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
“Their Baudelaire”: Baudelaire’s Reception by Russian Immigrants of the First Wave. Berberova, Adamovich, Poplavsky
Summary: The article focuses on two major tendencies of Baudelaire’s reception in Russian immigration circles of the 1920 – 1930s. The first one traditionally interprets the French poet as a decadent (cf. Nina Berberova’s paper at the French-Russian studio in Paris) whereas the second one tries to avoid clichés and develops a new look on Baudelaire and French symbolism in general (Georgij Adamovich, Boris Poplavsky). For the latter, Baudelaire is interesting not by himself but mainly as a figure of literary comparison serving to debunk stereotypes about certain Russian poets or writers such as Nekrasov.
Keywords: Baudelaire, decadence, symbolism, Russian immigration, Berberova, Adamovich, Poplavsky, Nekrasov.
Andrea Schellino
Poe, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky: “Dangerous Liaisons” in the Light of the Decadence Theory of Late Nietzsche
Summary: The essay examines Nietzsche’s response to the work of Baudelaire as well as to that of Dostoevsky and Poe. The research focuses on Cosmopolis, the ideal city of a decadent artist, and on the concept of decadence in Nietzsche’s late drafts and works. Since Nietzsche imagined himself to be the very consciousness of European decadence, the latter concept corresponds to his idea of the “autumnal” city and “autumnal” man.
Keywords: Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, decadence, nihilism, philosophy, literature, the image of the city.
Andrey Astvatsaturov
Baudelaire’s Paris in T.S. Eliot and Henry Miller
Summary: The paper discusses how Baudelaire’s “Parisian text” was incorporated within the work of two major American Modernists: T.S. Eliot and Henry Miller. Despite the many differences in their sensibility and aesthetics, Eliot and Miller employ Baudelairean imagery as they create their urban landscapes, sometimes following and developing the Baudelairean line, sometimes entering into polemics with the French author. Eliot carries out his dialogue with Baudelaire in early poems and in The Waste Land while Baudelairean images dominate Miller’s “Parisian novel” Tropic of Cancer.
Keywords: Baudelaire, Parisian text, Henry Miller, T.S. Eliot, Modernism, urban imagery.
Maria Nadyarnykh
“Sinister List”: Poe, Baudelaire, and Dostoevsky. In the World of Words and Innuendos of Borges
Summary: The essay focuses on potential ways and meanings of combining the texts and the fates of Poe, Baudelaire, and Dostoevsky in tales, essays, and interviews by Jorge Luis Borges. Borges brings these three names together in accordance with the Neoclassicist principle of classification and his concept of the writer’s fate against the context of modern obsession with literature.
Keywords: Poe, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, Borges, writing and reading, literary invention, classification, obsession with literature.
Tatiana Boborykina
Focus on Infinity: Poe, Baudelaire, and Dostoevsky in the Artistic Perspective of Eisenstein
Summary: The essay analyzes interrelations between Poe, Baudelaire and Dostoevsky and gives an overview of Eisenstein’s works touching on these three writers. It describes in more detail Eisenstein’s little-known sketch “‘The Psychology of Composition’ by Edgar Poe” where the famous film director advances a paradoxical treatment of Poe’s artistic method.
Keywords: Poe, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, Eisenstein, “The Philosophy of Composition.”
Fyodor Dvinyatin
Poe, Baudelaire, and Dostoevsky in the Works of Roman Jacobson
Summary: In his essays and notes on literary history and poetics, Roman Jacobson brings together the names of Poe and Baudelaire in relation to their statements about the role of structure, symmetry, and “mathematics” in the poetical text, and touches on the names of Baudelaire and Dostoevsky in the context of his reflection on the interrelation of Romanticism and Realism. Analysis of these references allows the treatment of a number of related topics, such as the sources of Jacobson’s ideas about Classicism (vs Romanticism) in Pushkin; metaphor and metonymy as two basic and polar tropes; the significance of references to Dostoevsky in the discussion of “exaggerations” in art; the relationship between interrelation of grammar and lexical analysis in Jacobson’s approach to the literary text; and interrelation of the Enlightenment and Romantic heritage in Jacobson’s structural poetics.
