Pushkin and the Genres of Madness

Pushkin and the Genres of Madness PDF Author: Gary Rosenshield
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299182045
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
In 1833 Alexander Pushkin began to explore the topic of madness, a subject little explored in Russian literature before his time. The works he produced on the theme are three of his greatest masterpieces: the prose novella The Queen of Spades, the narrative poem The Bronze Horseman, and the lyric "God Grant That I Not Lose My Mind." Gary Rosenshield presents a new interpretation of Pushkin’s genius through an examination of his various representations of madness. Pushkin brilliantly explored both the destructive and creative sides of madness, a strange fusion of violence and insight. In this study, Rosenshield illustrates the surprising valorization of madness in The Queen of Spades and "God Grant That I Not Lose My Mind" and analyzes The Bronze Horseman’s confrontation with the legacy of Peter the Great, a cornerstone figure of Russian history. Drawing on themes of madness in western literature, Rosenshield situates Pushkin in a greater framework with such luminaries as Shakespeare, Sophocles, Cervantes, and Dostoevsky providing an insightful and absorbing study of Russia’s greatest writer.

Pushkin and the Genres of Madness

Pushkin and the Genres of Madness PDF Author: Gary Rosenshield
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299182045
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
In 1833 Alexander Pushkin began to explore the topic of madness, a subject little explored in Russian literature before his time. The works he produced on the theme are three of his greatest masterpieces: the prose novella The Queen of Spades, the narrative poem The Bronze Horseman, and the lyric "God Grant That I Not Lose My Mind." Gary Rosenshield presents a new interpretation of Pushkin’s genius through an examination of his various representations of madness. Pushkin brilliantly explored both the destructive and creative sides of madness, a strange fusion of violence and insight. In this study, Rosenshield illustrates the surprising valorization of madness in The Queen of Spades and "God Grant That I Not Lose My Mind" and analyzes The Bronze Horseman’s confrontation with the legacy of Peter the Great, a cornerstone figure of Russian history. Drawing on themes of madness in western literature, Rosenshield situates Pushkin in a greater framework with such luminaries as Shakespeare, Sophocles, Cervantes, and Dostoevsky providing an insightful and absorbing study of Russia’s greatest writer.

Challenging the Bard

Challenging the Bard PDF Author: Gary Rosenshield
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 029929353X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
In this book, the author engages with the critical histories of two literary titans, illuminating how Dostoevsky reacted to, challenged, adapted, and ultimately transformed the work of his predecessor Pushkin. Focusing primarily on Dostoevsky's works through 1866 - including Poor Folk, The Double, Mr. Prokharchin, The Gambler, and Crime and Punishment - the author observes that the younger writer's way to literary greatness was not around Pushkin, but through him.

The Routledge History of Madness and Mental Health

The Routledge History of Madness and Mental Health PDF Author: Greg Eghigian
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351784390
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
Mad people's historical anthologies and republished writings -- Mad people's perspectives in institutional histories -- Mad people's historical biographies -- Mad people's activist histories -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Chapter 16: Dementia: confusion at the borderlands of aging and madness -- Dementia in the distant past -- Framing dementia as a brain disease in modern German psychiatry -- Framing dementia as a problem in the adjustment to aging in mid-century American psychodynamic psychiatry -- Framing dementia as dread disease and major public health crisis in an aging world -- Conclusion: the ongoing entanglement of dementia and aging -- Notes -- PART VI: Maladies, disorders, and treatments -- Chapter 17: Passions and moods -- Emotions in history -- Grand narratives and overarching themes -- Specific stories and critical contexts -- Conclusion and areas for further scholarship -- Notes -- Chapter 18: Psychosis -- Madness -- Psychosis is a special thing -- If "psychotic" means "psychosis-like," then what, pray tell, is psychosis like? -- Schizophrenia -- Notes -- Chapter 19: Somatic treatments -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Chapter 20: Psychotherapy in society: historical reflections -- Notes -- Chapter 21: The antidepressant era revisited: towards differentiation and patient-empowerment in diagnosis and treatment -- Psychopharmacology and historiography -- Towards a new chemistry of the mind -- Mother's little helpers -- Appetite for new chemical wonders for the mind -- Towards differentiation and patient empowerment in the era of genomics -- Notes -- Index

