The second episode of the first (and best) season of Amy Sherman-Palladino’s popular period drame... more The second episode of the first (and best) season of Amy Sherman-Palladino’s popular period dramedy series "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" (2017 – 2023) is entitled “Ya Shivu v Bolshom Dome Na Kholme” (i.e., “I live in a big house on a hill”; original air date: November 29, 2017). These are the words that the protagonist of the show, a brilliant stand-up comedian named Midge Maisel (née Miriam Weissman, played by Rachel Brosnahan), who just separated from her unfaithful and plain husband, pronounces in her very first public performance at the Gaslight Café in New York City. Where did she pick this phrase up? And why did she choose Russian language and literature in the first place? What was Bryn Mawr’s Russian program like in the early 1950s? I believe that these are not idle questions, since the answers to them will show us how historical this hysterical TV show is.
ТОЛКОВАНИЯ ПРАВДЫ В РУССКОЙ КУЛЬТУРЕ. Studia Russica Helsingiensia et Tartuensia XVII Под редакциейГеннадия Обатнина и Томи Хуттунена. , 2021
В биографиях (или биографических легендах) известных писателей часто встречаются сведения об их п... more В биографиях (или биографических легендах) известных писателей часто встречаются сведения об их первых словах и литературных (как правило, устных) опытах, сохранившиеся в памяти очевидцев и как бы предсказывающие великое будущее этих авторов. Разумеется, кардинальное отличие этих слов и произведений от последних написанных ими текстов заключается в том, что о первых мы знаем понаслышке, из воспоминаний самих авторов или их родных (нянька Державина, племянница Жуковского, сестра Пушкина, мать Блока), и никогда не можем быть уверенными, что они действительно существовали, а не были выдуманы post factum. Но именно такая мифологическая дубиальность этих «первоисточников» и делает их особенно привлекательными для исследователей. Поэты и свидетели могут врать, но даже выдуманные тексты, при правильном подходе и точно заданных вопросах, говорят правду о стоящих за ними культурных проблемах и коллизиях. Предлагаемая статья посвящена генезису и символическому значению одного такого «первого стихотворения» в поэтическом контексте и биографической легенде поэта.
* The article considers the key episode from Ivan Novikov’s popular biographical novel "Pushkin i... more * The article considers the key episode from Ivan Novikov’s popular biographical novel "Pushkin in the South" (1943-44), which portrays the vision of the poet in St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv. According to the novelist’s hypothesis, this vision is closely associated with Pushkin’s “secret love” and represents the main source of the poet’s erotic narrative poem "Gavriiliad." The article analyzes ideological implications of the scene and reconstructs the sources of this biographical mystification in the context of Novikov’s ouevre, Russian symbolism of the 1900s and Russian Pushkinism of the 1920s-1940s.
* В статье рассматривается кульминационный эпизод из известного романа писателя И.А. Новикова «Пушкин на юге» (1943-1944), изображающий видение поэта в киевском Софийском соборе, связанное, согласно гипотезе писателя, с «южной любовью» поэта и якобы ставшее источником его будущей поэмы «Гавриилиада». В статье исследуются идеологический подтекст и источники этой биографической мистификации в творчестве Новикова, русском символизме 1900-х годов и русской пушкинистике 1920-1940-х годов.
In this essay I explore the secret history of one of the modern world’s most influential messiani... more In this essay I explore the secret history of one of the modern world’s most influential messianic utopias, tracing its origins to the United States in the 1920s. This utopia was forged and promoted by a group of inventive and mystically inclined Russian émigrés, and it was propagated through the so-called yellow press, the empire of sensationalistic and tawdry journalism led by William Randolph Hearst. The utopia in question is the story of the discovery of an enigmatic isolated land of philosophers and mystics hidden for centuries in the heart of Asia and visited only by a very select group of men. I consider this story as part of, in Ian Tyrrell’s words, “the peculiar tale of American Exceptionalism” and try to demonstrate that a contextualized reconstruction of this orientalist myth’s origins allows us to explore how (and by whom) American exceptionalism was narrativized and symbolized in the popular imagination from the mid-1920s to the early 1940s.
