По, Бодлер, Достоевский: Блеск и нищета национального гения

Demons of Perversity: Poe, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, and the New Subject of Modernity

Summary: The essay focuses on three texts: Poe’s “The Imp of the Perverse,” Baudelaire’s “The Bad Glazier,” and Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground. The analysis builds on two central notions: the subject of literary utterance and modernity (modernitet). The figures of the narrator in each work are juxtaposed with such categories as scientific knowledge, psychology, politics, reader, and literature. In conclusion, the author develops and formulates the concept of the “divided subject” specific for all the examined texts.

Keywords: Poe, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, literature, madness, subject of literary experience.

Olga Voltchek

City Topology and Narrative Masks in Poe, Baudelaire, and Dostoevsky

Summary: The essay examines early Dostoevsky’s and Baudelaire’s works as well as “Parisian text” in Poe’s short stories. The narrative topos of these works is the urban environment of the capitalist megapolis that evoked peculiar and important figures of space in the imagination of nineteenth-century artists, writers, and poets. A new vision of modernity articulated by Baudelaire is interpreted via the key figure of the flaneûr, a product of modern consumerism having different incarnations in the discussed texts.

Keywords: Poe, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, modernity, city, flaneûr, old man, woman.

Anne Pinot

The Odd in Poe, the Odd in Baudelaire, and the Fantastic in Dostoevsky: Modern Life and Unreliable Language

Summary: This essay develops a comparative perspective and examines a number of concepts, propositions, and areas, within which Poe’s artistic quest prefigured those directions in the study of modern life which both the author of The Flowers of Evil and the author of The Brothers Karamazov pursued independently of each other. It focuses primarily on the following concepts: “the odd,” “the foreign,” and “the fantastic.” Efficient tools of the capacities of imagination, these concepts correlate in different ways with such phenomena of modernity as: the idea of technical and social progress; psychology of cities being ideal spaces for both crowded co-existence and personal solitude; alienation and estrangement from the realm of transcendence which only art can keep together.

Keywords: Poe, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, the poetics of the fantastic, the idea of progress, modernity, the idea of the divine in literature.

Stephen Rachman

Hearing Poe’s Sociopaths: Crime, Punishment, and Voice

Summary: This article analyzes the voice of the Poe’s sociopaths through two of cultural contexts. The first has to do with the bifurcated reactions that the voice of Poe’s sociopaths have engendered in their contemporary critical reception. “Utterly credible,” in the estimation of Stephen King; “three-quarters burlesque,” in the estimation of Jill Lepore. These reactions are emblematic of the key critical division with respect to the authenticity of Poe’s literary voice. The second context analyzes the perception that Fyodor Dostoevsky made in the 1860s about Poe’s tales, already having noticed the oddity of his literary manner. The aim of this comparative strategy is to reveal within a frame of critical comparison and contrast a deeper critical and literary theoretical continuity, the extent to which the critical ambiguity toward Poe’s sociopathic voice that we find in contemporary reaction finds its analog in the Russian translations of his work.

Keywords: Poe, Dostoevsky, reception, voice, sociopath.

Virginie Tellier

From New Extraordinary Tales to Notes from the Underground: Speaking in the First Person