Lyric Digression

a statement made by the author of an epic or lyric-epic directly expressing the author’s attitude toward what is being described. Thus, the lyric digression introduces the author-narrator as someone with a higher, ideal point of view (for example, some digressions in Gogol’s Dead Souls) and establishes a cordially intimate, emotional contact between author and reader, similar to suggestion in lyric poetry. Lyric digressions are most natural in the verse novel (or tale) because such conventions are more acceptable in verse form and poetic speech has great emotional potential—for example, Pushkin’s novel Eugene Onegin and A. T. Tvardovskii’s “book about a fighter,” Vasilii Terkin.