The real cause of his death in Moscow triggered an intense epistolary debate that has remained un... more The real cause of his death in Moscow triggered an intense epistolary debate that has remained unnoticed by Russian and Western scholars of suicide. The participants of this debate included Russian, Swedish, Finnish, Polish, and French writers, politicians, military men, conspirators, adventurists, courtiers, and historians, ranging from the Russian writer Karamzin to Napoleon, then First Consul of France, and Russian Emperor Paul I. The major question posed by this project is not why the son of the infamous Swedish politician decided to commit suicide, but rather how this suicide reveals a number of dramatic ideological, political, emotional, and literary conflicts and shifts in Russia, Sweden, and Europe as a whole on the eve of the Napoleonic Wars. Природа не может найти выход из запутанного лабиринта противоречивых сил, и человек умирает. Горе тому, кто будет смотреть на все это и скажет: «Глупая! Стоило ей выждать, чтобы время оказало свое действие, и отчаяние бы улеглось, нашелся бы другой, который бы ее утешил». Это все равно, что сказать: «Глупец! Умирает от горячки. Стоило ему подождать, чтобы силы его восстановились, соки в организме очистились, волнение в крови улеглось: все бы тогда наладилось, он жил бы и по сей день». И.-В. Гете. Страдания юного Вертера Чебутыкин: Пусть поплачут... (Тихо напевает.) Та-ра-рабумбия... сижу на тумбе я... Не все ли равно! А.П. Чехов. Три сестры
This study of Pushkin’s American reception takes as its point of departure a “technical” issue in... more This study of Pushkin’s American reception takes as its point of departure a “technical” issue in English translations of the bawdy narrative poem “Gavriiliada” (“The Gabrieliad,” 1821). How can the analysis of a translation error or the erroneous concretization of a “motor” image (Tynianov’s term) that is obscured in the source text help us to understand the original and its subsequent reception both in literature and in the visual arts? Our focus is on the scene in which Pushkin’s Satan is comically “mutilated” by his holy rival, as rendered in Walter Arndt’s (1916–2011) translation of the “Gavriiliada” and in the Japanese artist Kinuko Craft’s cycle of illustrations for that translation’s publication in the Christmas 1974 issue of Playboy. The essay demonstrates that this provocative publication— which was a trilateral collective effort of the male translator, female illustrator, and male art editor—does not “replace” (per Tynianov), “misread” (Harold Bloom), or “mutilate” (Nabokov) the original, but “fills in” and reappropriates Pushkin’s “ribald classic” by situating it in the aesthetic, visual and ideological context of an American men’s magazine with pretensions to style that reached the peak of its popularity in 1974. What is more, the sacrilegious and bawdy plot of the “Gavriiliada” became a literary expression of Playboy’s hedonistic religion.
This article reconstructs the literary and ideological genealogy of the "Ossetian myth" of Stalin... more This article reconstructs the literary and ideological genealogy of the "Ossetian myth" of Stalin's origins in Osip Mandelstam's poem, "We live without feeling the land beneath our feet…" (1933). It argues that in his verbal fight with Stalin the poet drew from Mikhail Dzhavakhishvili's allegorical novel Dzhako's Fugitives, written in the aftermath of the failed Georgian Uprising of 1924 and translated into Russian in 1929. The proposed textual and ideological relationship between Mandelstam's poem and Dzhako's Fugitives extends the list of the poem's sources and suggests that in his attack on the tyrant as a demonized "other," Mandelstam rhetorically aligned himself not only with the ambivalent tradition of Russian Romantic orientalism but also with the nationalist ressentiment myth of the Georgian intelligentsia.
The image of Pushkin's shining white teeth occupies an important place in the Russian cultural im... more The image of Pushkin's shining white teeth occupies an important place in the Russian cultural imagination (Veresaev, Tynianov, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, etc.). In his recollections about Pushkin, one of his acquaintances noted that the poet took special care of his teeth. This was an attempt to look like Lord Byron, whom he adored and meticulously imitated at that time. This article demonstrates that in European culture of the nineteenth century, Byron's teeth served as a synecdoche of the ideal Romantic body. Teeth were a telling feature of his iconic image, along with his Greek handsomeness, curly hair, long neck, small arms, proverbial lameness, asymmetrical eyes and the three wrinkles crossing his high forehead. In this cultural context, Byron's physical appearance manifested for Pushkin the Romantic conflict between light and darkness, body and soul-a conflict that was literally embodied in the English poet's controversial figure. The article argues that it is in this spiritual-odontological sense that Pushkin brushed his teeth à la Lord Byron. In other words, to become the Pushkin whom we know, the young poet tried to become Byron in flesh and spirit.
Reading Backwards. An Advanced Retrospective on Russian Literature. Ed. by Muireann Maguire and Timothy Langen
This chapter focuses on the striking final request in Nikolai Gogol's (in)famous "Testament" (184... more This chapter focuses on the striking final request in Nikolai Gogol's (in)famous "Testament" (1845), which opens his Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (1847), and which concerns the writer's prohibition of the reproduction and distribution of his portrait and expresses his passionate commandment that those who really love him should instead buy an engraving of Raphael's Transfiguration made by one of his friends. The paper offers a Bayardian interpretation of this request, based on inner, counter-chronological relationships between the two testaments - Raphael's last painting and Gogol's last will.
“Unearthing LOL: The Imaginary Adventures of a Slavicist in Leningrad” re-discovers and deciphers... more “Unearthing LOL: The Imaginary Adventures of a Slavicist in Leningrad” re-discovers and deciphers an unusual Nabokovian mystification (a series of “fictional essays”), created by the fake writer Larry Gregg as a tribute to VN. This playful literary phantasmagoria, informed by the author’s conversations with Soviet non-conformist intellectuals in Leningrad in the late 1960s, provides a glimpse into their spiritual (in both meanings of the word) culture. It also presents a mock commentary on American debates concerning Nabokov’s Commentary to Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin as “an encyclopedia of Russian life.”
The essay concerns the problem of “beyonsense” language in Mikhail Gasparov’s philological autobi... more The essay concerns the problem of “beyonsense” language in Mikhail Gasparov’s philological autobiography Jottings and Extracts. Our focus is on the “Native Amereican theme” in the book, which illustrates this problem well. The article argues that “beyonsense” for Gasparov is not simply a scholarly problem, but a key existential riddle. The linguistic and aesthetic problem fits into a broader theoretical and physical conception of the universe (the theory of the “quark,” popular in Gasparov’s intellectual circle), of world literature (Joyce), and of a philology that connects physics and literature as sciences of understanding.
