The Superstitious Muse: Thinking Russian Literature Mythopoetically 9781618116789
For several decades David Bethea has written authoritatively on the “mythopoetic thinking” that lies at the heart of cla
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English Pages 432 Year 2017
Table of contents :
Contents
Note on Transliteration
Preface
I. 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
II. Part Two: 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
III. Part Three: 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 Daughter” (A Reading)
20. Brodsky, Frost, and the Pygmalion Myth
Index
