Токарев Дмитрий Викторович – филолог, специалист по русско-французским культурным связям; доктор филологических наук, ведущий научный сотрудник Института русской литературы (Пушкинский Дом) РАН; профессор Высшей школы экономики, СПб.; автор монографий «Курс на худшее: абсурд как категория текста у Даниила Хармса и Сэмюэля Беккета» (НЛО, 2002), «“Между Индией и Гегелем”: творчество Бориса Поплавского в компаративной перспективе» (НЛО, 2011); составитель и научный редактор сборника «“Невыразимо выразимое”: экфрасис и проблемы репрезентации визуального в художественном тексте» (НЛО, 2013).
Уракова Александра Павловна – филолог, специалист по творчеству Э.А. По и американской литературе XIX века; кандидат филологических наук, старший научный сотрудник Института мировой литературы им. А.М. Горького РАН. Автор монографии «Поэтика тела в рассказах Эдгара По» (ИМЛИ РАН, 2009); ответственный редактор коллективной монографии «Deciphering Poe: Subtexts, Contexts, Subversive Meanings» / «Расшифровывая По: подтексты, контексты, субверсивные смыслы» (Lehigh UP/Rowan and Littlefield, 2013). Автор статей по американской литературе в научных сборниках и журналах (включая «НЛО», «New England Quarterly» (NEQ), «The Edgar Allan Poe Review», «Nineteenth-Century Literature»). Член редколлегии журнала «The Edgar Allan Poe Review», в прошлом – «Poe Studies».
Фэррент Тим (Farrant Tim) преподает французскую литературу XIX века в Оксфордском университете, французскую литературу и язык – в Пемброук-колледже (Оксфорд). Автор монографии «Balzac’s Shorter Fictions: Genesis and Genre» / «Короткая проза Бальзака: генезис и жанр» (Oxford UP, 2002), предисловия к «Nineteenth-Century French Literature» / «Французская литература XIX века» (Duckworth, 2007) и «Three novels by Jules Verne» / «Три романа Жюля Верна» (Everyman, 2013), а также многочисленных статей по французской литературе и культуре. В настоящее время работает над несколькими книгами о французской малой прозе XIX века.
Фокин Сергей Леонидович – историк идей, специалист по французской литературе и философии, филолог, переводчик; доктор филологических наук; заведующий кафедрой романских языков и перевода Санкт-Петербургского государственного экономического университета, в то же время – профессор кафедры междисциплинарных исследований в области языков и литературы Факультета свободных искусств и наук СПбГУ. Автор пяти монографий, в том числе: «“Русская идея” во французской литературе XX века» (Изд-во СПбГУ, 2003), «Пассажи: этюды о Бодлере» (MACHINA, 2011), «Фигуры Достоевского во французской литературе XX века» (Изд-во РХГА, 2013).
Summaries and keywords
Jean-Christophe Valtat
Demons of Perversity: Poe, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, and the New Subject of Modernity
Summary: The essay focuses on three texts: Poe’s “The Imp of the Perverse,” Baudelaire’s “The Bad Glazier,” and Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground. The analysis builds on two central notions: the subject of literary utterance and modernity (modernitet). The figures of the narrator in each work are juxtaposed with such categories as scientific knowledge, psychology, politics, reader, and literature. In conclusion, the author develops and formulates the concept of the “divided subject” specific for all the examined texts.
Keywords: Poe, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, literature, madness, subject of literary experience.
Olga Voltchek
City Topology and Narrative Masks in Poe, Baudelaire, and Dostoevsky
Summary: The essay examines early Dostoevsky’s and Baudelaire’s works as well as “Parisian text” in Poe’s short stories. The narrative topos of these works is the urban environment of the capitalist megapolis that evoked peculiar and important figures of space in the imagination of nineteenth-century artists, writers, and poets. A new vision of modernity articulated by Baudelaire is interpreted via the key figure of the flaneûr, a product of modern consumerism having different incarnations in the discussed texts.
Keywords: Poe, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, modernity, city, flaneûr, old man, woman.
