The Superstitious Muse: Thinking Russian Literature Mythopoetically Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures and History Series Editor: Lazar Fleishman Boston 2009 The Superstitious Muse: Thinking Russian Literature Mythopoetically D D AVID M. M. B ETHEA Copyright © 2009 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-934843-17-8 Book design and typefaces by Konstantin Lukjanov© Photo on the cover by Benson Kua Published by Academic Studies Press in 2009 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA press@academicstudiespress.com www.academicstudiespress.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bethea, David M., 1948- The superstitious muse: thinking Russian literature mythopoetically / David M. Bethea. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-934843-17-8 (hardback) 1. Russian literature — History and criticism. 2. Mythology in literature. 3. Superstition in literature. I. Title. PG2950.B48 2009 891.709—dc22 2009039325 Effective December 12th , 201 7 , this book will be subject to a CC - BY - NC license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by - nc/4.0/. Other than as provided by these licenses, no part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or displayed by any electronic or mechanical means without permission from the publisher or as permitted by law. The open access publication of this volume is made possible by: This open access publication is part of a project supported by The A ndrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book initiative , which includes the open access release of several Academic Studies Press volumes. To view more titles available as free ebooks and to learn more about this project, please visit borderlinesfoundation.org/open Published b y Academic Studies Press 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA press@academicstudiespress.com www.academicstudiespress.com For Kim Contents Preface: David M. Bethea 9 Introduction: Caryl Emerson (Mythopoetics Meets the Living Person: How David Bethea Balances the Body and the Muse) 17 I. Part One: Russian Literature: Background, Foreground, Creative Cognition 1. The Mythopoetic “Vectors” of Russian Literature 27 2. Mythopoesis Writ Large: The Apocalyptic Plot in Russian Literature 41 3. Mythopoesis and Biography: Pushkin, Jakobson, and the Secret Life of Statues 101 4. The Evolution of Evolution: Genes, Memes, Intelligent Design, and Nabokov 127 5. Relativity and Reality: Dante, Florensky, Lotman, and Metaphorical Time-Travel 149 6. Whose Mind is This Anyway? Influence, Intertextuality, and the Legitimate Boundaries of Scholarship 167 II. Part Two: Pushkin the Poet, Pushkin the Thinker 7. Of Pushkin and Pushkinists 185 8. Biography (with Sergei Davydov) 205 9. Pushkin’s Mythopoetic Consciousness: Apuleius, Psyche and Cupid, and the Theme of Metamorphosis in Eugene Onegin 227 10. “A Higher Audacity”: How to Read Pushkin’s Dialogue with Shakespeare in The Stone Guest 249 11. Stabat Pater: Revisiting the “Monumental” in Peter, Petersburg, and Pushkin 265 12. Slavic Gift Giving, the Poet in History, and Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter 281 13. Pushkin’s The History of Pugachev: Where Fact Meets the Zero-Degree of Fiction 301 III. Part Three: Reading Russian Writers Reading Themselves and Others 14. Sorrento Photographs : Khodasevich’s Memory Speaks 323 15. Nabokov’s Style 337 16. Sologub, Nabokov, and the Limits of Decadent Aesthetics 347 17. Exile, Elegy, and Auden in Brodsky’s “Verses on the Death of T. S. Eliot” 363 18. Joseph Brodsky and the American Seashore Poem: Lowell, Mandelstam, and Cape Cod 381 19. Joseph Brodsky’s “To My Daughter” (A Reading) 391 20. Brodsky, Frost, and the Pygmalion Myth 405 Index 421 Note on Transliteration Transliterating modern Russian is always a thorny issue, as any single method (e.g., “Library of Congress”) universally applied is going to create problems with a book’s implied readership. I n the following essays the author has merged two systems in an attempt to recognize the competing needs of the general academic reader and the specialist scholar. I n text as text, whether in the body of the essay or in the footnote, proper names are rendered less formally: “Yury,” not “ I urii,” “Olga,” not “Ol’ga,” “Solovyov,” not “Solov’ev,” “Petrushevskaya,” not “Petrushevskaia”; in text and bibliographical material cited from the Russian, the situation is reversed, and the Library of Congress system (without diacriticals) is used consistently throughout: I urii Lotman, “ I deinaia struktura Kapitanskoi dochki.” When common practice supports a westernized version of a well- known figure’s name, “Tsar Nicholas” for example, I have adopted that version in the text and in the narrative portions of the footnotes. 