Buddhism and Biography

The Buddhist religion has a long and rich tradition of biographical literature. This literature has functioned to unify distinct and often contradictory elements of Buddhist ritual, practice, and doctrine, adjusting these elements to specific historical situations. Scholarship on the function of literary characters in making narrative worlds coherent supports this argument: when readers engage characters, they draw together textual and non-textual data to construct beings that are similar to themselves. This connection of a specific situation with a larger whole, a connection that is at the same time an organization, can be observed in how Buddhist biographies are built. Biographies of Shakyamuni, for example, contain many traces of changes motivated by local conditions. The body of Shakyamuni is used to authorize these changes: the local is situated at the heart of Buddhism. Biographies of Chinese Buddhist saints attest to the same process, as can be seen in the shifting representation of Indian saints in China or the literary transformations of the Patriarchs of the Chan school. While these changing representations reflect changes in historical Buddhist communities, they can also produce attitudes and regulate behaviors. The debate on the portrayal and effects of women and animals in Indian Buddhist texts provides an illustration of this, as does scholarship on how saintly ideals regulate behavior. The case of Buddhist autobiography, a genre at times so closely connected to biography that it is nearly indistinguishable from it, provides a final example of how identity is structured in Buddhist biography.

Biography as intertext in the lyrics of Volodymyr Bazylevsky: features of artistic interpretation

The article analyzes the poetic interpretation of biographical elements in the works of Volodymyr Bazylevsky. It is noted that the poet follows the modernist tradition to comprehend the biographies of the characters of world history and culture (real names) in order to turn them into precedent figures. The material for such literary transformations is not only real facts from biographies, but also legends and myths that exist in the space of culture. V. Bazylevsky shows interest in world history in general, but his focus is shifted to Ukrainian (Prince Svyatoslav, I. Nechuy-Levytsky, P. Kulish). The choice of biographical material is influenced by a special - "tragically optimistic" - the author's perception of reality, his attitude to tradition, the consistency of life and ideological position of the real-historical character with the problems of today. V. Bazylevsky tends to actualize existential situations, such as "choice", "death", "loneliness", giving biographies of a new interpretation as a synthesis of objective and subjective factors. In this way, V. Bazylevsky creates his own catalog of moral and aesthetic values ​​and positive characters, whose lives are a benchmark for contemporaries. It is generalized that biographical elements in V. Bazylevsky's lyrical texts appear as a part of the great author's myth about the Personality and outline the perspective of research of autobiographical elements as a part of the author's mythology of the Poet.

“Let Rome in Tiber melt”: Hermaphroditic Transformation in Antonius and Antony and Cleopatra

This essay uses Ovid’s tale of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus as a vehicle for considering the connections between the theme of gender fluidity and the practice of literary transformations in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and Mary Sidney Herbert’s translation of Robert Garnier’s Antonius. The characters in both versions demonstrate the desire for and resistance to transformation, presenting a worldview that parallels Hermaphroditus’s own contradictory hatred of his disempowering metamorphosis and his prayer for anyone who bathes in Salmacis’s fountain to be similarly changed. This contradictory interpretation of the union of opposites serves as a lens through which to understand both plays, which fluctuate between anxieties over female power and recognition of the loss of clear markers distinguishing men and women, Rome and Egypt, conqueror and conquered, original and imitation. The two plays finally reject notions of masculine rigidity in favor of a more flexible view of gender and artistic creativity.

Eckensteher

This article explores the complex origins of the literary figure ‘Berliner Eckensteher’ around 1830. It analyses the sources of this figure in European visual and textual culture, its literary transformations and its different meanings. On the one hand, these figures were conceived as typical ‘biedermeierlich’, that is, as conforming to the social order, as drunken, dumb and harmless. On the other hand, and typical ‘vormärzlich’, they stood also for subversive protest against social repression and increasingly for the fight against reactionary politics. But: did Berlin ‘Eckensteher’ ever actually exist?