Information about the author:

Abstract:

The issue of the female worldview is one of the most important in critical prose and poetry of Annensky. He saw the discrepancy between male and female worldviews as an inexhaustible source of tragic experience for world culture. His articles “The Tragedy of Hippolytus and Phedra”, “The Dying Turgenev. Klara Milich”, and “Symbols of Beauty in Russian Writers” explore the “reflections” of heroines by Euripides, Turgenev, Pushkin, and others. Annensky challenges the classics in their understanding of female beauty and warmly welcomes the work of modern women poets, who are capable of redressing the situation with the embodiment of female passion in literature (“On Modern Lyricism”). Annensky delves into the “problem of the female soul” in his final book of poetry “The Cypress Casket”. The exploration of this theme is often accompanied by the artistic technique of disrupting the boundaries between the real and the fantastic. Women suffer because culture fails to find “signs” of higher spirituality in their natural impulses (“A Stream of Mignonette in a Dark Carriage”). Dreams, hallucinations, nightmares, and ghosts in “The Nightmare Trefoil”, “The Phantom Trefoil”, and “The Paper Trefoil” sharpen the author’s thought about the impossibility of rationally suppressing the natural sexual attraction in order to conform to generally accepted models and ideals. In general, it was precisely in the male consciousness’s rejection of direct contact with the “world of things,” in its aspiration to the realms of pure spirit, that Annensky found the main reason for the endless tragedy of his contemporaries’ worldview. Psychologizing the female soul, which retains a stronger connection with nature and the surrounding reality, seemed to him a pressing need not only for art but also for the transformation of life itself.

Keywords: I. Annensky, literary critical articles, “Books of Reflections”, “The Cypress Casket”, female, male.