For Fyodor Dostoevsky, ways of seeing reflect ways of thinking about the world. This dissertation complements Mikhail Bakhtin’s analyses of Dostoevsky’s poetics by taking a visual-aesthetic approach and exploring “visual polyphony,” a concept that Bakhtin used but did not develop at length. When Dostoevsky returned from nearly ten years in exile (1849-1858), his interest in aesthetics was acute. He had intended to write a treatise on art and Christianity, but that project never materialized. Dostoevsky did, however, explore visual matters in essays of the 1860s. And vision figures prominently in his post-Siberian fiction. Each of the three chapters in this dissertation focuses on vision in Dostoevsky’s writing. The first chapter analyzes two important aesthetic statements of Dostoevsky’s journal Vremia. The first is “Petersburg Visions: In Prose and Verse” wherein Dostoevsky’s narrator declares that he is a “dreamer,” a claim that also reveals the role of imagination in Dostoevsky’s special brand of realism. In “Exhibition at the Academy of the Arts: 1860-1861,” Dostoevsky takes issue with the realism of the Academy’s prized painting, Valery Yakobi’s Prisoners’ Halt, for being too photographic in its servility to visual objectivity and outward appearance. These writings display Dostoevsky’s fascination with vision not as a passive observation, but as an active, subjective and complex process in which empirical data blends with existing narratives that dictate what the seer sees. In the second chapter, I show how Dostoevsky renders prison convicts empirically, yet empathetically in Notes from the house of the Dead (1861). The narrator Gorianchikov describes the eponymous notes as “scenes.” Through Gorianchikov, Dostoevsky maintains an exterior perspective relative to the peasant convicts’ thoughts. In this sense, Gorianchikov assumes the perspective of a realist painter, yet he manages to humanize the prisoners where Yakobi’s painting fails. This is especially evident in my analysis of what Gorianchikov calls a “strange picture,” which is his description of the prisoners gathered in anticipation of their annual Christmas theater performance. The characters of this novel number among the least psychologically penetrated in his fiction, yet Dostoevsky manages to indicate their interiority from without. In the third and final chapter, I examine Dostoevsky’s use of Holbein’s Dead Christ (1521) in The Idiot (1868). Drawing from Pavel Florensky’s explanations of Realism in visual art and reverse perspective in iconography from his article “Reverse Perspective,” I show how the Dead Christ combines Realist and reverse perspectival qualities. I use Bakhtin’s term “visual polyphony” to explain the special capacity of this painting to convey conflicting messages about Christ’s death and to elicit conflicting worldviews from Ippolit, Rogozhin and Myshkkin. The visually polyphonic painting plays a critical role in The Idiot, the most polyphonic of Dostoevsky’s novels. It reveals the visual dimensions to Dostoevsky’s polyphony: things look differently from different perspectives.

Thèse--École pratique des hautes études, Paris. / Bibliography: p. [167]-178.

In this dissertation I have made an attempt to follow up on Peter Baker's idea of Generative Criticism. Generative Criticism, as Baker proposes in Modern Poetic Practice (1986), aims at a deeper understanding of poetry by incorporating the poet's point of view in literary analysis. I have chosen Janos Pilinszky's work for my investigations into the issue. Pilinszky is one of the most distinguished Hungarian poets of the twentieth century, and certainly one of the most original ones even worldwide. He seemed an ideal subject for my study, because he builds a poetic world out of the lowest number of elements possible, while maintaining an atmospheric presence that poets using a lot more tools have not achieved. Studying such limited material one can reach consistency, accuracy, and access the whole of his poetry more easily than by trying to make sense of more complex texts. At first, I had to clarify my point of view, which I did by introducing a heuristic environment with an appropriate hermeneutics and epistemology. I coordinated my initial tenets in relation to contemporary phenomenology (Husserl), dialectics (Hegel, Aristotle), semiotics (Kristeva), and Rhetorical Criticism (Baker) in Chapter One and Sections 1-3 and in Chapter Two. I probed the workings of the system set up by applying it deductively to the poet's creative act as well as to the resulting poems. I used inductive argument when trying to coordinate the poet's point of view from material written on, or by the poet himself. Ideally, the resulting conclusions materialized as the synthesis of the combination of induction and deduction (Sections 3-7 of Chapter Two, the whole Chapter Three, and Sections 1-4 of Chapter Four). The synthesis I made by proving that imitation of the poet is possible by employing the modules of his experience and his poetry (Section 5 and 6 in Chapter Five). Finally, after placing Generative Criticism, as I understand it, in the context of rhetoric (Aristotle, Lanham), former attempts (Baker), and as a possible part of eclectic approaches (Rosenthal), I endeavored to identify some modern poetic tools from a Generative point of view (Chapter Six). In conclusion I found that the analysis of my limited material may have led to the formulation of rules and categories that can apply to modern poets at a much larger scale.

