2019 Issue №4

Our comparative study focuses on Mickiewicz’s Saint Petersburg poems (Part III of Dzyady, 1832) and Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman (1833). We explore the eschatological figurativeness of the two texts and the eccentricity, as Yuri Lotman put it, of the Saint Petersburg space. We conclude that Mickiewicz’s eschatology of Saint Petersburg is linked to the biblical myth of Babylon. Nominal rhetorical detachment permeates his perception of the Saint Petersburg flood. Pushkin’s position consists of two elements: the presence of a bystander in the text and compassion for Evegenii who falls victim to the flood. Pushkin combines an apologetic statist perception of ‘Peter’s own creation’ with tragic existential realisation of the neglected state, in which the ‘little man’ lives in the Saint Petersburg space.

In this article, I investigate the poetics of the novel The buried giant by Kazuo Ishiguro and consider artistic images that tend to actualise mytho­logical poetics in the literary text. I pay particular attention both to the re-creation of elements of mythological origin in the context of the novel and to new semantic meanings emerging through the reconsideration of the myth in the mind of the author. I address the problem of defining the genre of the novel, which has not yet received a single identification in the literature. My analysis shows that, in the novel, mythopoetics is a means to create a metaphorical image of reality. The theme of the text and its key motifs are most fully expressed in the complex interactions among links existing within this reality.

Using the rock opera Orpheus and Eurydice (1975) and Hip-hopera: Orpheus & Eurydice (2018), we analyse interpretations of the ancient myth in today’s popular culture. We demonstrate how the plot and motif transformations of the pre-text bridge the gap between history and modernity. In both the rock opera and the hip-hopera, the ancient theme of descent into the kingdom of the dead in the name of love merges with its semiotic double: the neo-mythological plot about the symbolic death of the Creator under the yoke of profane mass culture. We explore how the ideology of the rock and rap subcultures affects the general semantics of the new myth of ‘mass culture Hades’. We consider secondary semiotisation of the concepts of contemporary musical culture in terms of archaic models of thinking. The revision of the mythological plot by assigning to it relevant sociocultural meanings is viewed as an experience of aesthetic legitimation of a work of mass art and its inclusion in a broader cultural context.