Montaging Pushkin

Montaging Pushkin PDF Author: Alexandra Smith
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042020121
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
Montaging Pushkin offers for the first time a coherent view of Pushkin's legacy to Russian twentieth-century poetry, giving many new insights. Pushkin is shown to be a Russian forerunner of Baudelaire. Furthermore it is argued that the rise of the Russian and European novel largely changed the ways Russian poets have looked at themselves and at poetic language; that novelisation of poetry is detectable in the major works of poetry that engaged in a creative dialogue with Pushkin, and that polyphonic lyric has been achieved. Alexandra Smith locates significant examples of Pushkin's cinematographic cognition of reality, suggesting that such dynamic descriptions of Petersburg helped create a highly original animated image of the city as comic apocalypse, which followers of Pushkin appropriated very successfully even as far as the late twentieth century. Montaging Pushkin will be of interest to all students of Russian poetry, as well as specialists in literary theory, European studies and the history of ideas. "Smith's thesis is both startling and original: that Pushkin, for all his Mozart-like fluidity and perfection, can be productively read as a poet of pain and violence. His reflex was to respond to the totalizing, authoritative public landscape of his era with an equally severe but specifically private, individualizing, disciplined set of demands on the Poet. The recurring attention that later generations have paid toward those aspects of Pushkin's life and texts governed by the private right to resist or to initiate violence (his duel, his struggles with the bureaucracy, his failed pursuit of service with honour) suggest that this mythologeme is among the most productive in Pushkin's astonishing legacy" CARYL EMERSON (A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Chair of the Slavic Department, Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University) "Smith's innovative study offers a wonderful analysis of how cinematographic editing and polyphony are detected in Russian twentieth-century poetry... It views Pushkin as a "reference obligee" of contemporary urban poetry" VERONIQUE LOSSKY (Professor Emeritus of Russian Literature at the Universite de Paris-Sorbonne IV)

Pushkin and Romantic Fashion

Pushkin and Romantic Fashion PDF Author: Monika Greenleaf
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804727990
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
Pushkin and Romantic Fashion is about the interpenetration of culture and personality, specifically Alexander I's Russian Empire, a latecomer in post-Napoleonic European history, and Aleksandr Pushkin, virtuoso improvisor yet prisoner of the Golden Age discourses that now bear his name. It focuses on Pushkin's use of the Romantic fragment, especially the link between the fragment and Romantic irony's fundamental and modern questioning of the sources and intentionality of language. In the view of such irony's most eloquent formulator, Friedrich Schlegel, "identity" does not precede speech, but is forged in each improvisational interaction with interlocutor or reader. One finds out who one is by speaking, and all utterances and texts stand in a fragmentary, contingent relation to an accumulating life-text. Pushkin may actually come closest of all major European poets to realizing what Schlegel prescribed, or diagnosed, as the poetics of modernity, not because of any direct links, but because as common latecomers on the European cultural scene, Russian and German writers shared a fascination with European fashions and an ironic talent for conflating or stepping outside them. Thus Pushkin's kaleidoscopic explorations of fashionable European genres, from "Augustan" erotic elegy to the archaic Greek lyric fragment, from the Byronic Oriental poetic tale to Shakespearean chronicle drama, from the modern "society tale" to the Walter Scott historical novel, can be seen as ever more dramatic rewritings of and meditations on a previous life-text. This fragmentary and ironic self-presentation has ensured that every generation of Pushkin readers, no matter how gilded with cultural authority the poetbecame, "talked back." The author is deeply concerned to embed Pushkin in a larger European context in a way critically consonant with the best in Western Romantic studies. She locates Pushkin's penchant for fragmentary structures in a European discourse of fragmentation, reveali

Pushkin, the Decembrists, and Civic Sentimentalism

Pushkin, the Decembrists, and Civic Sentimentalism PDF Author: Emily Wang
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 0299345807
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
In December 1825, a group of liberal aristocrats, officers, and intelligentsia mounted a coup against the tsarist government of Russia. Inspired partially by the democratic revolutions in the United States and France, the Decembrist movement was unsuccessful; however, it led Russia's civil society to new avenues of aspiration and had a lasting impact on Russian culture and politics. Many writers and thinkers belonged to the conspiracy while others, including the poet Alexander Pushkin, were loosely or ambiguously affiliated. While the Decembrist movement and Pushkin's involvement has been well covered by historians, Emily Wang takes a novel approach, examining the emotional and literary motivations behind the movement and the dramatic, failed coup. Through careful readings of the literature of Pushkin and others active in the northern branch of the Decembrist movement, such as Kondraty Ryleev, Wilhelm Küchelbecker, and Fyodor Glinka, Wang traces the development of "emotional communities" among the members and adjacent writers. This book illuminates what Wang terms "civic sentimentalism": the belief that cultivating noble sentiments on an individual level was the key to liberal progress for Russian society, a core part of Decembrist ideology that constituted a key difference from their thought and Pushkin's. The emotional program for Decembrist community members was, in other ways, a civic program for Russia as a whole, one that they strove to enact by any means necessary.