ДОСТОЕВСКИЙ И МИРОВАЯ КУЛЬТУРА. Филологический журнал., 2020
The concept of romantic love directed towards a young bride is an ideological constr... more The concept of romantic love directed towards a young bride is an ideological construction in the history of European culture as manifested in works of Rousseau, Novalis, and Edgar Allan Poe. Any given author's modification of this form of love is an important indication of his religious, ethical, and aesthetic beliefs, which are in turn indicative of his cultural trend and which reflect the fears and ideals of the given author's contemporary society. Here, I will trace the transformation of this topic in the late work of Vasily Zhukovsky in its intersection with the Rousseauist topos of the last or "twilight" love. I will also analyze the transformation of the image of the girl-bride, previously canonized by the patriarch of Russian Romanticism, in the poetry of Pyotr Vyazemsky, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita - works which represent different literary-ideological programs which respond in different ways to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions (1769, published 1782).
The Whole World in a Book: Dictionaries in the 19th Century, 2019
"Ilya Vinitsky discusses Vladimir Dahl, whose religious passions and unbridled energy recall Webs... more "Ilya Vinitsky discusses Vladimir Dahl, whose religious passions and unbridled energy recall Webster. Dahl structured the entries in his Explanatory Dictionary as 'nests' and thereby worked to cast the Russian language as a kind of national epic. As a Spiritualist, he claimed the Word as a bridge between worlds..."
The First Serbian Female Writer: From the History of Nineteenth-Century Women's Literature, 2019
At the end of the nineteenth century the Romantic image of Eustahija Arsić (1776–1843) was introd... more At the end of the nineteenth century the Romantic image of Eustahija Arsić (1776–1843) was introduced to the Serbian national pantheon as the first Serbian woman writer and philosopher of the modern age. This image was based first and foremost on her book “Useful Thoughts on the Four Seasons” which appeared in Budim in 1816 under that author’s name. In the second half of the twentieth century several scholarly studies and a biography were devoted to Arsić. More recently this image has attracted the attention of scholars of women’s literature in South Slavic countries. These scholars note that her “Thoughts”, while influenced by Western pre-romantic (sentimentalist) literature, illuminate a wide range of fields, including philosophy, ethics, history, natural science, anatomy, physics, and religion, while at the same time they introduce the genre of the “feminist essay” into Serbian literature. The poems that are included in “Thoughts” appear in anthologies of Serbian literature as original poems by Arsić.
The present essay shows that the ideas about the originality, European erudition, cosmopolitanism, personal tone, philosophical gifts and poetic talent are highly exaggerated, and that the image of this author is a cultural construct that was created at a certain stage of the formation of Serbian national literature and was reconceived at a later time. The essay establishes that Arsić’s “Useful Thoughts” is a compilation of essays, tracts, and poetry that appeared in Russian journals from the late 1780s to the early 1810s. These works (including some by Nikolai Karamzin) were transferred into her book with minor orthographic and grammatical changes (e.g. masculine noun endings are changed to feminine ones) and without any indication of the source. The work of the compiler of “Thoughts” consisted solely in taking the sentimental texts of Russian male authors and attributing them to a pious female author.
The essay does not simply give the direct sources of this “Slavono-Russian” book of “the first Serbian woman writer” and describe the process of adaptation of the “foreign” as a stage of the national and literary self-affirmation of the “younger” Slavic culture, but it also offers material for a more general (philological and literary-critical) study of the “Slavono-Russian” period in the history of Serbian literature in particular and “pan-Slavic” pre-romanticism more generally. The case of Arsić is likewise interesting for a comparative analysis of the formation of national literary “pantheons” and for a gender history of Russian and other Slavic literatures.
ВРЕМЕННИК ПУШКИНСКОЙ КОМИССИИ Выпуск 33 СБОРНИК НАУЧНЫХ ТРУДОВ, 2019
Pushkin and the "Byron Paradox": The Psychological Self-Fashioning as a Cultural Problem
This ar... more Pushkin and the "Byron Paradox": The Psychological Self-Fashioning as a Cultural Problem
This article considers the cultural genealogy of Pushkin’s self-definition as a “great melancholic with happy moments of cheerful disposition” (Journey from Moscow to St. Petersburg). The author argues that this emotional mask referred the reader to Lord Byron’s psychological self-fashioning and the "history of melancholy" of the mid-1820s and 1830s. The “Byron paradox” (an inexplicable coexistence of deep melancholy with extreme cheerfulness), which was canonized by Thomas Moore in his influential biography of the poet, was perceived by Pushkin as an emotional key to his own persona and a template for the representation of his own emotional life and poetry.
Spiritualist sources of one of N.S. Leskov's major Christmas stories, "An Apparition in the Engin... more Spiritualist sources of one of N.S. Leskov's major Christmas stories, "An Apparition in the Engineers' Castle," considered in literary and historical contexts of the early 1880s.
The image of Grand Duchess Aleksandra Feodorovna, a daughter of the legendary Queen Louise of Pru... more The image of Grand Duchess Aleksandra Feodorovna, a daughter of the legendary Queen Louise of Prussia and Vassily Zhukovsky’s student since 1817, lies at the center of the poet’s diary entries and oeuvre during his stay in Berlin in the winter and spring of 1820–1821. His worship of the Grand Duchess assumes the form of a genuine ritual borrowed by him from a Prussian Romantic court tradition. Thus, on April 6, during vespers, the poet sees in the Grand Duchess’s hands a special prayer book, “her mother’s letters”, and admires the Grand Duchess’s “beautiful, touching thought” of turning her memories of the Queen “into a prayer, into the purification of the soul, into penitence”. In the present article, I identify the actual source and content of this sacred epistolary “prayer book” (a compilation of letters made by the Queen’s friend and biographer Carolina von Berg and entitled “The Heavenly Remembrances”) and examine the role of the Prussian national myth of Queen Louise in the formation of Zhukovsky’s transnational (German-Russian) poetic “religion.”
