Lyricism and Philosophy in Brodsky's Elegiac Verse

Slavic Review ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 591-609
Author(s):  
Aaron Beaver
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
Osip Mandel'shtam ◽  
Silver Age ◽  
Loved One ◽  
Central Thesis ◽  
Joseph Brodsky ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Marina Tsvetaeva ◽  
Poetic Practice ◽  
Point Of Departure

In this article Aaron Beaver analyzes two elegies written by Joseph Brodsky—one for his father (“Pamiati ottsa: Avstraliia“) and one for his mother (“Mysl’ o tebe udaliaetsia …“). The point of departure is Brodsky's appropriation of the genre from his Silver Age predecessors (Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandel'shtam, Marina Tsvetaeva), as made evident in a number of Brodsky's well-known essays. Beaver's central thesis is that Brodsky reshapes the elegy by centering it not on the death of the loved one but on time. Brodsky is inspired in this endeavor by his Silver Age forebears, but he extends their poetic practice into more philosophical territory. Specifically, close reading of Brodsky's two elegies exposes a model of time consistent with the temporal idealism elaborated by Jean- Paul Sartre inBeing and Nothingness.Based on this exegesis Beaver ventures to generalize about the nature of lyricism in Brodsky's verse, arguing that it is inseparable from his philosophical assumptions.

Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “Hypertext” About the Female Warrior. Article I

2021 ◽  
pp. 18-38
Author(s):  
Veronika B. Zuseva-Ozkan ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Male Character ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
Silver Age ◽  
Woman Warrior ◽  
Horse Riding ◽  
Marina Tsvetaeva ◽  
Rural World ◽  
Physical Abilities ◽  
The Woman Warrior

This article deals with Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “hypertext” about the female warrior, i.e. with the totality of her manifestations in the works of the writer and the semantic continuum that they form. This type of character is defined as a heroine with outstanding physical abilities (such as strength, horse-riding and shooting skills, etc. - and also great beauty), a strong, proud personality, persistence, ability to fight back, determination to gain the upper hand, to win at all costs - especially in the game of power and armed conflict with the male character that is in love with the heroine and/or is loved by her. The author identifies Zamyatin’s works in which the woman warrior appears, analyzes the plot functions and the characteristic motif complex associated with this image. The author demonstrates that the female warrior represents a very frequent type of heroine in Zamyatin’s works: the image appears at the beginning of his career as a writer, in the short story “Kryazhi” (1915), and accompanies him until the end, manifesting itself in the screenplays written in the 1930s. The author reveals that a specific variant of the plot featuring the female warrior is implemented in Zamyatin’s works: the heroine is shown as equal in strength with the male character, and the test of power happens, in particular in the form of a literal duel. Whatever its outcome is and whoever wins, the storyline usually finishes with the death of one or both characters - either during the combat or as its remote consequence. While the type of the plot is usually the same, the female character itself shows a wide variety: there are Valkyrie-like heroines (Ildegonda in the play Atilla), polenitsas from Russian bylina songs (such as Nastasya Mikulishna in the screenplay “Dobrynya” or Marya in “Kryazhi”), Mongolian women warriors (Borte, Ulek), and even contemporary heroines of this type (Zinaida in the screenplay “The God of Dance”). Usually such characters are attributed in Zamyatin to the legendary epic past or rooted in “folk archaics”; they belong to the rural world, to the Russian village. The constant topoi and the evolution of the female warrior in Zamyatin’s artistic works are revealed; in particular, such motifs as love-hate, test of strength (in the form of a duel or a competition), mutual intendedness of two “strong ones” and their tragic non-encounter are considered. The author notes that the supervalue of the female warriors in Zamyatin’s works is love, while for some other writers of the Silver Age, for instance, for Marina Tsvetaeva or Lyubov Stolitsa, such values were female agency, independence, control over one’s life, freedom, or even spiritual salvation. The play Atilla and its heroine Ildegonda are analyzed in this article in particular detail; the sources of this image are revealed.

'Il aurait peut-être préféré avoir une autre fille': Paternal Mourning in the Work of Annie Ernaux

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-122
Author(s):  
Máire Áine Ní Mhainnín
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
Loved One ◽  
Freudian Theory ◽  
Death Of A Child ◽  
Annie Ernaux ◽  
P 16 ◽  
Paternal Experience

