По, Бодлер, Достоевский: Блеск и нищета национального гения

“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.

PART IV

BETWEEN FICTION AND SPECULATION

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