This book deals with some complicated cases in the field of poetics and literary strategies of Osip Mandelstam, Sasha Chorny, Alexander Pushkin, François Rabelais, Leo Tolstoy, Anna Akhmatova, Nikolai Gogol, and Vladimir Nabokov. The cases illustrate the theoretical model suggested by the author in the foreword.
Why did Osip Mandelstam picture himself as a victim of anti-Semitic persecution, but at the same time described his victimizers using the grotesque features of Jews from anti-Semitic mythology? What was the meaning of Sasha Chorny's pen name? Why were the Russian translators of Gargantua and Pantagruel steadily leaving out one phrase from the novel? Why did Alexander Pushkin use the same idiom in his fragments on Cleopatra, though in different contexts and referring to different things? What was the principle used by Leo Tolstoy when choosing one of the four patterns created by a diegetic or non-diegetic narrator and a personal or narratorial point of view? Why was the common knowledge about the tight alliance of the four post-symbolist poets - Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak, and Anna Akhmatova - so enthusiastically appreciated by Akhmatova herself? Why in Nikolai Gogol's The Overcoat the robbed Akaky Akakievich receives a kick in the butt but falls face-up? Which fairy-tale character does the name of the dwarf from Vladimir Nabokov's short story The Potato Elf allude to? Each of these questions is reviewed in a separate chapter of this book, united by a uniform interpretation method, theoretically substantiated in the book's foreword.
Mandelstam, Khlebnikov, Sasha Chorny, Pushkin, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Bakhtin, Tolstoy, Shklovsky, Akhmatova, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Gogol, Plato, Nabokov, Hauff, Literary interpretation strategies, Anti-Semitism, Censorship, Estrangement, Four elements
Evgeny Soshkin holds a PhD from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem where he now participates in a collective research project. He is the author of the Russian language monograph Hypogrammar: A Book on Mandelstam (2015) as well as articles on literary theory, history, and poetics.
