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Thinking Russian Literature Mythopoetically

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Thinking Russian Literature Mythopoetically The Superstitious Muse: Thinking Russian Literature Mythopoetically Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures and History Series Editor: Lazar Fleishman The Superstitious Muse: Thinking Russian Literature Mythopoetically DAVID MM.. BETHEA Boston 2009 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bethea, David M., 1948- The superstitious muse: thinking Russian literature mythopoetically / David M. Bethea. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-934843-17-8 (hardback) 1. Russian literature — History and criticism. 2. Mythology in literature. 3. Superstition in literature. I. Title. PG2950.B48 2009 891.709—dc22 2009039325 Copyright © 2009 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-934843-17-8 Book design and typefaces by Konstantin Lukjanov© Photo on the cover by Benson Kua Published by Academic Studies Press in 2009 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com Effective December 12th, 2017, this book will be subject to a CC-BY-NC license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. Other than as provided by these licenses, no part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or displayed by any electronic or mechanical means without permission from the publisher or as permitted by law. The open access publication of this volume is made possible by: This open access publication is part of a project supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book initiative, which includes the open access release of several Academic Studies Press volumes. To view more titles available as free ebooks and to learn more about this project, please visit borderlinesfoundation.org/open. Published by Academic Studies Press 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com For Kim Contents Preface: David M. Bethea 9 Introduction: Caryl Emerson (Mythopoetics Meets the Living Person: How David Bethea Balances the Body and the Muse) 17 I. Part One: Russian Literature: Background, Foreground, Creative Cognition 1. The Mythopoetic “Vectors” of Russian Literature 27 2. Mythopoesis Writ Large: The Apocalyptic Plot in Russian Literature 41 3. Mythopoesis and Biography: Pushkin, Jakobson, and the Secret Life of Statues 101 4. The Evolution of Evolution: Genes, Memes, Intelligent Design, and Nabokov 127 5. Relativity and Reality: Dante, Florensky, Lotman, and Metaphorical Time-Travel 149 6. Whose Mind is This Anyway? Influence, Intertextuality, and the Legitimate Boundaries of Scholarship 167 II. Part Two: Pushkin the Poet, Pushkin the Thinker 7. Of Pushkin and Pushkinists 185 8. Biography (with Sergei Davydov) 205 9. Pushkin’s Mythopoetic Consciousness: Apuleius, Psyche and Cupid, and the Theme of Metamorphosis in Eugene Onegin 227 10. “A Higher Audacity”: How to Read Pushkin’s Dialogue with Shakespeare in The Stone Guest 249 11. Stabat Pater: Revisiting the “Monumental” in Peter, Petersburg, and Pushkin 265 12. Slavic Gift Giving, the Poet in History, and Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter 281 13. Pushkin’s The History of Pugachev: Where Fact Meets the Zero-Degree of Fiction 301 III. Part Three: Reading Russian Writers Reading Themselves and Others 14. Sorrento Photographs: Khodasevich’s Memory Speaks 323 15. Nabokov’s Style 337 16. Sologub, Nabokov, and the Limits of Decadent Aesthetics 347 17. Exile, Elegy, and Auden in Brodsky’s “Verses on the Death of T. S. Eliot” 363 18. Joseph Brodsky and the American Seashore Poem: Lowell, Mandelstam, and Cape Cod 381 19. Joseph Brodsky’s “To My Daughter” (A Reading) 391 20. Brodsky, Frost, and the Pygmalion Myth 405 Index 421 Note on Transliteration Transliterating modern Russian is always a thorny issue, as any single method (e.g., “Library of Congress”) universally applied is going to create problems with a book’s implied reader ship. In the following essays the author has merged two systems in an attempt to recognize the competing needs of the general academic reader and the specialist scholar. In text as text, whether in the body of the essay or in the footnote, proper names are rendered less formally: “Yury,” not “Iurii,” “Olga,” not “Ol’ga,” “Solovyov,” not “Solov’ev,” “Petrushevskaya,” not “Petrushevskaia”; in text and bibliographical material cited from the Russian, the situation is reversed, and the Library of Congress system (without diacriticals) is used consistently throughout: Iurii Lotman, “Ideinaia struktura Kapitanskoi dochki.” When common practice supports a westernized version of a well- known figure’s name, “Tsar Nicholas” for example, I have adopted that version in the text and in the narrative portions of the footnotes. Preface FFirst,irst, a