Abstract
The article explores the phenomenon of pygmalionism, defined as passion for a statue or a doll (or, in a broader sense, an artificially manufactured body), which has been widely encountered in the Western literary tradition. Analysis starts with an episode from John R. Fowles’s novel “The Magus” depicting a puppet for love. The article further investigates into the origins of the topos in antiquity (Ovid) and its most colorful representations in Western culture (the romance of Tristan and Iseult, Western European and Russian literature of the 16th–20th centuries). An assumption is made about typological similarity between the strategies of semantization in pygmalionism and mystical experience.
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