In this chapter, I focus on the famous description of Prince Andrei's dying dream, which Konstant... more In this chapter, I focus on the famous description of Prince Andrei's dying dream, which Konstantin Leont'ev once called, "a crowning achievement in the field of psychic analysis." Drawing on this scene, I illustrate the ideological context of and the means by which War and Peace approaches the theme of the evolution of the human soul, or, as the spiritualists of the time would have put it, the ascent of the soul to the next step on the ladder of existence.
The second episode of the first (and best) season of Amy Sherman-Palladino’s popular period drame... more The second episode of the first (and best) season of Amy Sherman-Palladino’s popular period dramedy series "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" (2017 – 2023) is entitled “Ya Shivu v Bolshom Dome Na Kholme” (i.e., “I live in a big house on a hill”; original air date: November 29, 2017). These are the words that the protagonist of the show, a brilliant stand-up comedian named Midge Maisel (née Miriam Weissman, played by Rachel Brosnahan), who just separated from her unfaithful and plain husband, pronounces in her very first public performance at the Gaslight Café in New York City. Where did she pick this phrase up? And why did she choose Russian language and literature in the first place? What was Bryn Mawr’s Russian program like in the early 1950s? I believe that these are not idle questions, since the answers to them will show us how historical this hysterical TV show is.
ТОЛКОВАНИЯ ПРАВДЫ В РУССКОЙ КУЛЬТУРЕ. Studia Russica Helsingiensia et Tartuensia XVII Под редакциейГеннадия Обатнина и Томи Хуттунена. , 2021
В биографиях (или биографических легендах) известных писателей часто встречаются сведения об их п... more В биографиях (или биографических легендах) известных писателей часто встречаются сведения об их первых словах и литературных (как правило, устных) опытах, сохранившиеся в памяти очевидцев и как бы предсказывающие великое будущее этих авторов. Разумеется, кардинальное отличие этих слов и произведений от последних написанных ими текстов заключается в том, что о первых мы знаем понаслышке, из воспоминаний самих авторов или их родных (нянька Державина, племянница Жуковского, сестра Пушкина, мать Блока), и никогда не можем быть уверенными, что они действительно существовали, а не были выдуманы post factum. Но именно такая мифологическая дубиальность этих «первоисточников» и делает их особенно привлекательными для исследователей. Поэты и свидетели могут врать, но даже выдуманные тексты, при правильном подходе и точно заданных вопросах, говорят правду о стоящих за ними культурных проблемах и коллизиях. Предлагаемая статья посвящена генезису и символическому значению одного такого «первого стихотворения» в поэтическом контексте и биографической легенде поэта.
* The article considers the key episode from Ivan Novikov’s popular biographical novel "Pushkin i... more * The article considers the key episode from Ivan Novikov’s popular biographical novel "Pushkin in the South" (1943-44), which portrays the vision of the poet in St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv. According to the novelist’s hypothesis, this vision is closely associated with Pushkin’s “secret love” and represents the main source of the poet’s erotic narrative poem "Gavriiliad." The article analyzes ideological implications of the scene and reconstructs the sources of this biographical mystification in the context of Novikov’s ouevre, Russian symbolism of the 1900s and Russian Pushkinism of the 1920s-1940s.
* В статье рассматривается кульминационный эпизод из известного романа писателя И.А. Новикова «Пушкин на юге» (1943-1944), изображающий видение поэта в киевском Софийском соборе, связанное, согласно гипотезе писателя, с «южной любовью» поэта и якобы ставшее источником его будущей поэмы «Гавриилиада». В статье исследуются идеологический подтекст и источники этой биографической мистификации в творчестве Новикова, русском символизме 1900-х годов и русской пушкинистике 1920-1940-х годов.
In this essay I explore the secret history of one of the modern world’s most influential messiani... more In this essay I explore the secret history of one of the modern world’s most influential messianic utopias, tracing its origins to the United States in the 1920s. This utopia was forged and promoted by a group of inventive and mystically inclined Russian émigrés, and it was propagated through the so-called yellow press, the empire of sensationalistic and tawdry journalism led by William Randolph Hearst. The utopia in question is the story of the discovery of an enigmatic isolated land of philosophers and mystics hidden for centuries in the heart of Asia and visited only by a very select group of men. I consider this story as part of, in Ian Tyrrell’s words, “the peculiar tale of American Exceptionalism” and try to demonstrate that a contextualized reconstruction of this orientalist myth’s origins allows us to explore how (and by whom) American exceptionalism was narrativized and symbolized in the popular imagination from the mid-1920s to the early 1940s.
