams extraordinary things; is struck by his own thoughts as if from outside or from above and below, as if by his type of events and lightning bolts; is perhaps a storm himself, pregnant with new lightning; and is a fatal person in whose vicinity things are always rumbling, growling, gaping, and acting in uncanny ways.

Listen very carefully because Kireevskii writes in a very symbolic form, and unless you are very alert in reading his words, you may miss all the implications. The reason why he is so symbolic is that he is so full of new insights and he has so much he desires to share and to give.

As with a hermit’s writings, you can always hear something of the echo of the desert, something of the whisper and the timid sideways glance of solitude—a concealed philosophy where every opinion is also a hiding place, every word is also a mask.