Realizing Metaphors: Alexander Pushkin and the Life of the Poet (Publications of the Wisconsin Center for Pushkin Studies) - Softcover

Bethea, David M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0299159744 ISBN 13: 9780299159740

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998

Synopsis

Readers often have regarded with curiosity the creative life of the poet. In this passionate and authoritative new study, David Bethea illustrates the relation between the art and life of nineteenth-century poet Alexander Pushkin, the central figure in Russian thought and culture. Bethea shows how Pushkin, on the eve of his two-hundredth birthday, still speaks to our time. He indicates how we as modern readers might "realize"— that is, not only grasp cognitively, but feel, experience—the promethean metaphors central to the poet's intensely "sculpted" life. The Pushkin who emerges from Bethea's portrait is one who, long unknown to English-language readers, closely resembles the original both psychologically and artistically.

Bethea begins by addressing the influential thinkers Freud, Bloom, Jakobson, and Lotman to show that their premises do not, by themselves, adequately account for Pushkin's psychology of creation or his version of the "life of the poet." He then proposes his own versatile model of reading, and goes on to sketches the tangled connections between Pushkin and his great compatriot, the eighteenth-century poet Gavrila Derzhavin. Pushkin simultaneously advanced toward and retreated from the shadow of his predecessor as he created notions of poet-in-history and inspiration new for his time and absolutely determinative for the tradition thereafter.

About this title

About the Author

David M. Bethea is Vilas Research Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of Khodasevich: His Life and Art; The Shape of Apocalypse in Modern Russian Fiction; and Joseph Brodsky and the Creation of Exile.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0299159744
• ISBN 13: 9780299159740
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 262