Alexander Pushkin's Little Tragedies

Alexander Pushkin's Little Tragedies PDF Author: Svetlana Evdokimova
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299190248
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
Alexander Pushkin's four compact plays, later known as The Little Tragedies, were written at the height of the author's creative powers, and their influence on many Russian and Western writers cannot be overestimated. Yet Western readers are far more familiar with Pushkin's lyrics, narrative poems, and prose than with his drama. The Little Tragedies have received few translations or scholarly examinations. Setting out to redress this and to reclaim a cornerstone of Pushkin's work, Evodokimova and her distinguished contributors offer the first thorough critical study of these plays. They examine the historical roots and connective themes of the plays, offer close readings, and track the transformation of the works into other genres. This volume includes a significant new translation by James Falen of the plays-"The Covetous Knight," "Mozart and Salieri," "The Stone Guest," and "A Feast in Time of Plague."

Novels, Tales, Journeys

Novels, Tales, Journeys PDF Author: Alexander Pushkin
Publisher: Everyman's Library
ISBN: 0307959643
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 613

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Book Description
From the award-winning translators: the complete prose narratives of the most acclaimed Russian writer of the Romantic era and one of the world's greatest storytellers. The father of Russian literature, Pushkin is beloved not only for his poetry but also for his brilliant stories, which range from dramatic tales of love, obsession, and betrayal to dark fables and sparkling comic masterpieces, from satirical epistolary tales and romantic adventures in the manner of Sir Walter Scott to imaginative historical fiction and the haunting dreamworld of "The Queen of Spades." The five short stories of The Late Tales of Ivan Petrovich Belkin are lightly humorous and yet reveal astonishing human depths, and his short novel, The Captain's Daughter, has been called the most perfect book in Russian literature.

Nabokov's Canon

Nabokov's Canon PDF Author: Marijeta Bozovic
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810133164
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Nabokov's translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1964) and its accompanying Commentary, along with Ada, or Ardor (1969), his densely allusive late English language novel, have appeared nearly inscrutable to many interpreters of his work. If not outright failures, they are often considered relatively unsuccessful curiosities. In Bozovic's insightful study, these key texts reveal Nabokov's ambitions to reimagine a canon of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western masterpieces with Russian literature as a central, rather than marginal, strain. Nabokov's scholarly work, translations, and lectures on literature bear resemblance to New Critical canon reformations; however, Nabokov's canon is pointedly translingual and transnational and serves to legitimize his own literary practice. The new angles and theoretical framework offered by Nabokov's Canon help us to understand why Nabokov's provocative monuments remain powerful source texts for several generations of diverse international writers, as well as richly productive material for visual, cinematic, musical, and other artistic adaptations.

Taboo Pushkin

Taboo Pushkin PDF Author: Alyssa Dinega Gillespie
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 0299287033
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 506

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Book Description
Since his death in 1837, Alexander Pushkin—often called the “father of Russian literature”—has become a timeless embodiment of Russian national identity, adopted for diverse ideological purposes and reinvented anew as a cultural icon in each historical era (tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet). His elevation to mythic status, however, has led to the celebration of some of his writings and the shunning of others. Throughout the history of Pushkin studies, certain topics, texts, and interpretations have remained officially off-limits in Russia—taboos as prevalent in today’s Russia as ever before. The essays in this bold and authoritative volume use new approaches, overlooked archival materials, and fresh interpretations to investigate aspects of Pushkin’s biography and artistic legacy that have previously been suppressed or neglected. Taken together, the contributors strive to create a more fully realized Pushkin and demonstrate how potent a challenge the unofficial, taboo, alternative Pushkin has proven to be across the centuries for the Russian literary and political establishments.