Suchergebnisse

In this article Aaron Beaver analyzes two elegies written by Joseph Brodsky—one for his father ("Pamiati ottsa: Avstraliia") and one for his mother ("Mysl' o tebe udaliaetsia …"). The point of departure is Brodsky's appropriation of the genre from his Silver Age predecessors (Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandel'shtam, Marina Tsvetaeva), as made evident in a number of Brodsky's well-known essays. Beaver's central thesis is that Brodsky reshapes the elegy by centering it not on the death of the loved one but on time. Brodsky is inspired in this endeavor by his Silver Age forebears, but he extends their poetic practice into more philosophical territory. Specifically, close reading of Brodsky's two elegies exposes a model of time consistent with the temporal idealism elaborated by Jean- Paul Sartre inBeing and Nothingness.Based on this exegesis Beaver ventures to generalize about the nature of lyricism in Brodsky's verse, arguing that it is inseparable from his philosophical assumptions.

In this essay, Aaron Beaver argues that the poetry of Gavrila Derzhavin routinely and consistently connects metaphysical beliefs with moral ones, and that, at its most sophisticated, this connection amounts to a full "metaphysics of morality" much like that developed by Derzhavin's contemporary, the philosopher Immanuel Kant. Beaver begins by exploring Derzhavin's belief in the immortality of virtue; he then examines how Derzhavin's famous monument poems assert the poet's immortalitybecausehe verbally pays tribute to those who are virtuous; finally he analyzes Derzhavin's 1797 poem "Bessmertie dushi," in which the poet realizes the connection between the immortality of the soul and morality. The latter part of the article examines Derzhavin's poetic expression of this connection in light of Kant's two postulates of the moral law—the immortality of the soul and the existence of God—and finds that Derzhavin's poetry expresses a similar position with genuine philosophical rigor.