The main body of this work consists of a cross-section of Slovak sayings, songs, poems and folktales that have been translated from Slovak into English and made available to English-speaking readers for the first time. The pieces chosen for translation cover the long chronology of Slovak folklore--from ancient magical incantations and prognostications, through lyrical songs, proverbs and lengthier folktales, to the working-class and partisan songs and poems of twentieth century Slovakia. These materials have been drawn from collections of Melichercik and Dobsinsky. Although all aspects of life and nature are represented in the rich oral tradition of Slovakia, themes of love and marriage, health and successful agriculture are most prevalent, because of Slovakia's predominantly agrarian history and culture. Slovakia's political and social subjugation to other national groups, especially the Hungarians and the Turks, is another common theme in Slovak songs and poems, many of which appear in the present anthology. The translations are preceded by an introduction, which describes the historical, cultural and literary context of the works contained in the anthology. The special problems of translating mostly oral poetry and songs from regional or archaic Slovak into modern English defy easy solutions. The introductory section addresses the linguistic and poetic differences between the two languages, and explains how this translator has attempted to handle these differences. The introduction and footnotes draw attention as well to the more prominent aspects of the cultural gap between the traditions of rural Slovakia and those of America.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Slavic Languages and Literatures, June 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

My dissertation explores ways in which poetic utterances actually do speak against the received idea of poetry as an atemporal and unearthly genre and subtly present their own social and economic agendas. I read the canonical and non-canonical texts of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian poetry with an eye for uncovering the economic and social dynamics of these texts, unveiling their intricate and complicated relations to issues of censorship, copyright, professionalization of literature and the literary market, fashion, marital conventions and practices, the transition from gentry-oriented literature to a bourgeois reading public, formation of national identity, imperial conquests, etc. I argue that poetry in the nineteenth century often did engage the relevant issues of the day, just as the novel did, but it was (and is) the dominant mode of reading that prevents us from recognizing the political and economic inventory of verse. I focus on situations of implicit dialogue, where poetic texts respond to or engage the themes and ideas upheld by the novelistic tradition and often promote a very different, or at least an unfamiliar, disposition of forces in society. My dissertation argues for a new practical mode of reading poetry, a mode of reading which goes against the grain of both the existing scholarship on poetry and also the self-imposed vow of being "somewhat stupid," of refusing or being unable to converse about and investigate social, economic, and political realia. / Slavic Languages and Literatures

This dissertation examines the role of Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz as the Romantic Other in the formation of Russia's Romantic identity during his Russian sojourn between 1824 and 1829. Analysis of Mickiewicz's image as the poetic Other, with respect to his Russian contemporaries, reveals the process that led to the establishment of their individual and national identities during the transition from Classicism to Romanticism in the second half of the 1820s. Examination of materials gathered from a variety of sources - poetry dedicated to, and inspired by, Mickiewicz, reviews of his work, correspondence and memoirs - demonstrates how contemporary Russians perceived Mickiewicz: a Polish poet, all at once a representative of Western literature and culture, a Lithuanian bard, a Slavic Byron, and a poet who was also close to Russia's cultural and poetic tradition. Special consideration is also given to Mickiewicz as the Other in Pushkin's poetic paradigm "bard vs. prophet", through which the Russian poet expressed and interpreted his own poetic identity in the context of Western and Russian literature. Such a multi-dimensional image of Mickiewicz reflects the Russians' struggle to establish their own Romantic identity in response to Western literary and cultural models, as well as one that would reflect Russia's own history and tradition. By examining Mickiewicz's so far unexplored position as the Romantic Other, this dissertation provides a new perspective on the significant role that the Polish poet and his work played in the critical period of Russia's transition towards its own Romantic literature.

