This book shows the literary legacy of Boleslaw Lesmian, the great Polish writer, as engaged in a dialogue with the tradition, and forged on the crossroads of literatures, and epochs. Exploring American, French and Russian contexts (Poe's writing, Baudelaire's oeuvre, Balmont's texts, the symbolist style, the bylinna tradition), highlighting the correspondences between Lesmian and the romantics (Pushkin, Gogol) as well as the modernists (Jesienin, Gorodetsky) and connecting his work to Ukrainian culture through the evocation of old Slavic folklore, the book showcases Lesmian's work as an example of interliterary and inter-cultural transfer of aesthetics, styles, genres and motifs. A crucial outcome of this research is the codifying of a contextual analysis as a method of comparative studies.

Autorentext

Zaneta Nalewajk is a literature historian, comparativist and editor. She works at the Faculty of Polish Philology at the University of Warsaw, Poland. Her texts have been translated into English, Ukrainian, Russian, Bulgarian, Czech, Slovenian, Hungarian and Serbian. She has received several academic and editorial awards, both in Poland and abroad.

Klappentext

This is an open access book available on www.peterlang.com and www.oapen.org. All content published can be shared under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0).

Inhalt

Contents

I INTRODUCTION .................................................................................. 10 II CONTEXT AND METHOD .............................................................. 25

PROBLEMS OF CONTEXTS AND RESEARCH METHODS IN

COMPARATIVE STUDIES ......................................................................... 27

The subject of comparative studies ........................................................... 27

Typology of contexts ................................................................................... 29

Contextual analysis as a method of historical comparative studies ..... 34

Contextual comparative analysis of literary texts against the issue

of historicity ................................................................................................. 39

Aims of contextual comparative analysis ................................................. 41 ** III CONTEXT RELATIONS: LESMIAN COUNTERPOSED

WITH LITERARY PREDECESSORS AND CULTURAL

TRADITIONS** .......................................................................................... 45

I CROSS-LITERARY FILIATIONS ............................................................. 46

Literary Mediations (Poe - Baudelaire - Balmont - Lesmian) ............. 48

Poe via the symbolists: searching for sources of Lesmian's

inspirations ........................................................................................... 48

Baudelaire's Poe .................................................................................... 51

Balmont's Poe ....................................................................................... 57

Translative replicas (Poe - Baudelaire - Lesmian) ................................. 64

Poe's tales in Boleslaw Lesmian's translations: sources,

inspirations, replicas ............................................................................ 64

Poe versus Lesmian: outlining the problem ................................ 64

Lesmian and translators: the Genesis of Fascination

with Poe ........................................................................................... 65

Poe translated by Lesmian from Baudelaire ............................... 73

Aesthetic transformations (the aesthetics of death: Poe

• Baudelaire - Balmont - Lesmian) ......................................................... 86

  Ways of representing death ................................................................ 86

  Aestheticizing death ............................................................................ 86

  De-specification and/or alegorization of death ............................... 98

  Macabre aesthetics ............................................................................. 106

  Macabresque aesthetics ..................................................................... 115

  Stylistic and structural influences (symbolist style - the *bylina

• tradition - the early prose work of Lesmian) ........................................ 130

  The Symbolist Style of Boleslaw Lesmian's Early Work

  (illustrated by the case of "Basn o Rycerzu Panskim"

  ["Tale of the Lord's Knight"]) ........................................................... 130

  The lexical layer ............................................................................ 131

  The structural layer ...................................................................... 134

  Creative Inspirations or Influences? .......................................... 144

  II THE INTERCULTURAL HOMOLOGIES .......................................... 146

  The structural reminiscences (demonic female

  characters: Pushkin - Gogol - Lesmian) ............................................... 148

  Not just folklore: on neglected intercultural homologies ............. 148

  The function of female demons in Romantic literature, and

  their transformations in Lesmian's works ...................................... 152

  The anticipation of death: the horror of self-knowledge ........ 152

  The victims and/or avengers: the hell of memory .................... 154

  Initiation into the experience of time: the hell of nature ............. 157

  The grotesque figure of the witch: from Pushkin to Gogol

  and Lesmian .................................................................................. 157

  The Gogol context in Lesmian's "The Witch" ........................... 160

  Grotesque embarrassment .......................................................... 163

  Grotesque reconstruction of the stereotype of femininity ........... 165

  Grotesque disillusion and social roles ............................................ 170

  Metaphorical and parodistic-apocryphal transformations (forms

  of kaliki perekhozhie: Yesenin - Gorodetsky - Lesmian) ..................... 175

  Common cultural traditions? .......................................................... 175

  The three poets' kaliki as protagonist or collective subject .......... 178

  Kaliki of Gorodetsky and Lesmian as parodist and individual

  characters ............................................................................................ 184

  The protagonist on the road ............................................................. 199

  Pilgrimaging kaliki-kaleki? .............................................................. 206

  Homologies or filiations? .................................................................. 208

  Genre and structural modifications, thematic references, lexical

  repetitions (Lesmian's poetry and Ukrainian culture and folklore) ... 211

  Ukrainian culture and folklore in Lesmian's poetry? .................... 211

  Generic and structural modifications ............................................. 213

  Thematic references ........................................................................... 222

  Lexical repetitions ............................................................................. 226

  How many traditions and cultures? ................................................ 229 IV LITERARY FOLLOWERS OF LESMIAN'S POETIC ............. 235

  FROM ALLUSION TO LITERARY STYLIZATION: LESMIAN'S

  INTERTEXT IN CONTEMPORARY POLISH POETRY ..................... 237

  Lesmian: Poet with No Followers? .......................................................... 237

  Parodist and pastiche stylizations ..................................…