По, Бодлер, Достоевский: Блеск и нищета национального гения

Summary: The essay draws genetic and typological parallels between Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground and Poe’s New Extraordinary Tales in Baudelaire’s 1857 translation (that Dostoevsky could have known by the time he wrote his text), including “The Imp of the Perverse,” “The Black Cat,” “William Wilson,” “The Man of the Crowd,” and “Berenice.” My main hypothesis is that a communicative situation specific for Notes from the Underground contains a certain narrative paradox that evokes a number of questions. If the main condition of the narrator’s confession is not to be heard, can we call it a confession? If the coworkers who humiliated the narrator will never hear his narrative, does this make his notes more “real” than the speech he mentally addressed to his tormentors that terrible night when he underwent a final humiliation and secluded himself in the underground? And finally, is there such thing as a word “from the underground”? The essay claims that a literary form invented by Dostoevsky with certain elements going back to Poe’s first-person narrative represents a peculiar and highly controversial transit from silence to speech.

Keywords: Poe, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, narratology, first-person narrative, the fantastic, madness and literature.

Marie-Christine Alix Garneau de l’Isle-Adam

“Génie du christianisme” in the Light of Poe, Baudelaire, and Dostoevsky

Summary: This essay, bearing on the method of comparative analysis, discusses the attitude of Poe, Baudelaire, and Dostoevsky to the visual image and religious representation against the background of such modern visual technologies as panorama, daguerreotype, and photography that appeared in the first half of the nineteenth century and altered the perception of religious iconography. Poe living in the time of protestant prayer books with no illustrations (since Reformation), could not remain indifferent to the effect the Puritan purification had produced on the man of the crowd. This man was infected by spiritual maladies of three nations – English, American, and German – suffering from Spleen and Boredom since the Schism. Baudelaire, in his turn, living in a world not altogether deprived of its “lighthouses,” was concerned about the fact that the “lighthouses” were under the threat of disappearing with the advent of bourgeoisie unwilling to see anything except its own image and resemblance that the new medium, photography, made possible. As regards Dostoevsky’s attitude to image, I argue that the unseen and silent presence of icons in the works of the Russian novelist endows his visual representation with the innermost depth.

Keywords: Poe, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, Chateaubriand, religious iconography, Protestantism, Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity in literature.

PART II

DEMONOLOGIES AND ORNITHOLOGIES

Elvira Osipova

The Devil in Poe’s Tales and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov

Summary: The paper analyzes the way both Poe and Dostoyevsky used the figure of the devil to create the atmosphere of the fantastic. Poe’s tales “Bon-Bon,” “Never Bet the Devil Your Head,” and “The Devil in the Belfry,” and Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (in particular, the chapter “The Devil. The Nightmare of Ivan Fyodorovich”) reveal similarities in their poetical principles. The paper also claims that both authors introduced the figure of the devil for the purposes of literary polemics.

Keywords: Poe, Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, the fantastic, the figure of the devil, Transcendentalists, literary polemics.

Irina Golovacheva

The Battle with the Alter Ego: From Poe to Henry James

Summary: The essay offers a detailed comparative approach to three classical texts with a Doppelgänger motif: E.A. Poe’s “William Wilson,” Dostoevsky’s “The Double,” and “The Jolly Corner” by Henry James. It claims that Dostoevsky’s story, as well as the one by Poe, may have influenced “The Jolly Corner.” The poetic potential of the Doppelgänger imagery is explored as a cluster of “genetic traits” passed on as a literary heritage. All three texts demonstrate a high potential of the “double” imagery intended to reveal the basic existential distrust for the integrity of the ego since in them it is being taken over by the alter ego.

Keywords: Poe, Dostoyevsky, Henry James, Stevenson, Doppelgänger, de Vogüé, intertextual links, battle with the alter ego.

Elina Absalyamova

The Languages of the Odd: Terror, Laughter, and Creativity