Anne Pinot
The Odd in Poe, the Odd in Baudelaire, and the Fantastic in Dostoevsky: Modern Life and Unreliable Language
Summary: This essay develops a comparative perspective and examines a number of concepts, propositions, and areas, within which Poe’s artistic quest prefigured those directions in the study of modern life which both the author of The Flowers of Evil and the author of The Brothers Karamazov pursued independently of each other. It focuses primarily on the following concepts: “the odd,” “the foreign,” and “the fantastic.” Efficient tools of the capacities of imagination, these concepts correlate in different ways with such phenomena of modernity as: the idea of technical and social progress; psychology of cities being ideal spaces for both crowded co-existence and personal solitude; alienation and estrangement from the realm of transcendence which only art can keep together.
Keywords: Poe, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, the poetics of the fantastic, the idea of progress, modernity, the idea of the divine in literature.
Stephen Rachman
Hearing Poe’s Sociopaths: Crime, Punishment, and Voice
Summary: This article analyzes the voice of the Poe’s sociopaths through two of cultural contexts. The first has to do with the bifurcated reactions that the voice of Poe’s sociopaths have engendered in their contemporary critical reception. “Utterly credible,” in the estimation of Stephen King; “three-quarters burlesque,” in the estimation of Jill Lepore. These reactions are emblematic of the key critical division with respect to the authenticity of Poe’s literary voice. The second context analyzes the perception that Fyodor Dostoevsky made in the 1860s about Poe’s tales, already having noticed the oddity of his literary manner. The aim of this comparative strategy is to reveal within a frame of critical comparison and contrast a deeper critical and literary theoretical continuity, the extent to which the critical ambiguity toward Poe’s sociopathic voice that we find in contemporary reaction finds its analog in the Russian translations of his work.
Keywords: Poe, Dostoevsky, reception, voice, sociopath.
Virginie Tellier
From New Extraordinary Tales to Notes from the Underground: Speaking in the First Person
Summary: The essay draws genetic and typological parallels between Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground and Poe’s New Extraordinary Tales in Baudelaire’s 1857 translation (that Dostoevsky could have known by the time he wrote his text), including “The Imp of the Perverse,” “The Black Cat,” “William Wilson,” “The Man of the Crowd,” and “Berenice.” My main hypothesis is that a communicative situation specific for Notes from the Underground contains a certain narrative paradox that evokes a number of questions. If the main condition of the narrator’s confession is not to be heard, can we call it a confession? If the coworkers who humiliated the narrator will never hear his narrative, does this make his notes more “real” than the speech he mentally addressed to his tormentors that terrible night when he underwent a final humiliation and secluded himself in the underground? And finally, is there such thing as a word “from the underground”? The essay claims that a literary form invented by Dostoevsky with certain elements going back to Poe’s first-person narrative represents a peculiar and highly controversial transit from silence to speech.
Keywords: Poe, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, narratology, first-person narrative, the fantastic, madness and literature.
Marie-Christine Alix Garneau de l’Isle-Adam
“Génie du christianisme” in the Light of Poe, Baudelaire, and Dostoevsky
Summary: This essay, bearing on the method of comparative analysis, discusses the attitude of Poe, Baudelaire, and Dostoevsky to the visual image and religious representation against the background of such modern visual technologies as panorama, daguerreotype, and photography that appeared in the first half of the nineteenth century and altered the perception of religious iconography. Poe living in the time of protestant prayer books with no illustrations (since Reformation), could not remain indifferent to the effect the Puritan purification had produced on the man of the crowd. This man was infected by spiritual maladies of three nations – English, American, and German – suffering from Spleen and Boredom since the Schism. Baudelaire, in his turn, living in a world not altogether deprived of its “lighthouses,” was concerned about the fact that the “lighthouses” were under the threat of disappearing with the advent of bourgeoisie unwilling to see anything except its own image and resemblance that the new medium, photography, made possible. As regards Dostoevsky’s attitude to image, I argue that the unseen and silent presence of icons in the works of the Russian novelist endows his visual representation with the innermost depth.
Keywords: Poe, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, Chateaubriand, religious iconography, Protestantism, Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity in literature.
Elvira Osipova
The Devil in Poe’s Tales and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov
Summary: