The paper analyzes the way both Poe and Dostoyevsky used the figure of the devil to create the atmosphere of the fantastic. Poe’s tales “Bon-Bon,” “Never Bet the Devil Your Head,” and “The Devil in the Belfry,” and Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (in particular, the chapter “The Devil. The Nightmare of Ivan Fyodorovich”) reveal similarities in their poetical principles. The paper also claims that both authors introduced the figure of the devil for the purposes of literary polemics.
Keywords: Poe, Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, the fantastic, the figure of the devil, Transcendentalists, literary polemics.
Irina Golovacheva
The Battle with the Alter Ego: From Poe to Henry James
Summary: The essay offers a detailed comparative approach to three classical texts with a Doppelgänger motif: E.A. Poe’s “William Wilson,” Dostoevsky’s “The Double,” and “The Jolly Corner” by Henry James. It claims that Dostoevsky’s story, as well as the one by Poe, may have influenced “The Jolly Corner.” The poetic potential of the Doppelgänger imagery is explored as a cluster of “genetic traits” passed on as a literary heritage. All three texts demonstrate a high potential of the “double” imagery intended to reveal the basic existential distrust for the integrity of the ego since in them it is being taken over by the alter ego.
Keywords: Poe, Dostoyevsky, Henry James, Stevenson, Doppelgänger, de Vogüé, intertextual links, battle with the alter ego.
Elina Absalyamova
The Languages of the Odd: Terror, Laughter, and Creativity
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.
Sergey Fokine
“American Genius” in the Light of the Judgments of Barbey d’Aurevilly, Baudelaire, and Dostoevsky
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