Описание:By way of interpretative and comparative play with pairs of classical texts from both traditions we shall explore patterns of literary imagination in what throughout the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries was considered (and considered itself) the cultural periphery of the European world.
What did writers and poets make of the “artless, unenhanced” condition of their “land of living” (R. Frost)? Of potential yet untapped, of the capacity to be “extravagant” (H.D. Thoreau), of the courage at times to “come to a real verge” (D.H. Lawrence)? Also - of provincial limitations, obsession with mimetic desires? What do (the imaginative works of) Irving and Gogol have to say – to each other and to us, today - about the seductiveness and dangers of dreaming? Or those of Hawthorne and Chernishvesky –– about the virtues and risks of utopian communitarianism? Melville and Tolstoy –– about the experience of sociality? Melville and Dostoevsky –– about the paradoxes of mental underground? Whitman and Mayakovsky –– about defiant individualism going “En-Masse”? Stevens and Blok –– about radicalism aesthetic and political? Kerouac and Yerofeev about the opportunities and dead ends on the open road?