Robert Calasso. Literature and the gods (L. Egorova)

Abstract

Review of the collected essays Literature and the Gods (2001), based on Roberto Calasso’s Weidenfeld Lectures at Oxford. As a major theme of his studies, he examines the relation between myth and modern consciousness. Noting the interest in ancient gods, observed since the 19th c., as well as the keenness to generate a ‘new mythology’, Calasso recreates the romantic and post-romantic myth about literature, taking a close look at ‘absolute literature’. The research material was selected from poems and letters by Hölderlin and Mallarmé, Baudelaire’s polemic article Pagan School , Lautreamont’s The Songs of Maldoror , works by Schlegel and Nietzsche, and ancient Indian texts, etc. Among those who traced the progress of absolute literature Calasso names Baudelaire and Proust, Hofmannsthal and Benn, Valéry and Auden, Brodsky and Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva and Yeats, Borges and Nabokov, Calvino and Kundera. Calasso absolutely deserves the name of a master of secret knowledge, and thanks to Anna Yampolskaya the heuristic energy of his artistic and critical thought can finally be experienced in Russian.