dwells on questions of public
ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN. “PETERSBURG” ANDREI BELOGO
About Andrei Bely himself. He is too shaky and unbalanced to write a balanced work. In his unbridled fantasies themselves – unhealthiness, mental shift. Or rather: his peace of mind – “Almost everyone is sick.” And all his characters are so distorted as if he cannot imagine anything healthy. His own, even decadently cultivated, soreness manifests itself many times in the novel. And bizarrely anecdotally, he expresses himself in Nikolai Apollonovich: he spent a week at home in a black masquerade mask (in reality, there was a tiff with L. D. Blok) and “wanted to appear in a domino of flame color, in a mask, with a dagger in his hand”. So, Dudkin said: “I was not in love with any of the women: I was in love with separate parts of the female body, with toiletries, and stockings.” Bely himself writes: “I went through a disease where Friedrich Nietzsche, the magnificent Schumann and Hölderlin, fell into madness”. Continue reading
English theater of the era of Shakespeare
Along with the development of dramatic poetry in England, the stage production of plays was also improved. The great importance of Shakespeare’s dramas arouses interest in the design of the theater in his time. The knowledge of the stage situation is necessary for understanding the drama of Shakespeare, as the dramas of Sophocles and Euripides become clear only with the knowledge of the structure of the Greek theater. The English drama, like the Greek, is derived from religious plays. The Catholic Church allowed a comic element in the mysteries and morals; Reformation did not tolerate it. England adopted Calvinism in a gentle form given to him by the government. Continue reading
Two crosses of Konstantin Batiushkov
This year marks the 230th anniversary of the birth of Konstantin Nikolaevich Batyushkov (1787–1855) and the 200th anniversary of the release of his only book, the two-volume book Experiments in Verse and Prose (1817). An outstanding personality – bright, heroic and tragic – the Russian poet Konstantin Batiushkov occupied a special place in the history of Russian literature. Pushkin considered him one of his teachers in poetry, recognized the works of Batiushkov as a poetic miracle and in this sense called him a “wonderworker”. Continue reading