This dissertation investigates the use of sentimentalist tropes in the work of Viktor Shklovsky, Nikolai Karamzin, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in order to draw conclusions regarding the overlaps between eighteenth- and twentieth-century aesthetic imperatives. Specifically, it looks at love's literary forms--epistolary, triolet, conte--as models and spaces for autobiography, and compares love and self-expression as two literary phenomena that, for these three authors, demand the undoing of cultural mores as the means for their artistic portrayal. For the bulk of my analysis, I take the three authors' "Julie" texts--Rousseau's Julie, or The New Héloïse, Karamzin's "Julia," and Shklovsky's Zoo, or Letters Not About Love, a Third Eloise--in which love and self-expression meet to enact what I callSentimentalism made strange. Using estrangement (ostranenie), the literary device identified by Shklovsky, as an organizing principle, I investigate the cultural shift towards an underlying crude, elemental, and ultimately `savage' aesthetic that is treated in the work of the three authors I examine, and which sanctions a shift towards de-acculturation, de-institutionalization, and disarticulation that is seen in both sentimental and formalist fiction and criticism. While Rousseau factors into my analysis as the model sentimentalist, as the basis for Karamzin's and Shklovsky's own forays into Sentimentalism, in his effort to capture an authentic literary self he also estranges Sentimentalism's canonical forms, revealing, along with Karamzin, proto-formalist tendencies.

My dissertation Between Geopolitics and Geopoetics – “Mitteleuropa” as a Transnational Memory Discourse in Austrian and Yugoslav Postwar Literature examines how the German idea of Central Europe inspired a new poetics of memory in Austrian and South Slavic literary texts during the Cold War period (1945 – 1989). As early as the 19th century, German and Austrian political thinkers (Fürst von Metternich, Friedrich Liszt, Friedrich Naumann) have framed ideas of Germanic cultural and economic eastward expansion under the term Mitteleuropa. This was countered by a wave of post-imperial Austrian literature after 1918 that nostalgically evoked what had once been the largest multiethnic and multilingual political entity on the continent as Mitteleuropa. Even though these writings offered far from a unifying vision of old Austria, literary scholarship in the 1960s interpreted them as creating a retrospective utopia or “Habsburg myth.” Decades later, a group of Eastern European dissidents resuscitated that same literary idea to attack the Cold War division of Europe. The dialectics inherent in the Mitteleuropa debate from the beginning (east versus west, Germans versus Slavs, center versus periphery) have continued to shape postwar public discourses on memory, loss and justice. Challenging both expansionist and nostalgic visions of a larger Europe, my dissertation argues that with the radical geo-political shifts after World War II, an alternate memory discourse of Mitteleuropa emerged in the work of writers who questioned previous notions of geographic identity and national allegiance. By looking at the way that iconic writers like Ingeborg Bachmann, Peter Handke, Danilo Kiš and Dubravka Ugrešić utilize the legacy of Habsburg nostalgia in the postwar period to develop their own poetics of memory, I show how they establish a new form of engaged writing, which transgresses the ideological divide that has defined the continent. I reveal deep ties between the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia and the second Austrian Republic of 1955, dating back to a common imperial past, the persistent ideal of a multiethnic community and an uneasy relationship to dogmatic political ideologies. Both the second Austrian Republic and the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia found themselves in what seemed to be a historical vacuum after the end of the Second World War: Though under completely different political premises, both countries elided uncomfortable aspects of their recent pasts and replaced them with a highly edited version of historical ‘truth.’ In Austria, this meant a self-fashioning as the first victim of Nazi-Germany, and a denial of widespread collaboration in Holocaust atrocities. In the newly founded federative republic of Yugoslavia, Socialist ideology promoted the image of the partisan hero, but kept silent about crimes committed by the ‘liberators’ themselves. While Austria sought to distance itself from postwar Germany through a nostalgic reference to the Habsburg Empire, the Yugoslav Socialists’ official rhetoric of progress, plurality and unity left no room for inconvenient truths that might ignite conflicts between its numerous ethnicities. For lack of a public debate, the role of critical memory in both countries was consequently taken over by postwar authors and artists offering a different ‘engaged’ literature without succumbing to the pitfalls of ideology. Unlike previous interpretations, which focus on the historical ruptures created by Nazi Fascism and the Iron Curtain, my dissertation shows that Central Europe persists both as a literary network and a cultural community (Kulturgemeinschaft) defined by political debate and civic engagement.