9. P REFACE Preface First, a disclaimer First, a disclaimer — let us call it a “caveat emptor” statement. — let us call it a “caveat emptor” statement. I trust I am not being coy or self-serving when I say, with my I trust I am not being coy or self-serving when I say, with my conventional WASP upbringing and social instincts, I find it rather awkward to speak in propria persona , to discuss my work “in general,” outside the comfort zone of a book project’s governing concept and shape. Over the years I have said often to colleagues and graduate students that there is no system of ideas, no school or movement, I feel competent to create or, what is probably at some level an analogous response, encourage others to follow. Formalism and structuralism, “secondary modelling systems,” psychoanalysis, Freud, Jakobson, Bakhtin, Bloom, Lotman, Dawkins — these movements and individuals have all provided important grist for my mill, but that grist has always seemed to me to some significant degree insufficient, and this in full knowledge of the fact that, in terms of sheer intelligence, erudition, and conceptualizing ardour, my contributions are small potatoes when placed alongside what has been achieved by these proper names. If someone tells me that he or she admires or has learned something from my work, my initial reaction is embarrassment (obviously not everyone’s intentions are suspect, but what does one do with praise, other than gain some modicum of confidence that perhaps in the given case you got some things right). To those who don’t agree with my premises or how I use them in my books and articles I am also indebted: in many ways you are my ideal readers because I have your negative reactions ringing in mind (“why bother?” “this is not serious”) when I try to formulate something speculative and empirically unprovable. In any event, I am genuinely grateful if anyone reads my work, especially in these times. I have come I have come closest to explaining how I think and how I organize closest to explaining how I think and how I organize ideas and build arguments in the “polemical” introductions to my ideas and build arguments in the “polemical” introductions to my books on Brodsky ( Joseph Brodsky and the Creation of Exile, 1994) and Pushkin ( Realizing Metaphors: Alexander Pushkin and the Life of the Poet , 1998). But these “vectors” were there earlier as well: 10. The Superstitious Muse: Thinking Russian Literature Mythopoetically P REFACE in the thoughts on how Khodasevich used Pushkin ( Khodasevich: His Life and Art , 1983) and in the “structuralism with a human face” (the late Efim Etkind’s phrase) I tried to apply to an alternative tradition and sub-genre of modern Russian prose I called “apocalyptic fiction” ( The Shape of Apocalypse in Modern Russian Fiction , 1989). In each case I was trying to isolate cultural patterns, but then add something to the strict structural component — how the pattern took on flesh and blood, how it entered into historical and biographical context, how it happened once and then changed in the hands (brains) of the next individual or next cultural kin group. In all these instances I have consciously mixed what is purely descriptive, “scholarly” and supposedly “scientific,” with what is not: the use of metaphor, metaphorical thinking, associative leaps in understanding that are colored not simply by logic but also by emotion. Why? The danger of The danger of delving into metaphorical thinking is that you can delving into metaphorical thinking is that you can never be sure the metaphors are not merely your own and that you never be sure the metaphors are not merely your own and that you are offering an “impressionistic” picture of events that might have transpired otherwise. Also, if we take into account — which move is itself a mirage, as the ideas themselves spread into our brains like viruses — recent decades’ pulverizing of the self, the author, and the very concept of intentionality, then what does it matter to address the issue of biography (we can never know what Pushkin was thinking anyway) or the links between biography and cultural artifacts (any attempt to explain how the one interacts with the other is nothing more than a quixotic exercise in putting Humpty- Dumpty back together again). But it seemed to me that, if one read one’s subject carefully enough, and if one tried to focus more on their metaphors (the creation and use of which I will be referring to in these pages as “mythopoesis”) than on one’s own, then the effort did not have to be futile. There was also There was also another important factor affecting my thinking: another important factor affecting my thinking: desire. So much of contemporary discussion and analysis of desire. So much of contemporary discussion and analysis of “desire” in culture is — no mystery here! — a desire-killer. Obviously I am not complaining about how scientists measure what is happening in the brain and elsewhere when someone sees or thinks about something that to them is desirable. No, I am speaking about 11. The Superstitious Muse: Thinking Russian Literature Mythopoetically P REFACE the lit-crit tendency, diagnosed powerfully by people like Mark Edmundson, to assume we have explained something when we look at Shakespeare’s language and descend (the Freudian subterranean episteme), like psychic spelunkers, into the subconscious depths only to reveal what is hidden there. We identify what the desire means through this blindness-reveals-insight activity; we, as it were, explain to Shakespeare what he really meant when he penned such and such. Yet the moment someone trundles in Freudian or Lacanian language, especially Lacanian, which is infinitely able to hide behind its own ambiguity, the desire being discussed is nowhere to be found. As an aside, we should never forget that what to Saussure (and everything that followed out of Saussure) was purely arbitrary, the connection between the signifie ́ and signifiant , was by no means arbitrary in the same way to Darwin (and everything that followed out of Darwin): for the latter natural selection did not have an identifiable end-goal, and yet the adaptations to species that arose over time did so in response to environmental pressures, with the result that the species (if it survived) grew more complex, better able to function in its environment. (Of course it has been eloquently argued by those such as Stephen J. Gould that some organisms, parasites for instance, can evolve by becoming simpler.) Language may evolve, but we can’t say with intellectual honesty that the changes arising in a language make the user of that language more “fit.” When a de Man or a Derrida focuses on the infinite difference-making quality of language, the capacity to refine and refine without capturing a wholeness always in retreat, they are the modern avatars of Saussure. Darwin and the way his followers might look at language as a key factor, but not the only factor, in how Homo sapiens evolves stand outside the Saussurean frame. My idea, which My idea, which as I say I am not confident in calling a methodo- as I say I am not confident in calling a methodo- logy, is to try to track desire as something made up of both logy, is to try to track desire as something made up of both thought (what one wants) and emotion (how much and why one wants it). If, for example, to cite my piece on Pushkin, Jakobson, and the statue-come-to-life motif, we look at (speculate, if you wish) why Pushkin might have experienced such superstitious dread when he created The Stone Guest on the eve of his marriage, 12. The Superstitious Muse: Thinking Russian Literature Mythopoetically P REFACE we come much closer to what was really happening — and a practicing poet like Akhmatova, which is no coincidence in this case, sensed something like this before me — than Jakobson’s brilliant, structurally precise, though (for this reader) sterile classic. In my rendering I try to recoup, inasmuch as this is feasible, the metaphorical logic of Pushkin’s superstitious dread: how it traced back to his youth and early poems (above all The Gabrieliad ), his view of himself as a physical and emotional being, his guilt about his betrayal of beauty (in his Russian way beauty was both an aesthetic and ethical category), and his eerie sense, as he prepared to marry a supreme beauty, that the statues that were on the verge of animation in the play were isomorphic (and isochronic, hence the feeling of mental expansion, of various mythopoetic forms living through you at one time) with the bliss of a statuesque beauty come to life (Natalie) and the fear that the lucky lover must now pay dearly for all those husbands he has “killed” by stealing their wives and making fun of it. Desire needs resistance, abrasion, personal investment, risk, for it to be genuine, not ersatz, desire. It cannot reside in structural terms alone. There is more There is more to the issue of “desire” though, and for me that is to the issue of “desire” though, and for me that is what makes pursuing this line of thought rewarding. Too long we, what makes pursuing this line of thought rewarding. Too long we, including the writer of these lines, have remained in the comfort zone of literary studies, which is now, or has been for some time, morphing steadily into cultural studies. I would not want to say anything invidious about cultural studies: the most