{"product_id":"the-superstitious-muse-thinking-russian-literature-mythopoetically-9781618118127","title":"The Superstitious Muse: Thinking Russian","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor 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).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis 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, 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cem\u003e“Few American Slavists have been as prolific as David Bethea; hence this ample collection represents only a small sampling of his work. Nonetheless, it gives a good sense of his scholarly preoccupations over the past three decades. The book is wide-ranging in both its theoretical concerns and its choice of primary texts. . . . Bethea’s approach opens up obscure passages in unprecedented ways, often with admirable clarity. ”\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e— Michael Wachtel, Princeton University, in Slavic Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTable of Contents\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003ePreface: David Bethea\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eIntroduction: Caryl Emerson\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003ePart One: Russian Literature: Background, Foreground, Creative Cognition\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e1 The Mythopoetic \"\"Vectors\"\" of Russian Literature\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e2 Mythopoesis Writ Large: The Apocalyptic Plot in Russian Literature\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e3 Mythopoesis and Biography: Pushkin, Jakobson, and the Secret Life of Statues\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e4 The Evolution of Evolution: Genes, Memes, Intelligent Design and Nabokov\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e5 Relativity and Reality: Dante, Florensky, Lotman, and Metaphorical Time-Travel\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e6 Whose Mind is this Anyway? Influence, Intertextuality, and the Legitimate Boundaries of Scholarship\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003ePart 2: Pushkin the Poet, Pushkin the Thinker\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e7 Of Pushkin and Pushkinists\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e8 Biography (with Sergei Davydov)\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e9 Pushkin's Mythopoetic Consciousness: Apuleius, Psyche and Cupid, and the Theme of Metamorphosis in Eugene Onegin\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e10 \"\"A Higher Audacity\"\": How to Read Pushkin's Dialogue with Shakespeare in The Stone Guest\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e11 Stabat Pater: Revisiting the \"\"Monumental\"\" in Peter, Petersburg, and Pushkin\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e12 Slavic Gift Giving, the Poet in History, and Pushkin's The Captain's Daughter\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e13 Pushkin's The History of Pugachev: Where Fact Meets the Zero-Degree of Fiction\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003ePart 3: Reading Russian Writers Reading Themselves and Others\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e14 Sorrento Photographs: Khodasevich's Memory Speaks\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e15 Nabokov's Style\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e16 Sologub, Nabokov, and the Limits of Decadent Aesthetics\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e17 Exile, Elegy, and Auden in Brodsky's \"\"Verses on the Death of T.S\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eEliot\"\"\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e18 Joseph Brodsky and the American Seashore Poem: Lowell, Mandelstam, and Cape Cod\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e19 Joseph Brodsky's \"\"To My Dauther\"\" (A Reading)\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e20 Brodsky, Frost and the Pygmalion Myth\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eIndex.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003cul\u003e\u003c\/ul\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e","brand":"Academic Studies Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51359756419415,"sku":"9781618118127","price":30.39,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9781618118127.jpg?v=1754125617","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/the-superstitious-muse-thinking-russian-literature-mythopoetically-9781618118127","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}