The real cause of his death in Moscow triggered an intense epistolary debate that has remained un... more The real cause of his death in Moscow triggered an intense epistolary debate that has remained unnoticed by Russian and Western scholars of suicide. The participants of this debate included Russian, Swedish, Finnish, Polish, and French writers, politicians, military men, conspirators, adventurists, courtiers, and historians, ranging from the Russian writer Karamzin to Napoleon, then First Consul of France, and Russian Emperor Paul I. The major question posed by this project is not why the son of the infamous Swedish politician decided to commit suicide, but rather how this suicide reveals a number of dramatic ideological, political, emotional, and literary conflicts and shifts in Russia, Sweden, and Europe as a whole on the eve of the Napoleonic Wars. Природа не может найти выход из запутанного лабиринта противоречивых сил, и человек умирает. Горе тому, кто будет смотреть на все это и скажет: «Глупая! Стоило ей выждать, чтобы время оказало свое действие, и отчаяние бы улеглось, нашелся бы другой, который бы ее утешил». Это все равно, что сказать: «Глупец! Умирает от горячки. Стоило ему подождать, чтобы силы его восстановились, соки в организме очистились, волнение в крови улеглось: все бы тогда наладилось, он жил бы и по сей день». И.-В. Гете. Страдания юного Вертера Чебутыкин: Пусть поплачут... (Тихо напевает.) Та-ра-рабумбия... сижу на тумбе я... Не все ли равно! А.П. Чехов. Три сестры
This study of Pushkin’s American reception takes as its point of departure a “technical” issue in... more This study of Pushkin’s American reception takes as its point of departure a “technical” issue in English translations of the bawdy narrative poem “Gavriiliada” (“The Gabrieliad,” 1821). How can the analysis of a translation error or the erroneous concretization of a “motor” image (Tynianov’s term) that is obscured in the source text help us to understand the original and its subsequent reception both in literature and in the visual arts? Our focus is on the scene in which Pushkin’s Satan is comically “mutilated” by his holy rival, as rendered in Walter Arndt’s (1916–2011) translation of the “Gavriiliada” and in the Japanese artist Kinuko Craft’s cycle of illustrations for that translation’s publication in the Christmas 1974 issue of Playboy. The essay demonstrates that this provocative publication— which was a trilateral collective effort of the male translator, female illustrator, and male art editor—does not “replace” (per Tynianov), “misread” (Harold Bloom), or “mutilate” (Nabokov) the original, but “fills in” and reappropriates Pushkin’s “ribald classic” by situating it in the aesthetic, visual and ideological context of an American men’s magazine with pretensions to style that reached the peak of its popularity in 1974. What is more, the sacrilegious and bawdy plot of the “Gavriiliada” became a literary expression of Playboy’s hedonistic religion.
This article reconstructs the literary and ideological genealogy of the "Ossetian myth" of Stalin... more This article reconstructs the literary and ideological genealogy of the "Ossetian myth" of Stalin's origins in Osip Mandelstam's poem, "We live without feeling the land beneath our feet…" (1933). It argues that in his verbal fight with Stalin the poet drew from Mikhail Dzhavakhishvili's allegorical novel Dzhako's Fugitives, written in the aftermath of the failed Georgian Uprising of 1924 and translated into Russian in 1929. The proposed textual and ideological relationship between Mandelstam's poem and Dzhako's Fugitives extends the list of the poem's sources and suggests that in his attack on the tyrant as a demonized "other," Mandelstam rhetorically aligned himself not only with the ambivalent tradition of Russian Romantic orientalism but also with the nationalist ressentiment myth of the Georgian intelligentsia.
The image of Pushkin's shining white teeth occupies an important place in the Russian cultural im... more The image of Pushkin's shining white teeth occupies an important place in the Russian cultural imagination (Veresaev, Tynianov, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, etc.). In his recollections about Pushkin, one of his acquaintances noted that the poet took special care of his teeth. This was an attempt to look like Lord Byron, whom he adored and meticulously imitated at that time. This article demonstrates that in European culture of the nineteenth century, Byron's teeth served as a synecdoche of the ideal Romantic body. Teeth were a telling feature of his iconic image, along with his Greek handsomeness, curly hair, long neck, small arms, proverbial lameness, asymmetrical eyes and the three wrinkles crossing his high forehead. In this cultural context, Byron's physical appearance manifested for Pushkin the Romantic conflict between light and darkness, body and soul-a conflict that was literally embodied in the English poet's controversial figure. The article argues that it is in this spiritual-odontological sense that Pushkin brushed his teeth à la Lord Byron. In other words, to become the Pushkin whom we know, the young poet tried to become Byron in flesh and spirit.
Reading Backwards. An Advanced Retrospective on Russian Literature. Ed. by Muireann Maguire and Timothy Langen
This chapter focuses on the striking final request in Nikolai Gogol's (in)famous "Testament" (184... more This chapter focuses on the striking final request in Nikolai Gogol's (in)famous "Testament" (1845), which opens his Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (1847), and which concerns the writer's prohibition of the reproduction and distribution of his portrait and expresses his passionate commandment that those who really love him should instead buy an engraving of Raphael's Transfiguration made by one of his friends. The paper offers a Bayardian interpretation of this request, based on inner, counter-chronological relationships between the two testaments - Raphael's last painting and Gogol's last will.
“Unearthing LOL: The Imaginary Adventures of a Slavicist in Leningrad” re-discovers and deciphers... more “Unearthing LOL: The Imaginary Adventures of a Slavicist in Leningrad” re-discovers and deciphers an unusual Nabokovian mystification (a series of “fictional essays”), created by the fake writer Larry Gregg as a tribute to VN. This playful literary phantasmagoria, informed by the author’s conversations with Soviet non-conformist intellectuals in Leningrad in the late 1960s, provides a glimpse into their spiritual (in both meanings of the word) culture. It also presents a mock commentary on American debates concerning Nabokov’s Commentary to Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin as “an encyclopedia of Russian life.”
The essay concerns the problem of “beyonsense” language in Mikhail Gasparov’s philological autobi... more The essay concerns the problem of “beyonsense” language in Mikhail Gasparov’s philological autobiography Jottings and Extracts. Our focus is on the “Native Amereican theme” in the book, which illustrates this problem well. The article argues that “beyonsense” for Gasparov is not simply a scholarly problem, but a key existential riddle. The linguistic and aesthetic problem fits into a broader theoretical and physical conception of the universe (the theory of the “quark,” popular in Gasparov’s intellectual circle), of world literature (Joyce), and of a philology that connects physics and literature as sciences of understanding.
ДОСТОЕВСКИЙ И МИРОВАЯ КУЛЬТУРА. Филологический журнал., 2020
The concept of romantic love directed towards a young bride is an ideological constr... more The concept of romantic love directed towards a young bride is an ideological construction in the history of European culture as manifested in works of Rousseau, Novalis, and Edgar Allan Poe. Any given author's modification of this form of love is an important indication of his religious, ethical, and aesthetic beliefs, which are in turn indicative of his cultural trend and which reflect the fears and ideals of the given author's contemporary society. Here, I will trace the transformation of this topic in the late work of Vasily Zhukovsky in its intersection with the Rousseauist topos of the last or "twilight" love. I will also analyze the transformation of the image of the girl-bride, previously canonized by the patriarch of Russian Romanticism, in the poetry of Pyotr Vyazemsky, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita - works which represent different literary-ideological programs which respond in different ways to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions (1769, published 1782).
The Whole World in a Book: Dictionaries in the 19th Century, 2019
"Ilya Vinitsky discusses Vladimir Dahl, whose religious passions and unbridled energy recall Webs... more "Ilya Vinitsky discusses Vladimir Dahl, whose religious passions and unbridled energy recall Webster. Dahl structured the entries in his Explanatory Dictionary as 'nests' and thereby worked to cast the Russian language as a kind of national epic. As a Spiritualist, he claimed the Word as a bridge between worlds..."
The First Serbian Female Writer: From the History of Nineteenth-Century Women's Literature, 2019
At the end of the nineteenth century the Romantic image of Eustahija Arsić (1776–1843) was introd... more At the end of the nineteenth century the Romantic image of Eustahija Arsić (1776–1843) was introduced to the Serbian national pantheon as the first Serbian woman writer and philosopher of the modern age. This image was based first and foremost on her book “Useful Thoughts on the Four Seasons” which appeared in Budim in 1816 under that author’s name. In the second half of the twentieth century several scholarly studies and a biography were devoted to Arsić. More recently this image has attracted the attention of scholars of women’s literature in South Slavic countries. These scholars note that her “Thoughts”, while influenced by Western pre-romantic (sentimentalist) literature, illuminate a wide range of fields, including philosophy, ethics, history, natural science, anatomy, physics, and religion, while at the same time they introduce the genre of the “feminist essay” into Serbian literature. The poems that are included in “Thoughts” appear in anthologies of Serbian literature as original poems by Arsić.
The present essay shows that the ideas about the originality, European erudition, cosmopolitanism, personal tone, philosophical gifts and poetic talent are highly exaggerated, and that the image of this author is a cultural construct that was created at a certain stage of the formation of Serbian national literature and was reconceived at a later time. The essay establishes that Arsić’s “Useful Thoughts” is a compilation of essays, tracts, and poetry that appeared in Russian journals from the late 1780s to the early 1810s. These works (including some by Nikolai Karamzin) were transferred into her book with minor orthographic and grammatical changes (e.g. masculine noun endings are changed to feminine ones) and without any indication of the source. The work of the compiler of “Thoughts” consisted solely in taking the sentimental texts of Russian male authors and attributing them to a pious female author.
The essay does not simply give the direct sources of this “Slavono-Russian” book of “the first Serbian woman writer” and describe the process of adaptation of the “foreign” as a stage of the national and literary self-affirmation of the “younger” Slavic culture, but it also offers material for a more general (philological and literary-critical) study of the “Slavono-Russian” period in the history of Serbian literature in particular and “pan-Slavic” pre-romanticism more generally. The case of Arsić is likewise interesting for a comparative analysis of the formation of national literary “pantheons” and for a gender history of Russian and other Slavic literatures.
ВРЕМЕННИК ПУШКИНСКОЙ КОМИССИИ Выпуск 33 СБОРНИК НАУЧНЫХ ТРУДОВ, 2019
Pushkin and the "Byron Paradox": The Psychological Self-Fashioning as a Cultural Problem
This ar... more Pushkin and the "Byron Paradox": The Psychological Self-Fashioning as a Cultural Problem
This article considers the cultural genealogy of Pushkin’s self-definition as a “great melancholic with happy moments of cheerful disposition” (Journey from Moscow to St. Petersburg). The author argues that this emotional mask referred the reader to Lord Byron’s psychological self-fashioning and the "history of melancholy" of the mid-1820s and 1830s. The “Byron paradox” (an inexplicable coexistence of deep melancholy with extreme cheerfulness), which was canonized by Thomas Moore in his influential biography of the poet, was perceived by Pushkin as an emotional key to his own persona and a template for the representation of his own emotional life and poetry.
Spiritualist sources of one of N.S. Leskov's major Christmas stories, "An Apparition in the Engin... more Spiritualist sources of one of N.S. Leskov's major Christmas stories, "An Apparition in the Engineers' Castle," considered in literary and historical contexts of the early 1880s.
The image of Grand Duchess Aleksandra Feodorovna, a daughter of the legendary Queen Louise of Pru... more The image of Grand Duchess Aleksandra Feodorovna, a daughter of the legendary Queen Louise of Prussia and Vassily Zhukovsky’s student since 1817, lies at the center of the poet’s diary entries and oeuvre during his stay in Berlin in the winter and spring of 1820–1821. His worship of the Grand Duchess assumes the form of a genuine ritual borrowed by him from a Prussian Romantic court tradition. Thus, on April 6, during vespers, the poet sees in the Grand Duchess’s hands a special prayer book, “her mother’s letters”, and admires the Grand Duchess’s “beautiful, touching thought” of turning her memories of the Queen “into a prayer, into the purification of the soul, into penitence”. In the present article, I identify the actual source and content of this sacred epistolary “prayer book” (a compilation of letters made by the Queen’s friend and biographer Carolina von Berg and entitled “The Heavenly Remembrances”) and examine the role of the Prussian national myth of Queen Louise in the formation of Zhukovsky’s transnational (German-Russian) poetic “religion.”
In this chapter, I focus on the famous description of Prince Andrei's dying dream, which Konstant... more In this chapter, I focus on the famous description of Prince Andrei's dying dream, which Konstantin Leont'ev once called, "a crowning achievement in the field of psychic analysis." Drawing on this scene, I illustrate the ideological context of and the means by which War and Peace approaches the theme of the evolution of the human soul, or, as the spiritualists of the time would have put it, the ascent of the soul to the next step on the ladder of existence.
"On the whole, it makes sense to speak of two polar types of artistic spiritualism in literature ... more "On the whole, it makes sense to speak of two polar types of artistic spiritualism in literature (that is, two attempts at the ontology of the 'spirit of literature'): the idea of literature as a cunning and pernicious force ('the party of the devil," in William Blake's words) and ..................................."
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Papers by Ilya Vinitsky
post factum. Но именно такая мифологическая дубиальность этих «первоисточников» и делает их особенно привлекательными для исследователей. Поэты и свидетели могут врать, но даже выдуманные тексты, при правильном подходе и точно заданных вопросах, говорят правду о стоящих за ними культурных проблемах и коллизиях. Предлагаемая статья посвящена генезису и символическому значению одного такого «первого стихотворения» в поэтическом контексте и биографической легенде поэта.
* В статье рассматривается кульминационный эпизод из известного романа писателя И.А. Новикова «Пушкин на юге» (1943-1944), изображающий видение поэта в киевском Софийском соборе, связанное, согласно гипотезе писателя, с «южной любовью» поэта и якобы ставшее источником его будущей поэмы «Гавриилиада». В статье исследуются идеологический подтекст и источники этой биографической мистификации в творчестве Новикова, русском символизме 1900-х годов и русской пушкинистике 1920-1940-х годов.
Ключевые слова: биографический роман, Благовещение, Софийский собор, «Гавриилиада», символизм, «южная любовь» Пушкина, Вечная женственность, А.А. Блок, В.В. Вересаев, общество «Темный Пушкин», мистификация как прием
to explore how (and by whom) American exceptionalism was narrativized and symbolized in the popular imagination from the mid-1920s to the early
1940s.
1974 issue of Playboy. The essay demonstrates that this provocative publication— which was a trilateral collective effort of the male translator, female illustrator, and male art editor—does not “replace” (per Tynianov), “misread” (Harold Bloom), or “mutilate” (Nabokov) the original, but “fills in” and reappropriates Pushkin’s “ribald classic” by situating it in the aesthetic, visual and ideological context of an American men’s magazine with pretensions to style that reached the peak of its popularity in 1974. What is more, the sacrilegious and bawdy plot of the
“Gavriiliada” became a literary expression of Playboy’s hedonistic religion.
The present essay shows that the ideas about the originality, European erudition, cosmopolitanism, personal tone, philosophical gifts and poetic talent are highly exaggerated, and that the image of this author is a cultural construct that was created at a certain stage of the formation of Serbian national literature and was reconceived at a later time. The essay establishes that Arsić’s “Useful Thoughts” is a compilation of essays, tracts, and poetry that appeared in Russian journals from the late 1780s to the early 1810s. These works (including some by Nikolai Karamzin) were transferred into her book with minor orthographic and grammatical changes (e.g. masculine noun endings are changed to feminine ones) and without any indication of the source. The work of the compiler of “Thoughts” consisted solely in taking the sentimental texts of Russian male authors and attributing them to a pious female author.
The essay does not simply give the direct sources of this “Slavono-Russian” book of “the first Serbian woman writer” and describe the process of adaptation of the “foreign” as a stage of the national and literary self-affirmation of the “younger” Slavic culture, but it also offers material for a more general (philological and literary-critical) study of the “Slavono-Russian” period in the history of Serbian literature in particular and “pan-Slavic” pre-romanticism more generally. The case of Arsić is likewise interesting for a comparative analysis of the formation of national literary “pantheons” and for a gender history of Russian and other Slavic literatures.