ddisclaimerisclaimer — lletet uuss ccallall iitt a ““caveatcaveat eemptor”mptor” sstatement.tatement. I ttrustrust I aamm nnotot bbeingeing ccoyoy oorr sself-servingelf-serving wwhenhen I ssay,ay, wwithith mmyy conventional WASP upbringing and social instincts, I find it rather awkward to speak in propria persona, to discuss my work “in general,” outside the comfort zone of a book project’s governing concept and shape. Over the years I have said often to colleagues and graduate students that there is no system of ideas, no school or movement, I feel competent to create or, what is probably at some level an analogous response, encourage others to follow. Formalism and structuralism, “secondary modelling systems,” psychoanalysis, Freud, Jakobson, Bakhtin, Bloom, Lotman, Dawkins — these movements and individuals have all provided important grist for my mill, but that grist has always seemed to me to some significant degree insufficient, and this in full knowledge 9. of the fact that, in terms of sheer intelligence, erudition, and PREFACE conceptualizing ardour, my contributions are small potatoes when placed alongside what has been achieved by these proper names. If someone tells me that he or she admires or has learned something from my work, my initial reaction is embarrassment (obviously not everyone’s intentions are suspect, but what does one do with praise, other than gain some modicum of confidence that perhaps in the given case you got some things right). To those who don’t agree with my premises or how I use them in my books and articles I am also indebted: in many ways you are my ideal readers because I have your negative reactions ringing in mind (“why bother?” “this is not serious”) when I try to formulate something speculative and empirically unprovable. In any event, I am genuinely grateful if anyone reads my work, especially in these times. I hhaveave ccomeome cclosestlosest ttoo eexplainingxplaining hhowow I tthinkhink aandnd hhowow I oorganizerganize iideasdeas aandnd bbuilduild aargumentsrguments iinn tthehe ““polemical”polemical” iintroductionsntroductions ttoo mmyy books on Brodsky (Joseph Brodsky and the Creation of Exile, 1994) and Pushkin (Realizing Metaphors: Alexander Pushkin and the Life of the Poet, 1998). But these “vectors” were there earlier as well: The Superstitious Muse: Thinking Russian Literature Mythopoetically in the thoughts on how Khodasevich used Pushkin (Khodasevich: His Life and Art, 1983) and in the “structuralism with a human face” (the late Efim Etkind’s phrase) I tried to apply to an alternative tradition and sub-genre of modern Russian prose I called “apocalyptic fiction” (The Shape of Apocalypse in Modern Russian Fiction, 1989). In each case I was trying to isolate cultural patterns, but then add something to the strict structural component — how the pattern took on flesh and blood, how it entered into historical and biographical context, how it happened once and then changed in the hands (brains) of the next individual or next cultural kin group. In all these instances I have consciously mixed what is purely descriptive, “scholarly” and supposedly “scientific,” with what is not: the use of metaphor, metaphorical thinking, associative leaps in understanding that are colored not simply by logic but also by emotion. Why? TThehe ddangeranger ooff ddelvingelving iintonto mmetaphoricaletaphorical tthinkinghinking iiss tthathat yyouou ccanan 10. nneverever bbee ssureure tthehe mmetaphorsetaphors aarere nnotot mmerelyerely yyourour oownwn aandnd tthathat yyouou PREFACE are offering an “impressionistic” picture of events that might have transpired otherwise. Also, if we take into account — which move is itself a mirage, as the ideas themselves spread into our brains like viruses — recent decades’ pulverizing of the self, the author, and the very concept of intentionality, then what does it matter to address the issue of biography (we can never know what Pushkin was thinking anyway) or the links between biography and cultural artifacts (any attempt to explain how the one interacts with the other is nothing more than a quixotic exercise in putting Humpty- Dumpty back together again). But it seemed to me that, if one read one’s subject carefully enough, and if one tried to focus more on their metaphors (the creation and use of which I will be referring to in these pages as “mythopoesis”) than on one’s own, then the effort did not have to be futile. TTherehere wwasas aalsolso aanothernother iimportantmportant ffactoractor aaffectingffecting mmyy tthinking:hinking: ddesire.esire. SSoo mmuchuch ooff ccontemporaryontemporary discussiondiscussion andand analysisanalysis ofof “desire” in culture is — no mystery here! — a desire-killer. Obviously I am not complaining about how scientists measure what is happening
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