По, Бодлер, Достоевский: Блеск и нищета национального гения

Summary: The present essay is a comparative analysis of Poe’s image as it was reflected in the famous introductory note by Dostoevsky, on the one hand, and in critical opinions about the American author, America, American culture, literature, and life style in France of the 1850s, on the other. The latter opinions were expressed in overt and covert disputes between Baudelaire who by that time had begun his work on Poe’s translation and his elder contemporary, Jules Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly.

Keywords: Poe, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, Barbey d’Aurevilly, the idea of the “national genius,” the national and the international in literature, problems of reception and literary translation.

Sandy Pecastaing

Baudelaire and “Poor Eddie”

Summary: The essay is a psychoanalytic interpretation of Baudelaire’s attitude to Poe. In particular, it points out that sadism dominated in this attitude: Baudelaire exaggerated Poe’s actual exile, openly attacking United States. The French committed an act of violence on Poe’s phantom, as it were, as he developed his own poetical subjectivity under the sign of the exiled and defeated.

Keywords: Poe, Baudelaire, Poe’s reception in France, poète maudit, body poetics, cosmopolitism.

Tatiana Sokolova

Impossibility of Choice: Baudelaire between the “Impeccable” Gautier and the “poète maudit” Poe

Summary: The article analyzes Baudelaire’s intellectual and aesthetic quests between his two “poles of attraction” – Théophile Gautier and Poe. Baudelaire fully sympathized with Gautier’s sarcastic statements about “useful” art while Poe’s works impressed him with the idea of literature worth in itself. Baudelaire’s special attention was attracted by cases of “the exceptional in the terms of morality,” which both Poe and Baudelaire saw as manifestation of the quality inherent in human nature and which both called “the perverse” (“perversité” in Baudelaire’s translation).

Keywords: Baudelaire, Poe, Gautier, autonomy of art, odd beauty, perversity.

Olga Panova

The Idols of the Mauve Decade: Poe, Baudelaire, and the American Bohemia of the 1890s

Summary: The article concentrates on the Poe-Baudelaire paradox of the American decadent and bohemian culture of the Mauve Decade. In the 1850 – 1870s, Baudelaire and Poe were ahead of the “American moment”; in the 1880 – 1890s, they were left behind together with Whitman and Russell Lowell, because American decadents sensed them as out-of-date Romantics whose innovations had been already well digested by the next, post-Baudelairian generation of European poets. Their time came in the twentieth century, when Baudelaire and Poe were reassessed by the Modernist generation. Underestimated in the “mauve 1890s,” both poets outlived American decadents and bohemians and persisted as underlying key figures in the history of various reincarnations of the American decadent sensibility.

Keywords: Poe, Baudelaire, Ambrose Bierce, Edgar Saltus, James Huneker, Lafcadio Hearn, decadence, Bohemia, Mauve Decade, American-European cultural and literary connections.

Sergey Sapozhkov, Valery Zusman

Prince Alexander Ourousof on Baudelaire in the French Symbolist Periodicals of the 1890s

Summary: The article deals with critical writings of Prince Alexander Ivanovich Ourousof dedicated to Baudelaire and published in a Parisian periodical La Plume and in the annual Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire (Paris, 1896). The focus is on the personality of the Prince Ourousof, a devoted mediator between Russian and French cultures. Ourousof pursued the idea of semi-material, semi-spiritual nature of the literary text as he conceived literature as a phenomenon of material culture, as a “thing” where every letter or every sign was meaningful and sacred and contributed to the aesthetic whole of the text. He used Baudelaire’s work as an example of his theory. The article detects how these ideas led Ourousof to describe The Flowers of Evil in terms of its “secret architecture,” as a grand ensemble (“architectonics”) seen in the unity of its verbal, graphic, and typographical properties – an approach that was revolutionary for his time. Also, the article reflects on the genesis of Ourousof’s ideas in the French thought (Gustave Flaubert, Jules Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly) and their further development by the representatives of OPOIAZ and the Russian Acmeism.

Keywords: Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, Barbey d’Aurevilly, literature as a “thing,” “architectonics,” “Secret architecture of The Flowers of Evil,” “sensual mysticism,” OPOIAZ, Russian Acmeism.

Dmitry Tokarev