The Superstitious Muse
Thinking Russian Literature Mythopoetically
Published on 14. June 2018
Book
Paperback/Softback
432 pages
978-1-61811-812-7 (ISBN)
Description
For several decades David Bethea has written authoritatively on the "mythopoetic thinking" that lies at the heart of classical Russian literature, especially Russian poetry. His theoretically informed essays and books have made a point of turning back to issues of intentionality and biography at a time when authorial agency seems under threat of "erasure" and the question of how writers, and poets in particular, live their lives through their art is increasingly moot. The lichnost' (personhood, psychic totality) of the given writer is all-important, argues Bethea, as it is that which combines the specifically biographical and the capaciously mythical in verbal units that speak simultaneously to different planes of being. Pushkin's Evgeny can be one incarnation of the poet himself and an Everyman rising up to challenge Peter's new world order; Brodsky can be, all at once, Dante and Mandelstam and himself, the exile paying an Orphic visit to Florence (and, by ghostly association, Leningrad).
This sort of metempsychosis, where the stories that constitute the Ur-texts of Russian literature are constantly reworked in the biographical myths shaping individual writers' lives, is Bethea's primary focus. This collection contains a liberal sampling of Bethea's most memorable previously published essays along with new studies prepared for this occasion.
This sort of metempsychosis, where the stories that constitute the Ur-texts of Russian literature are constantly reworked in the biographical myths shaping individual writers' lives, is Bethea's primary focus. This collection contains a liberal sampling of Bethea's most memorable previously published essays along with new studies prepared for this occasion.
Reviews / Votes
"Few American Slavists have been as prolific as David Bethea; hence this ample collection represents only a small sampling of his work. Nonetheless, it gives a good sense of his scholarly preoccupations over the past three decades. The book is wide-ranging in both its theoretical concerns and its choice of primary texts. . . . Bethea's approach opens up obscure passages in unprecedented ways, often with admirable clarity. "- Michael Wachtel, Princeton University, in Slavic Review
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Brighton
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 156 mm
Thickness: 23 mm
Weight
652 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-61811-812-7 (9781618118127)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
David Bethea (Ph.D. University of Kansas, 1977) is a Vilas Professor of Slavic Languages, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Research interests include: Pushkin and his era, modern Russian poetry (esp. Khodasevich and Brodsky), Russian religious thought and cultural mythology, Russian emigre literature, Anglo-American vs. Russian modernism, 20th century Russian/Slavic literary theory (esp. influence studies), biography. Among his books are: Joseph Brodsky and the Creation of Exile (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), and Realizing Metaphors: Alexander Pushkin and the Life of the Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998).
Content
Preface: David Bethea
Introduction: Caryl Emerson
Part One: Russian Literature: Background, Foreground, Creative Cognition
1 The Mythopoetic ""Vectors"" of Russian Literature
2 Mythopoesis Writ Large: The Apocalyptic Plot in Russian Literature
3 Mythopoesis and Biography: Pushkin, Jakobson, and the Secret Life of Statues
4 The Evolution of Evolution: Genes, Memes, Intelligent Design and Nabokov
5 Relativity and Reality: Dante, Florensky, Lotman, and Metaphorical Time-Travel
6 Whose Mind is this Anyway? Influence, Intertextuality, and the Legitimate Boundaries of Scholarship
Part 2: Pushkin the Poet, Pushkin the Thinker
7 Of Pushkin and Pushkinists
8 Biography (with Sergei Davydov)
9 Pushkin's Mythopoetic Consciousness: Apuleius, Psyche and Cupid, and the Theme of Metamorphosis in Eugene Onegin
10 ""A Higher Audacity"": How to Read Pushkin's Dialogue with Shakespeare in The Stone Guest
11 Stabat Pater: Revisiting the ""Monumental"" in Peter, Petersburg, and Pushkin
12 Slavic Gift Giving, the Poet in History, and Pushkin's The Captain's Daughter
13 Pushkin's The History of Pugachev: Where Fact Meets the Zero-Degree of Fiction
Part 3: Reading Russian Writers Reading Themselves and Others
14 Sorrento Photographs: Khodasevich's Memory Speaks
15 Nabokov's Style
16 Sologub, Nabokov, and the Limits of Decadent Aesthetics
17 Exile, Elegy, and Auden in Brodsky's ""Verses on the Death of T.S
Eliot""
18 Joseph Brodsky and the American Seashore Poem: Lowell, Mandelstam, and Cape Cod
19 Joseph Brodsky's ""To My Dauther"" (A Reading)
20 Brodsky, Frost and the Pygmalion Myth
Index.
Introduction: Caryl Emerson
Part One: Russian Literature: Background, Foreground, Creative Cognition
1 The Mythopoetic ""Vectors"" of Russian Literature
2 Mythopoesis Writ Large: The Apocalyptic Plot in Russian Literature
3 Mythopoesis and Biography: Pushkin, Jakobson, and the Secret Life of Statues
4 The Evolution of Evolution: Genes, Memes, Intelligent Design and Nabokov
5 Relativity and Reality: Dante, Florensky, Lotman, and Metaphorical Time-Travel
6 Whose Mind is this Anyway? Influence, Intertextuality, and the Legitimate Boundaries of Scholarship
Part 2: Pushkin the Poet, Pushkin the Thinker
7 Of Pushkin and Pushkinists
8 Biography (with Sergei Davydov)
9 Pushkin's Mythopoetic Consciousness: Apuleius, Psyche and Cupid, and the Theme of Metamorphosis in Eugene Onegin
10 ""A Higher Audacity"": How to Read Pushkin's Dialogue with Shakespeare in The Stone Guest
11 Stabat Pater: Revisiting the ""Monumental"" in Peter, Petersburg, and Pushkin
12 Slavic Gift Giving, the Poet in History, and Pushkin's The Captain's Daughter
13 Pushkin's The History of Pugachev: Where Fact Meets the Zero-Degree of Fiction
Part 3: Reading Russian Writers Reading Themselves and Others
14 Sorrento Photographs: Khodasevich's Memory Speaks
15 Nabokov's Style
16 Sologub, Nabokov, and the Limits of Decadent Aesthetics
17 Exile, Elegy, and Auden in Brodsky's ""Verses on the Death of T.S
Eliot""
18 Joseph Brodsky and the American Seashore Poem: Lowell, Mandelstam, and Cape Cod
19 Joseph Brodsky's ""To My Dauther"" (A Reading)
20 Brodsky, Frost and the Pygmalion Myth
Index.