This article considers the cultural genealogy of Pushkin’s self-definition as a “great melancholic with happy moments of cheerful disposition” (Journey from Moscow to St. Petersburg). The author argues that this emotional mask referred the reader to Lord Byron’s psychological self-fashioning and the "history of melancholy" of the mid-1820s and 1830s. The “Byron paradox” (an inexplicable coexistence of deep melancholy with extreme cheerfulness), which was canonized by Thomas Moore in his influential biography of the poet, was perceived by Pushkin as an emotional key to his own persona and a template for the representation of his own emotional life and poetry.
tradition. Thus, on April 6, during vespers, the poet sees in the Grand Duchess’s hands a special prayer book, “her mother’s letters”, and admires the Grand Duchess’s “beautiful, touching thought” of turning her memories of the Queen “into a prayer, into the purification of the soul, into penitence”. In the present article, I identify the actual source and content of this sacred epistolary “prayer book” (a compilation of letters made by the Queen’s friend and biographer Carolina von Berg and entitled “The Heavenly Remembrances”) and examine the role of the Prussian national myth of Queen Louise in the formation of Zhukovsky’s transnational (German-Russian)
poetic “religion.”
post factum. Но именно такая мифологическая дубиальность этих «первоисточников» и делает их особенно привлекательными для исследователей. Поэты и свидетели могут врать, но даже выдуманные тексты, при правильном подходе и точно заданных вопросах, говорят правду о стоящих за ними культурных проблемах и коллизиях. Предлагаемая статья посвящена генезису и символическому значению одного такого «первого стихотворения» в поэтическом контексте и биографической легенде поэта.
* В статье рассматривается кульминационный эпизод из известного романа писателя И.А. Новикова «Пушкин на юге» (1943-1944), изображающий видение поэта в киевском Софийском соборе, связанное, согласно гипотезе писателя, с «южной любовью» поэта и якобы ставшее источником его будущей поэмы «Гавриилиада». В статье исследуются идеологический подтекст и источники этой биографической мистификации в творчестве Новикова, русском символизме 1900-х годов и русской пушкинистике 1920-1940-х годов.
Ключевые слова: биографический роман, Благовещение, Софийский собор, «Гавриилиада», символизм, «южная любовь» Пушкина, Вечная женственность, А.А. Блок, В.В. Вересаев, общество «Темный Пушкин», мистификация как прием
to explore how (and by whom) American exceptionalism was narrativized and symbolized in the popular imagination from the mid-1920s to the early
1940s.
1974 issue of Playboy. The essay demonstrates that this provocative publication— which was a trilateral collective effort of the male translator, female illustrator, and male art editor—does not “replace” (per Tynianov), “misread” (Harold Bloom), or “mutilate” (Nabokov) the original, but “fills in” and reappropriates Pushkin’s “ribald classic” by situating it in the aesthetic, visual and ideological context of an American men’s magazine with pretensions to style that reached the peak of its popularity in 1974. What is more, the sacrilegious and bawdy plot of the
“Gavriiliada” became a literary expression of Playboy’s hedonistic religion.
The present essay shows that the ideas about the originality, European erudition, cosmopolitanism, personal tone, philosophical gifts and poetic talent are highly exaggerated, and that the image of this author is a cultural construct that was created at a certain stage of the formation of Serbian national literature and was reconceived at a later time. The essay establishes that Arsić’s “Useful Thoughts” is a compilation of essays, tracts, and poetry that appeared in Russian journals from the late 1780s to the early 1810s. These works (including some by Nikolai Karamzin) were transferred into her book with minor orthographic and grammatical changes (e.g. masculine noun endings are changed to feminine ones) and without any indication of the source. The work of the compiler of “Thoughts” consisted solely in taking the sentimental texts of Russian male authors and attributing them to a pious female author.
The essay does not simply give the direct sources of this “Slavono-Russian” book of “the first Serbian woman writer” and describe the process of adaptation of the “foreign” as a stage of the national and literary self-affirmation of the “younger” Slavic culture, but it also offers material for a more general (philological and literary-critical) study of the “Slavono-Russian” period in the history of Serbian literature in particular and “pan-Slavic” pre-romanticism more generally. The case of Arsić is likewise interesting for a comparative analysis of the formation of national literary “pantheons” and for a gender history of Russian and other Slavic literatures.
This article considers the cultural genealogy of Pushkin’s self-definition as a “great melancholic with happy moments of cheerful disposition” (Journey from Moscow to St. Petersburg). The author argues that this emotional mask referred the reader to Lord Byron’s psychological self-fashioning and the "history of melancholy" of the mid-1820s and 1830s. The “Byron paradox” (an inexplicable coexistence of deep melancholy with extreme cheerfulness), which was canonized by Thomas Moore in his influential biography of the poet, was perceived by Pushkin as an emotional key to his own persona and a template for the representation of his own emotional life and poetry.
tradition. Thus, on April 6, during vespers, the poet sees in the Grand Duchess’s hands a special prayer book, “her mother’s letters”, and admires the Grand Duchess’s “beautiful, touching thought” of turning her memories of the Queen “into a prayer, into the purification of the soul, into penitence”. In the present article, I identify the actual source and content of this sacred epistolary “prayer book” (a compilation of letters made by the Queen’s friend and biographer Carolina von Berg and entitled “The Heavenly Remembrances”) and examine the role of the Prussian national myth of Queen Louise in the formation of Zhukovsky’s transnational (German-Russian)
poetic “religion.”