Annie Ernaux discovered, at the age of ten, that her sister, Ginette Marie Thérèse Duchesne, had died of diphtheria in 1938, two years prior to Ernaux's birth. Ernaux relates the circumstances of her sister's death and parents' grief in Une femme and in several subsequent texts, culminating in L'Autre fille, a letter addressed to her deceased sister. In the latter text, Ernaux poignantly describes her parents' grief and this article examines Ernaux's perception of her father's mourning processes as depicted across a range of texts. The analysis of Ernaux's writing is informed by Freudian concepts of mourning and grief. According to Freudian theory, when one enters the melancholic stage of grieving, the lost loved one causes a diminishment of the ego. Ginette's death was clearly a profound loss for her father. Ernaux's mother, Blanche, recalls Alphonse Duchesne's reaction: 'mon mari était fou quand il t'a trouvée morte en rentrant de son travail.' (L'Autre fille, p. 16). It is significant, therefore, to note that Alphonse Duchesne, as described by Ernaux, particularly in La Place and La Honte, displays many of the behavioural elements which Freud considered melancholic including a decrease in self-regard – as can be seen through many examples in Ernaux's corpus of her father's abasement, humiliation and emasculation. Our reading of Ernaux's texts will be enhanced by Cathy Caruth's conception of trauma as 'the story of a wound that cries out'. By combining both of these approaches – the melancholia of grief and the trauma of loss – this article engages in a close reading of paternal experience of the death of a child, as related by Ernaux, with a focus on how this impacts on both the physiological and physical self.

REHABILITATING THE POLITICIAN ON A NEGLECTED GENRE IN POLITICAL THEORIZING

2002 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
KARI PALONEN
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Change ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Point Of Departure

The relatively rare defences of politicians, responding to commonplace denounciations, form a neglected genre of political theorizing. Max Weber's famous ‘Politik als Beruf’ (1919) serves here as a point of departure for the analysis of the examples of Louis Barthou, F.C. Oliver, J.D.B. Miller and Jean-Paul Sartre. The rehabilitation signifies a conceptual change through rhetorical redescription, as suggested by Quentin Skinner.

Jean-Paul Sartre

2018 ◽  
pp. 34-41
Author(s):  
Anthony Hatzimoysis
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Behavioral Patterns ◽  
Therapeutic Method ◽  
Reflective Awareness ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
Phenomenological Conception ◽  
Existential Psychoanalysis

Sartre articulated a phenomenological conception the “human being-in-situation,” which forms the ontological background of a therapeutic method that he called “existential psychoanalysis.” The overall principle of existential psychoanalysis is that each agent is a totality and not a collection, and thus she expresses herself even in the most insignificant or superficial of her behaviors; its goal is to decode and interpret the behavioral patterns, so as to articulate them conceptually; its point of departure is the pre-reflective awareness of lived experience; and its overall goal is to reach not some past psychic complex, but the choice that renders meaningful how one lives—so that the analysand achieves authenticity, owning up to the projects through which she, as a situated freedom, is making herself into the person she is.

Through the Lens of Loss: Marina Tsvetaeva's Elegiac Photo-Poetics

Slavic Review ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 73 (01) ◽  
pp. 1-35
Author(s):  
Molly Thomasy Blasing
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Visual World ◽  
Secondary Importance ◽  
Marina Tsvetaeva ◽  
Poetic Practice ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
Photographic Imagery

Marina Tsvetaeva is often described as a poet of keen aural sensibilities, while the visual world has been thought to be of secondary importance to her. This study of the influence of photography on Tsvetaeva's poetic writing contributes new evidence of the role of visual culture in her creative world. In detailing Tsvetaeva's experiences with the material and metaphysical properties of photographic imagery, Molly Thomasy Blasing argues that photography played a significant role in shaping the poet's elegiac writings on death, loss, and separation. The article makes available a number of previously unpublished archival photographs taken by Tsvetaeva—images that are directly linked to her cycle of poems dedicated to Nikolai Gronskii, Nadgrobie. Blasing contextualizes this discovery within a network of other photo-poetic encounters in Tsvetaeva's life and works, revealing the extent to which the poet's thinking about photography relates to the goals of her poetic practice.

Mandel'shtam's Farewell to Marina Tsvetaeva: “Ne veria voskresen'ia chudu”

Slavic Review ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 266-280 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ieva Vitins
Keyword(s):  
Osip Mandel'shtam ◽  
Marina Tsvetaeva ◽  
Boris Godunov ◽  
The City

… tak znai zhe: tvoi Dmitrii Davno pogib, zaryt — i ne voskresnet.A. S. Pushkin, Boris Godunov“Ne veria voskresen'ia chudu” is the last of the three poems that Osip Mandel'shtam addressed to Marina Tsvetaeva. The poets had met briefly in Koktebel' in the summer of 1915; they were reintroduced that December in Petrograd, and soon after Mandel'shtam made the first of several visits to Tsvetaeva in Moscow. He responded to her gift of the city, “Iz ruk moikh — nerukotvornyi grad/ Primi, moi strannyi, moi prekrasnyi brat” and to the affection of her “Otkuda takaia nezhnost'” with “V raznogolositse devicheskogo khora,” a celebration of his companion against the wondrously integrated Russo-Italian backdrop of the old capital. But in his next poem to her, “Na rozval'niakh ulozhennykh solomoi,” a sinister note is heard that relates their friendship to a darker side of Moscow's past, to Tsvetaeva's identification with Marina Mnishek and to his own confused identity at her side.

