The Superstitious Muse

For several decades David Bethea has written authoritatively on the 'mythopoetic thinking' that lies at the heart of classical Russian literature, especially Russian poetry. His theoretically informed essays and books have made a point of turning back to issues of intentionality and biography at a time when authorial agency seems under threat of 'erasure' and the question of how writers, and poets in particular, live their lives through their art is increasingly moot. The lichnost (personhood, psychic totality) of the given writer is all-important, argues Bethea, as it is that which combines the specifically biographical and the capaciously mythical in verbal units that speak simultaneously to different planes of being. Pushkin's Evgeny can be one incarnation of the poet himself and an everyman rising up to challenge Peter's new world order; Brodsky can be, all at once, Dante and Mandelstam and himself, the exile paying an Orphic visit to Florence (and, by ghostly association, Leningrad). It is this sort of metempsychosis, where the stories that constitute the Ur-texts of Russian literature are constantly reworked in the biographical myths shaping individual writers' lives, that is Bethea's primary focus. This collection contains a liberal sampling of Bethea's most memorable previously published essays along with new studies prepared for this occasion.

ISBN 1934843172   Pages 432 ISBN13 9781934843178 (What's this?)   Weight (grammes) 762 Publisher Academic Studies Press   Published in Brighton Imprint Academic Studies Press   Series title Studies in Slavic and Russian Literatures, Cultures and History Format Hardback   Height (mm) 234 Publication date 15 Nov 2009   Width (mm) 156 DEWEY 891.709   Spine width (mm) 24 DEWEY edition DC22   Academic level Postgraduate

		Preface by David M. Bethea		9
Introduction		Mythopoetics Meets the Living Person: How David Bethea Balances the Body and the Muse by Caryl Emerson		17
Pt. 1		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, Jakobsen, 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, lnterrextualttv and the Legitimate Boundaries of Scholarship		167
Pt. 2		Pushkin the Poet, Pushkin the Thinker
7		Of Pushkin and Pushkinists		185
8		Biography		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
Pt. 3		Reading Russian Writers Reading Themselves and Others
14		Sorrento Photographs: Khodasevich's Memory Speaks		323
157		Nabokov's Style		337
16		Sologub. Nabokov, and the Limits of Decadent Aesthetics		347
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