I would venture is that the democratizing (if that’s the right word) thrust of the movement has encouraged practitioners to look for patterns outside of “high” culture and “great” authors and cultural figures. There is a significant mixing, of genre, media, cultural layer and audience, taking place that is part and parcel of late postmodernism, or post-postmodernism. Philology, classical literary study, has the reputation, whether deserved or not (personally I suspect deserved), of being stale and stuffy. Theory as it applies to “high” culture seems less in evidence if not totally exhausted, and much of the impetus to look at things cultural these days comes from adjacent disciplines, such as anthropology, history, philosophy, and psychology. 13. The Superstitious Muse: Thinking Russian Literature Mythopoetically P REFACE For the past For the past few years I have been spending part of every spring in few years I have been spending part of every spring in Oxford (UK). This year (2009) is, as many know, the bicentennial of Oxford (UK). This year (2009) is, as many know, the bicentennial of the birth of Charles Darwin. In science, with the possible exception of Einstein’s relativity theory, no discovery has had a greater impact on how we view ourselves in the modern world than natural selection. Darwin’s “finches,” with their different beaks adapted for alternative means of food gathering on the different islands of the Galapagos, have become not only a vivid illustration of this core discovery, that species are not unchanging and designed once and for all by God, but can adapt over time and diverge from a common ancestor under environmental pressures. That discovery has set us on a path that is, curiously, as metaphoric as it is metonymic and taxonomical. Let me explain. Recently I attended in Oxford a lecture by a bright young zoologist who specialized in a small subset of the multitude of bird species found in the Amazon rainforests (in this instance in Peru). The zoologist explained that there were more different species of birds (thousands) in this relatively small area where she had been conducting her research than in any other place on earth. What was fascinating was that the subspecies that the young scientist studied did not communicate with family members or close relatives through any learned bird signals or songs. Apparently, the possibilities for mating were so richly available that the birds never had to depend on anything other than their original inherited “hard-wiring” to produce offspring and get on with their bird lives. But when these same or similar birds were tracked north and found on other continents with less inviting habitats, which meant that the competition for mates was more demanding, the birds that produced vocal signals only through genetic coding morphed into birds that were capable of learning signals and songs from parents. This may not be anything to write home about for the scientists that study birds at the level of my young zoologist, but the message is clear for those of us who try to make sense of culture, including literature. Biologically, learning begins as the need to find a mate in more competitive circumstances. However, there is a quantum leap between one’s genes telling one’s brain to find a way to replicate themselves and the “culture” (because those birds that learn from parents to sing in a certain way are 14. The Superstitious Muse: Thinking Russian Literature Mythopoetically P REFACE participating in a rudimentary form of culture) that produces Dante’s Commedia . Rote learning, as we move higher and higher up the taxa (or further and further laterally across the taxa, as Darwin- Gould might say), becomes learning imbued with ever increasing desire, not simply with the sex drive per se, which we must assume is an evolutionary constant, but with the sort of value added that produces, in the right time-space, a Commedia or a Hamlet or a Eugene Onegin . That is why we need, on the cultural side, more attention paid to how metaphorical thinking actually works, when looked at in all the striations (Mandelstam actually compares it to trying to run across a jagged watery football field of Chinese junks) of its historical dimensionality. Broadly speaking, what Broadly speaking, what I mean by “mythopoesis” is how the poetic I mean by “mythopoesis” is how the poetic impulse creates and is created by story. When I discuss questions impulse creates and is created by story. When I discuss questions of tradition and group perception, such as my studies of apo- calyptic thinking in Russian literature, the focus is more on the transmission and modification of large cultural patterns. Individual biography, while not disappearing