scholarly journals Die kerk en sy mag in Openbaring 11

2012 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pieter G.R. De Villiers
Keyword(s):  
Early Christianity ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Book Of Revelation ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
Firm Evidence ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
The Church ◽  
And Task

The church and power in Revelation 11. The article discusses the notion of power in the episode of the two witnesses in Revelation 11:4–6 as a point of departure for a reflection on power in early Christian documents. It also aims to determine the meaning of power in terms of a close reading of a specific text so that discussions about its nature and about power in Biblical texts can be rooted in firm evidence. This evidence should then, at later stages be further developed with the aid of theoretical models and insights about power. In a first section power in Revelation 11:4−6 is described in terms of the identity and task of the witnesses and in terms of its divine origins, followed in a second part by reflection on the direct references to their power. Special attention is given to some seminal issues about power, namely, its relationship with truth and prophecy, its divine origins, the misuse of power, violence as a response to evil and, finally, its role in the Book of Revelation and Early Christianity.

SIGMUND FREUD, SUBLIMATION, AND THE RUSSIAN SILVER AGE

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 443-470
Author(s):  
ANA SILJAK
Keyword(s):  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Da Vinci ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Psychological Theory ◽  
Leonardo Da Vinci ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Philosophical Perspective ◽  
Silver Age ◽  
Religious Understanding

Freud's most sustained account of the power of sexual sublimation to fuel scientific and artistic genius is found in hisLeonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, published in 1910. This article argues that Freud chose Leonardo as the perfect example of sublimation because of his close reading of the then quite popular historical novelLeonardo da Vinci, written by a poet and author of the Russian Silver Age, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii. The central point of Freud's theory of sublimation, that sexuality is at the root of human knowledge and creativity, is developed by Merezhkovskii, but from the religious-philosophical perspective of Silver Age symbolism. Freudian sublimation, as a psychological theory, was developed in dialogue with a Russian religious understanding of Eros and its power. Freud essentially rewrote Merezhkovskii's story of Leonardo, reducing Merezhkovskii's philosophy of Eros to the more “scientifically” grounded theory of sexual sublimation.

Marina Tsvetaeva et Lev Chestov

2021 ◽  
pp. 203-214
Author(s):  
Olga Tabachnikova
Keyword(s):  
Joseph Brodsky ◽  
Marina Tsvetaeva ◽  
De Se

Cet article présente une exploration d’une proximité étroite entre les visions du monde de Marina Tsvetaeva et Lev Chestov et de leur philosophie de base manifestée dans leur créativité poétique et philosophique. Nous analysons cette proximité en termes de philosophie du refus et de philosophie de la tragédie, alors que l’ordre mondial existant est passionnément et catégoriquement rejeté. Ce niveau de refus et de non-conformité semble remarquable dans le contexte de la tradition culturelle russe de la compassion, de la réconciliation tragique et de la gratitude absolue, du refus en termes éthiques plutôt qu’esthétiques (ce que le romantisme russe démontre incontestablement). Si on la juge par des mesures ordinaires, une telle attitude se démarque et semble effrayante, même à l’intérieur du fameux maximalisme de la culture russe. On constate qu’il y a deux niveaux où la vie et l’héritage de Tsvetaeva peuvent être appréciés, un niveau quotidien et un niveau poétique. Il faut souligner la nécessité de se souvenir toujours de l’énorme prix existentiel que Tsvetaeva a payé pour son génie poétique non seulement par sa mort tragique, mais aussi par tous les jours de sa vie, quand elle se soumettait constamment à un équivalent du Jugement Dernier, si l’on cite Joseph Brodsky.

Sartre on Affectivity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Hatzimoysis
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
Affective Experience ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
The World ◽  
Phenomenological Account

In the Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939) Jean-Paul Sartre presents an original account of emotional phenomena. His account focuses on the phenomenology of affectivity, a topic that is taken up in a section of The Imaginary (1940), in which he explores the relation between the subjective and objective aspects of affective experience. This chapter offers a close reading of the section from The Imaginary with a view to laying out clearly its proposed analysis of feelings, and places that analysis in the context of Sartre’s theory of our conscious engagement with the world. The chapter concludes with some critical remarks about the coherence of Sartre’s phenomenological account of emotions.

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