The Department of Russian and Slavic Studies (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) invites you to the guest lecture
“Between Rapture and Terror: On the Evolution of Pushkin’s Muse”
by ALYSSA DINEGA GILLESPIE

Thursday, December 16, 2021, 18:30 Jerusalem | 11:30 New York | 17:30 Paris | 19:30 Moscow

ZOOM: https://huji.zoom.us/j/86702115258?pwd=M0RpbmIzeGV6Y3ZIYnB0bjlvWk1hZz09

The origins and psychodynamics of human creativity are a mystery that various cultures have tried to explain in diverse ways, going back to the inspiring Muse of the ancient Greeks. That classical figure was rediscovered and repurposed in the
era of Romanticism, when the cult of artistic genius held sway—including in the writings of the “father of Russian literature,” Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837). Yet, although significant scholarly attention has been given to the mythopoetic aspect of Pushkin’s creative genius (by R. Jakobson, B. Gasparov, S. Senderovich, D. Bethea and others), the myth of the inspiring muse that lies at the heart of his poetic mythology has largely been overlooked.
This talk will argue that, from an early age, Pushkin’s invocations of the muse show that he intuited the potential costs and risks of following his creative genius wherever it might lead. Much like the ancient Greek daemon or the Spanish and Latin American duende, Pushkin’s ambivalent muse embodies both erotic desire and fatal danger. The forces of darkness and light, Eros and Thanatos are simultaneously present for him in the imperative to create. These characteristics emerge more clearly in his narrative works than in his lyric poetry, where the muse figure remains, at least superficially, conventional. A pivotal text is the eighth chapter of Pushkin’s famous novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin, where he explicitly identifies the heroine Tatiana as his own muse. Several key attributes of Pushkin’s muse drawn from this portrayal are then traced through later works, including The Bronze Horseman, A Feast in the Time of Plague, and The Queen of Spades. In these texts, the muse emerges as an overpowering force, both seductive and destructive. Increasingly abstract and threatening, she is a force of nature or an implacable divinity with the power to obliterate her worshipper; ultimately, she becomes synonymous with death. Appreciating this metamorphosis of Pushkin’s muse brings new insight into the anxiety, mystery, and psychic toll of his life in poetry—an understanding that clashes markedly with conventional and official views of his supposedly carefree nature.

ALYSSA DINEGA GILLESPIE has been employed as Associate Professor of Russian at the University of Notre Dame and Bowdoin College, USA. She is the author of A Russian Psyche: The Poetic Mind of Marina Tsvetaeva (2001; Russian translation, 2015), Pushkin’s Poetic Imagination (in Russian, 2021), and numerous scholarly articles on Brodsky, Gorky, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Tsvetaeva, and others; she is also the editor of Taboo Pushkin: Topics, Texts, Interpretations (2012). In addition to her scholarly work, Gillespie is an award-winning translator of Russian poetry. Among her current projects are a monograph on Pushkin titled Dangerous Verses: Alexander    Pushkin and the Ethics of Inspiration, and a collection of her translations of Tsvetaeva’s verses.