entirely, by necessity takes a back seat. The focus, however, shifts and the understanding of how the poet uses his own biography becomes central when we begin to examine individual instances. Pushkin, for if there was ever anyone genetically and culturally wired up to be a poet it was he, did not make a practice of collecting fully rounded off stories into which he then inserted himself, disguised as this or that character, in his artistic works. The process didn’t operate that simply or crudely. Rather, he adopted for himself certain signature mythoi — Pygmalion, Psyche and Cupid, Prodigal Son, Virgin Mary, Arion, etc. — fragments of which he would use from time to time to tell the story of his pilgrim soul’s progress. It is important to note that the specific work that grows out of the mythopoetic nexus does not suggest the entire story is being lived through from beginning to end. Pushkin was smart enough, and constantly challenged enough by the harsh facts of his and others’ existence, not to give himself wholly to any one explanation for his being. Most of the time his use of these plot fragments involves metamorphosis, a change his heart desires but makes known to itself as something difficult, fraught with obstacles, often potentially tragic obstacles. The part of the 15. The Superstitious Muse: Thinking Russian Literature Mythopoetically P REFACE Pygmalion story Pushkin uses for his own purposes at a specific point in his life is the need to create beauty and be loved by beauty at the same time, when it is clear to the beauty-maker that his enterprise is not inherently worthy of anything, especially the love of a beautiful creature for the person he really is. The Psyche and Cupid plot gave Pushkin the opportunity to try to understand what happens on the female side (the proverbial “what women want”) when eros is experienced fully and for the first time. The Prodigal Son parable was what came to mind in connection with the deep need to be forgiven for past profligacy by the Good Father. And so on. These moments of great need drew Pushkin to try to imagine what exactly it was he was living through, and then these stories, or the parts of them that mattered, provided the best available answer, which itself became the words on a page we love. But because Pushkin was so through and through a poet, the process seemed to work both ways: it could also be that he was sitting and playing with the sound of words and then the mythic traces surfaced (the poln / voln , “full”/“waves” rhyme pair runs through a number of his 1820’s poems about his own creative thinking, and makes the “pregnancy of thought/inspiration” idea and the “romantic element of water/birth” idea a logical starting point for Peter’s creation myth — “Na beregu pustynnikh voln / Stoial on, dum velikikh poln ” [On the shore of the desolate waves / He stood, full of great thoughts] — by the time we get to The Bronze Horseman ). The point is both these tendencies were firing off each other at great speed and intensity. The essays in The essays in this volume are divided into three parts: a more this volume are divided into three parts: a more conceptual first part, a second part devoted to similarly conceived conceptual first part, a second part devoted to similarly conceived articles on Pushkin, and a third part focusing on how other writers (Khodasevich, Nabokov, Brodsky) read themselves and others. In general, while I composed these articles over a thirty year period with no conscious intention to house them under one conceptual roof, it seems to me that they do somehow “belong together.” In the beginning of the first and second parts I decided to include pieces of a broader framing nature, studies that would address the questions “How can we look at Russian literature mythopoetically?” and “Can this mythopoetic tendency be tracked through history along one major current (apocalypse)?” (Part One); “How can we 16. The Superstitious Muse: Thinking Russian Literature Mythopoetically P REFACE organize the history of Pushkin studies?” and “What are the primary contours of Pushkin’s biography that would be relevant for a study like this?” (Part Two). The idea was that the information provided in these pieces would make some of the more speculative arguments in the later essays more plausible and “load-bearing.” Although I have added new material in some places, cut in others, and where appropriate tried to bring the older pieces up to date, there is only one completely new essay: “The Evolution of Evolution: Genes, Memes, Intelligent Design, and Nabokov.” For what it is worth, I consider this latter contribution an important (to me) later statement of how I perceive these matters and in that respect something the