По, Бодлер, Достоевский: Блеск и нищета национального гения

Summary: The essay analyzes foreign elements and national or ethnical identification of characters in Poe’s, Baudelaire’s, and Dostoevsky’s works. It claims that in addition to the traditional ludic function, they contribute to creating the effect of terror while being imbedded with important meta-literary meanings. Interest to the otherness and ambiguity of one’s identity become important attributes of the artist.

Keywords: Poe, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, foreign insertions, imitation of a foreign accent, macaronic and broken language, national and ethnical identification of a character, comic, horror, otherness, hybridity of the artist’s properties.

Tim Farrant, Alexandra Urakova

Birds of a Feather: Birds, Transcendence, and the Uncanny in Poe and Baudelaire

Summary: Birds are centrally emblematic in both Baudelaire’s and Poe’s work. During his lifetime Poe was already known as “the author of ‘The Raven’” (this poem was the only one of Poe’s poems that Baudelaire translated – or rather, paraphrased, in prose – making it the focus for subsequent French readers) while Baudelaire’s “L’Albatros” and especially “Le Cygne” encapsulate both his own position as an artist and a wider alienation from, and within, modernity. The article seeks to situate the specificity of avian images in Poe and Baudelaire, placing these images within the dualism of presence and absence, transcendence and relativity, familiar and uncanny.

Keywords: Poe, Baudelaire, birds, uncanny, transcendence, dialectics.

Alexey Astvatsaturov

Black Jackdaw, Raven, Woodpecker: The Motifs of Birds in Jean Paul, Poe, and Nietzsche

Summary: The essay focuses on the comparative analysis of bird images in the work of three nineteenth-century authors: Jean Paul, Poe, and Nietzsche. The author considers all the three to be undisputable representatives of modernity as a macro-epoch in literary history. The work of Jean Paul (1763 – 1825) is a brilliant phenomenon of early modernity as well as of modernity associated with Romanticism. The work of Poe (1809 – 1849) is quintessentially Romantic, on the one hand, and reflective and critical of European Romanticism, on the other hand. The work of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) embodies a critique of the phenomenon of modernity as such, a critique that was in fact immanent to modernity and that reveals itself in Nietzsche’s modernist experimental philosophy and deconstructionist poetry. The essay claims that modernist emblems demonstrate a collapse of expanding subjectivity in Jean Paul while in Poe, they push us to the limits of the rational and the irrational. Such subjectivization and interiorization of Baroque imagery are accompanied by the active employment of bird emblems. Both the black jackdaw and the raven are directly related to the theme of the sinister omen whereas Nietzsche’s cheerful woodpecker, the raven in reverse, becomes an emblem of another, decadent modernity.

Key words: Poe, Jean Paul, Nietzsche, Romanticism, modernity, birds, emblems, subjectivity.

Alexey Volsky

Birds in Baudelaire, George, and Rilke: A Study in Comparative Poetology

Summary: The essay analyzes the concept of the bird in the light of Benjamin’s idea about the so called pure language (reine Sprache) and discusses it as a poetological image on the example of three poems by Baudelaire, George, and Rilke where it appears in the form of allegory, symbol, and meta-logos. In the philosophy of language of pre-Romantic and Romantic periods, avian images were associated with the notion of natural language that had musical-verbal form and was believed to be the origin of human language by the theorists of literary modernity. Theoretical hypothesis about a musical pra-language formulated by Romantics was close to Benjamin’s ideas expressed in his essay “The Task of the Translator.” Finally, birds were important poetological images of modernist poetry as such. I come to the conclusion that in the examined poems by Baudelaire, George, and Rilke, birds function as an allegory of the poet’s image, a symbol of poetical world, and meta-logos of a self-reflective poetical text.

Keywords: Baudelaire, poetry, poetology, hermeneutics, metalogos, allegory, symbol, Benjamin, George, Rilkе.

Part III

NATIONAL GENIUSES, THEIR ASSOCIATES AND OPPONENTS

Sergey Fokine

“American Genius” in the Light of the Judgments of Barbey d’Aurevilly, Baudelaire, and Dostoevsky