Key words: Poe, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, Roman Jacobson, poetics, textual analysis, history of poetics, tropes, grammar of poetry, Classicism, Romanticism, Realism.
List of contributors
Elina Absalyamova specializes in nineteenth-century French literature and comparative studies. Serving as Associate Professor at Paris 13 University, her research focuses on the problems of genre typology (literary criticism, essay, novel, (auto)biography), the poetics and pragmatics of periodicals, and adaptations of literary works in art and the media. She has published, inter alia, articles on settings of Baudelaire and other French poets by Russian composers (Moscow SUP, 2011) and on comic versions of Poe’s works (7.KFRV Essen, 2011; The Edgar Allan Poe Review, vol. 15.1).
elina.absalyamova@univ-paris13.fr.
Alexey Astvatsaturov (1945 – 2015) was Professor at the University of Foreign Languages (St. Petersburg). He lectured on philosophy, cultural studies, the history of foreign literatures, German Romanticism, and Goethe, and wrote numerous essays on classical German literature in journals and collections, notably: “Goethe and the World of Play” in Goethe. Life. Traditions (St. Petersburg, 2002. Pp. 4 – 34), “Three Nietzsche’s Great Books” in Friedrich Nietzsche. Poems. Philosophical Fiction (St. Petersburg, 1993. Pp. 22 – 60), etc. He is the author of Poetry. Philosophy. Play (Gelikon Plus, 2010).
Andrey Astvatsaturov is a writer, literary historian, specialist in English and American literature. He is Interim Head of the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Field of Languages and Literature at St. Petersburg State University. He is the author of three monographs: T.S. Eliot and His Poem The Waste Land (St. Petersburg SUP), The Phenomenology of Text: Play and Repression (NLO, 2007), and Henry Miller and the Parisian Trilogy (NLO, 2010). He wrote a collection of literary essays Salinger and Not Only (AST, 2015) as well as over 100 scholarly essays.
astvatsa@yandex.ru.
Tatiana Boborykina is Associate Professor of the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Field of Languages and Literature at St. Petersburg State University. Her research interests include literature, theatre, cinematography, choreography, visual and plastic metaphors, and translation of literature into the languages of cinema and ballet.
t.boborykina@spbu.ru.
Fyodor Dvinyatin specializes in the history of Russian language, linguistic and structural poetics, Russian literature, and the history of linguistics. He works as Associate Professor at St. Petersburg State University, at the Department of Russian Language and at the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Field of Languages and Literature. He has contributed over twenty articles to Russian Language. School Encyclopedia (St. Petersburg SUP, 2013; 2015). He is the author of over eighty essays in such journals as Russian Literature, NLO, and Slovene and in collections published by NLO, Nauka, Yaziki russkoi kulturi, Indrik, Elseveir and others.
feodvin@yahoo.com.
Tim Farrant is Reader in Nineteenth-Century French Literature at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor in French at Pembroke College, Oxford. His publications include Balzac’s Shorter Fictions: Genesis and Genre (Oxford UP, 2002), an Introduction to Nineteenth-Century French Literature (Duckworth, 2007), and an Introduction to Three novels by Jules Verne (Everyman, 2013), as well as numerous articles on nineteenth-century French literature and culture. He is currently preparing a number of longer studies on nineteenth-century short fiction.
tim.farrant@pmb.ox.ac.uk.
Sergey Fokine is a historian of ideas, specialist in French literature and philosophy, philologist, and translator. He is Head of the Department of Romance Languages and Translation at Saint Petersburg State University of Economics and Professor at the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Field of Literature and Languages, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences, St. Petersburg State University. His five monographs include “Russian idea” in the Twentieth-Century French Literature (St. Petersburg SUP, 2003), Passages: Essay on Baudelaire (MACHINA, 2011), and Figures of Dostoevsky in the Twentieth-Century French Literature