volume needs and would be much less representative without. Finally, when I did return to an older piece, as for example my 1980 essay on Khodasevich’s Sorrento Photographs , I tried as a rule not to “write over” my previous self and start an entirely new and uncomfortably coy meta-dialogue with what has transpired in the secondary literature in the intervening years. While I’m a great fan of structures that seem to live and breathe on their own and to continue to create their own future as it were, a signature poem by Pushkin being a prime example, I also have no desire to get in the last word, since I do believe our larger role as teachers and servers of knowledge is to build on others and to make ourselves available for others to build on us. To all those To all those readers who have helped me knead my ideas into readers who have helped me knead my ideas into shape over the years, I thank you. I am especially grateful in the shape over the years, I thank you. I am especially grateful in the present instance to Caryl Emerson, who took time from a very full schedule to write an Introduction for this volume, and to Andrew Reynolds, my dear colleague at Madison, who has looked at (and proofread) this project in its various incarnations and who has been an ideal interlocutor and source of helpful information as I have attempted to think through the project's many challenges and issues. Any inadequacies in the following pages, and inadequacies of various stripes there will be despite one’s good intentions, are entirely my own. Madison/Oxford March 2009 17. Mythopoetics Meets the Living Person: How David Bethea Balances the Body and the Muse C ARYL E MERSON The entries in The entries in this volume cover a huge amount of territory, but this volume cover a huge amount of territory, but even so represent only a portion of David Bethea’s wide-ranging even so represent only a portion of David Bethea’s wide-ranging interests over the past three decades. One figure will serve as portal into these selected essays, arguably the fulcrum and in- spiration for Bethea’s mythopoetics: Alexander Pushkin. The shade of that great poet hovers over Bethea’s other perennial companions: Vladimir Nabokov, Vladislav Khodasevich, Joseph Brodsky, Gavrila Derzhavin. From this magical zone of Russian writers with Pushkin at its core, one question will be central. How, and through what charmed intermediaries, does a poet create and then continue to live? The two prongs The two prongs of that question, primary creativity and post- of that question, primary creativity and post- humous life, address with equal urgency the poet (life as well humous life, address with equal urgency the poet (life as well as work) and the responsibility of the poet’s “recuperators.” The professional behavior of this latter category of cultural servant — the biographer, literary critic, cultural historian, editor, textologist, secondary or tertiary commentator — is deeply important to Bethea. Himself a master at close readings in biographical context (one third of the essays in this collection are happy evidence of this skill), he disavows any single method. To be sure, a distinguished group of theorists and cultural critics do serve Bethea as recurrent reference points: Harold Bloom, Sigmund Freud, Roman Jakobson, Mikhail Bakhtin, Yury Lotman, even in passing the “continentals” Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Helene Cixous. All are suggestive and all are found inadequate. But Bethea’s own voice, or better his own “mythopoetic critical consciousness,” cannot be traced back to any of them. Some hints are provided, however, in the way he circles warily around Pushkin. We can extract these hints from the opening paragraphs of one essay included here, on metamorphosis in Eugene Onegin I NTRO 18. I NTRO Mythopoetics Meets the Living Person: How David Bethea Balances the Body and the Muse, C ARYL E MERSON In that essay, In that essay, Bethea applauds Pushkin’s instinctive move to mask Bethea applauds Pushkin’s instinctive move to mask the personal, and especially the painfully intimately personal, the personal, and especially the painfully intimately personal, through two means. The first is lived experience through the con- cept of a code of honor. The second, operative in his poetic per- sona, is through “genre consciousness,” that is, an awareness of what sort of message a given literary form can and should trans- mit. Writing about Pushkin and other poets, Bethea will scrupu- lously respect these constraints. Allow one’s subject matter to breathe, to hide its face, to drape and mystify itself. Be attentive to “vectors”: the poet’s use of multiple points of view, for example, to complicate his own subjective perspective or to organize a fic- tional world that is alive on its own terms. (These terms are differ- ent for each genre, of course, and part of the genius of Pushkin is his ability to challenge the reader to identify which type of world is in force.) But inevitably the critic is drawn to those subjective mo- ments in a poet’s lived experience that are “fraught with certain life choices and heightened by fear and anxiety.” 