The Imperial Sublime examines the rise of the Russian empire as a literary theme simultaneous with the evolution of Russian poetry between the 1730s and 1840—the century during which poets ...defined the main questions facing Russian literature and society. Harsha Ram shows how imperial ideology became implicated in an unexpectedly wide range of issues, from formal problems of genre, style, and lyric voice to the vexed relationship between the poet and the ruling monarch.
The first book-length study of the poetics of co-translation in the context of British and European modernismThis study focuses on the considerable but neglected body of works translated by S. S. ...Koteliansky in collaboration with Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. It provides close-readings and broad cross-cultural contextualisations to assess the influence that translating from Russian had on the individual writers, as well as its resonance within the dynamics of modernist writing. Claire Davison shows that, read as an oeuvre, their various co-translations shed light on how their own creative vision was evolving, particularly through explorations of voice, consciousness, gender and polyidentity. And their co-translating ventures enriched their responses to the great classics but also invited innovative dialogues with other genres: critical essays, biography and early-twentieth-century writing from Russia. The focus here is on co-translation as praxis. Looking specifically at the immediate post-revolutionary and post-war years, when political, ideological and aesthetic interests were so intertwined, the book examines the cultural and historical dynamics of translation, which reveal a clear interface between literary creation, textual production, publishing networks and the literary translator.
Key Features:
The first in-depth study of the impact that translating from the Russian had on these individual writers as well as on the shaping of modernist poetics in general
*Feeds into a recent renewal of interest in the intense era of Russian fever in the early 20th century
*Focuses on the processes of translating including negotiations with style, voice, and textual rhythm
The object of the study is the notion “absence” referring to the basic abstract notions that play a significant role in the conceptual system of any language and are of social and cultural ...significance. The subject of the research includes poetic contexts in which this notion is represented. Poetic texts have not been chosen by random since it is in them that the reflection of the perception of “absence” reveals the cognitive potential of personalities who individually select and use verbal means that convey this notion. The study of the mechanisms of the formation and representation of the notion “absence” in a poetic text is carried out taking into account the principle of anthropocentrism as a fundamental one in cognitive linguistics. Linguocognitive analysis based on the theory of prototypical description of lexico-grammatical phenomena makes it possible to identify a wide range of representation of the notion “absence” in poetic discourse.
The paper focuses on the endings of two novels by two authors, The Silver Dove by A. Bely (1909) and Despair by V. Nabokov (1934) to reveal how the latter responds to the tradition of Symbolism and ...its emblematic author-theorist. The influence of A. Bely on V. Nabokov is considered in the paper as a multidimensional phenomenon, not only as following in the footsteps of the accepted heritage or its denial. Rather, it is the student’s attention to the master of the poetic form, giving rise to stylistic parallels, on the one hand, and on the other hand, it is the attitude to the literary predecessor being overcome, expressed in complex transformations. The finest genre of the second type of attitude is parody (ambivalent in its nature), parody, concerning here both ideological and philosophical criticism.
The paper presents a selection of poems about the sea, written by Russian lyric poets in the 19th century. The descriptive aspect in the poems is imbued by the emotional experience and actual mood of ...the authors. At the same time, the changing sight of the sea, the abundance of its luminous tints and sounding modulations are shown with high poetic mastery suggesting a certain parallel between the dynamism of the sea and the alternating states of the human mind. Parts of the texts indicate the authors’ disposition to transcendence.
The study explores worldview and artistic reflection of Teilhard de Chardin’s work that influenced the ideas of the third-generation Russian Korean artist Anatoli Kim. The evidence that Anatoli Kim ...was immersed in the ideas of the French theologian and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin is revealed not only through the mentioning of his name and writings, but also on a deeper level such as through thematic adaptation in Anatoli Kim’s works. Accordingly, this study observes the aspect of concepts such as “biosphere,” “noosphere,” and “omega point,” which are based on the evolutionary biology of Teilhard, being reflected on the natural philosophy of Anatoli Kim’s works. Such attempts to analyze the aspects of Teilhard’s theories or perspectives being embraced in the worldview of Anatoli Kim and artistically projected in his works can be a significant case study on the convergence of science, theology, and philosophy into cultural art.
The article analyses the aesthetic and philosophical concepts of Russian symbolism of the beginning of the 20th century. The primary focus lies on the interpretation of the selected theoretical ...studies and essayistic works by A. Bely and V. Ivanov. We show the inner connections in the genesis of their aesthetic-philosophical system, which was gradually heading from the decadent-symbolic aesthetics towards the broader trans-cultural syntheses, or, using the words of the Russian philosopher V. Solovjov, towards the principal of theurgy. Literary and essayistic works of A. Bely and V. Ivanov are represented by the idea of theurgy. It is the idea that art possesses mystic and religious power, and that “all-human” art can be united with cognitive act. Art is seen as a complex way of thinking, understanding the world and the way of existence. The aim of theurgy was to find new ways of perception and expression and to reach the state of existence, in which the artistic images would not only evoke the impression of the beauty, but also become the means of cognition.
Having a creation based on a Christian pattern, but also integrated into a universal cultural horizon, Dostoevsky was among the first writers to design, in all the psychological senses of the word, ...the human typology of the antihero. The enormous influence of the Russian writer can be identified in the universal literature, especially in the way in which such an unusual character began to respond, ideologically, to a different need, felt by literature consumers. From the ancient tragedy to the novel and the cinema, the antihero has different masks and, obviously, different forms of manifestation, within the same psychological matrix. Weakness, that sometimes is real or apparent, cowardice and fighting avoidance, along with a specific dimension of the trickster archetype, define the protein figure of the antihero.
The article, actually a would-be 3rd chapter of an intended piece of literary history, aims at retrieving, based on novel documents and on our own individual research, other defining moments in the ...history of the Romanian PEN Club, i.e. the activity with a view to consolidation in the years right after WWI. The recuperated sequences are integrated within the enlarged historical, political, social and cultural context of the time. The figure of Marcu Beza, the Romanian Anglicist and diplomat in London in the 1920s, is in close-up, together with that of Emanoil Bucuţa, the Secretary of the Romanian P.E.N in its first decade of activity, due to their determination in engaging Romanian writers in the emergent circuit of democratic values specific to western societies.