1 At those times the pressure is on to save one- self, or find oneself, through one’s creativity. This risk-laden, heated-up This risk-laden, heated-up terrain is Bethea’s terrain is Bethea’s point of departure. But his concerns are not point of departure. But his concerns are not solely for the life of the poet. Our own lives and livelihoods also hang in the balance. Bethea has long sought analogies between the incipient creative spark born in the poet’s imagination and the creative vision painstakingly reassembled by the poet’s disciples and later by scholars, who strive to keep the most vital parts of their hero alive by judiciously re-animating them from outside or from beyond. Guidelines here are intuitive and few. Bethea address- ed just this problem in his 2004 keynote address to the AATSEEL Annual Convention: “Whose Mind is This Anyway?” — with a subtitle naming the more slippery components of the answer: “Influence, In- tertextuality, and the Boundaries of Legitimate Scholarship.” In that speech, Bethea examined Yury Lotman’s recuperation of Karamzin and Pushkin as acts almost of “co-creation,” analogous to the in- tentional risks taken by Pushkin to re-animate his own life at cru- cial junctures, especially the feverishly productive Boldino autumn of 1830 preceding his marriage and his debut in prose. Bethea ex- 1 See Chapter 9 of the present volume, “Pushkin’s Mythopoetic Consciousness: Apuleis, Psyche and Cupid, and the Theme of Metamorphosis in Eugene Onegin ,” 228. 19. Mythopoetics Meets the Living Person: How David Bethea Balances the Body and the Muse, C ARYL E MERSON plains that it is practically impossible to catch Pushkin, perfect poet, speaking directly of himself. The scholar in search of Pushkin’s au- thenticity must look elsewhere for intent: at his superstitions, his love objects, the moments of sudden, Pygmalion-like metamorpho- sis that he sets up or (when they happen by chance) that he ac- cepts and instantly incorporates into his fate. Or as Bethea puts the matter in lapidary fashion, we can glimpse the poet as human be- ing and not as a literary pose in two exemplary situations: by the “authenticity of what one wishes for in one’s unhappiness coming to life,” and by “the sort of love that doesn’t question the past or the motives of the supplicant.” 2 In terms of the inti- mate access required, this is a staggering agen- da. What are the proper tools to bring to such a project? Which methods are decent, which inva- sive and indecent? How might scholarly critics ac- knowledge their own subjectivity (for to deny it, however we aspire to the ideals of an objective science, is surely fraudulent in all but the most quantified study of metrics or external biographical fact), while at the same time not obscuring the poet with our own pas- sionately needy face? Bethea’s theater of Bethea’s theater of operations, like Lotman’s, can be vast. In his en- operations, like Lotman’s, can be vast. In his en- try on Literature in Nicholas Rzhevsky’s 1998 try on Literature in Nicholas Rzhevsky’s 1998 Cambridge Cambridge Companion Companion to Modern Russian Culture to Modern Russian Culture (excerpted here as chapter 1 of Part One), he posits nine “vectors” that govern the “ecosystem” of the Russian literary semiosphere. Perhaps Bethea’s most ambitious attempt to objectivize the critical impulse is that phase of his research invok- ing the ancient, impersonal tropes of metamorphosis and apocalypse, two chronotopic changes of state that would appear to function above the level of personal agency. But this is a smokescreen, for the person of the poet and the anguish of the critic who loves the poet are nev- er wholly muffled or displaced. Again and again, Bethea returns to the problem, or the challenge, of intentionality and creative autonomy. If Harold Bloom has remained vital in Russian criticism during the last two decades, it is largely thanks to Bethea’s continued willingness to interrogate and circulate his terms. By and large Bethea does not ap- prove of Bloom’s suspicious, imperious, quasi-Freudian categories and invokes them as cautionary or negative examples — but he does 2 See chapter 6 of the present volume, “Whose Mind is This Anyway? Influ- ence, Intertextuality, and the Legitimate Boundaries of Scholarship,” 182. I NTRO