Baroque Literature Research Articles

LINGUOPOETIC ANALYSIS OF BAROQUE UKRAINIAN ELEGY "CUPIDO SEU AMOR ALATUS" BY ILARION YAROSHEVYTSKYI

Background. Latin baroque literature of Ukraine represents inheritance and unique interpretation of classical and medieval plots. Ukrainian poets and Ilarion Yaroshevytskyi, in particular, demonstrate their literary mastership and cultural reception of the time. His poem reflects the baroque worldview of distorted world and struggle of good and evil, spirit and flesh, Christian and pagan views, ascetic and secular life. The goal of the article was to conduct in-depth analysis of linguopoetic peculiarities of the poem in order to present the author's embodiment of the baroque worldview by the language means. Methods. The following methods were employed: method of linguostylistic and linguopoetic analysis, method of cultural interpretation, contextual and interpretative method, classification, systematization and generalization. Results. Analysis of the elegiac poem revealed the following linguopoetic peculiarities: 1) at lexical level – the use of mythological names denoting divinities and their epithets (Mars / Gradivus, Venus / Diona / Cypris / Erycina, Artemis, Lar); mythological characters (the Meduse Gorgon, Daedalus and Icarus, Eryx, Charybdis); 2) at syntactic level – parallel constructions / chiasm; inversion of the three types; 3) at stylistic level – direct speech; irony; repepetitions; comparisons; 4) at conceptual level – the oppositions of war and peace; secular and ascetic life; christian and mythological worldviews; spiritual and corporeal love. Conclusion. Latin elegy, represented in a poetic course "Cedrus Apollinis", contributed to the development of the genre in Ukrainian baroque literature and corresponded to the classical Latin samples. The poem demonstrates the author's awareness of mythological and medieval plots and their bizarre combination in elegiac genre.

Response to the article “Olaus Sirman runojen vertailevaa luentaa” [The comparative interpretation of Olaus Sirma’s poems] (SUSA 97, 2019)

The article communicates a possible interpretation of Olaus Sirma's pastoral poem / love song Morse faurog as a part of the European baroque literature. The folklore features of the poem--the so called rhyme anticipation and the irregularity of the metre and the rhythm--may be attributed to the literature of the baroque period as well, and the poem doesn't diverge from the baroque literary conventions. The generic inconsistency, expressed by a hesitation of the lyrical subject, was perhaps intended as a signal for the reader to understand the pastoral as an anagoge.

“Alma, si ciega vas tras tus antojos”: Going Blindly through Seventeenth-Century Literature

Faced with the exaltation of sight as a perfect divine creation, so evident in the Uso de los antojos (1623) by Daza de Valdés, and faced with the satirical–burlesque tone of popular literature, dogmatic theology considered it inappropriate to praise a sense that deviated human understanding and made it difficult to comprehend the sacramental mysteries in depth. Through different fragments of literature produced in seventeenth-century Seville, we will see how the Church constructed, parallel to the scientific and popular discourses, a catechetical rhetoric that sought to deny physical sight and any device intended to enhance or restore it. The idea was to promote a knowledge of God guided by faith, allegorized as a blindfolded woman. Thus, we will see how the glasses and the blindfold capitalized two discourses that could feed back on each other and at the same time evidence the porosity of baroque literature towards the new advances in physics.

Baroque metaphors and Nietzschean influence in Vivaldi Metal Project’s The Four Seasons

In this article I will analyse how a widespread metaphor of Renaissance and Baroque literature, the comparison between the stages of life and the seasons of the year, is updated via a contemporary perspective and transformed through an intertextual relation with Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra in Vivaldi Metal Project’s The Four Seasons. I highlight the strong presence of Baroque aesthetics in symphonic metal and I aim to propose, from a literary perspective, a model for the analysis of the presence and transformation of Baroque elements in this subgenre.

Schauplätze des Künftigen

Abstract The subject of this article are spatiotemporal manifestations of the future as they are formed in various genres of German-language Baroque literature. Using three examples – pastoral (Martin Opitz), religious poetry and hymns (Anna Ovena Hoyers), as well as Trauerspiel (Andreas Gryphius) – the authors examine how imminent, expected, planned, anticipated, or feared states are explored in 17th-century works, i.e., how they are composed processually and medially, and which spaces and places they occupy in each genre.

ПЕРЕКЛАДАЦЬКА МІСІЯ МИКОЛИ ЛУКАША В РОЗВИТКУ УКРАЇНСЬКОЇ ЛІНГВОКУЛЬТУРИ

The relevance of the article is determined by the general focus of translation studies on the research of the heritage, as well as the practice of artistic translation of the Ukrainian theoretician Mykola Lukash. In fact, in translation studies, the author's method of translation of baroque literature in the polysystem of the Ukrainian literature still remains vaguely defined. The analysis of the influence of the translated baroque literature on the creative and life paths of the artisttranslator seems to be promising. The purpose of the study is to reveal Mykola Lukash’s translation mission as a significant figure in the history of the Ukrainian translation and development of Ukrainian language culture. Comprehensive understanding of the history of the Ukrainian literature, as well as its culture and people is not possible without an overall study of the history of the Ukrainian artistic translation, as well as the Ukrainian translation studies in general. The defender of the Ukrainian culture and, in particular, the language, the ascetic translator Mykola Oleksiyovych Lukash, takes a prominent position in the research. Acting as a mediator, the translator M. Lukash explains the incomprehensible, reveals the author to a new community. He often changes the established view of the work as an obvious and complete thing, convinces everyone with a fresh and deeper interpretation, cancels errors of perception. His characteristic was a bold approach to solving difficult translation tasks, he often experimented with linguistic means. The creative legacy of the master of the Ukrainian translation, M. Lukash, has always aroused the increased interest of specialists in his author's innovations, dominant features of the individual style and method of translation of a certain literary direction and genre. Actually, the translation of baroque literature, the specificity of which is the contrast between reality and illusions, heterogeneous combination of the tragic and the comic, the sublime and the vulgar, the terrible and the funny, i.e. the combination of the book and the folk, the sacred and the profane, brought M. Lukash to a completely new level as after the release of these translations, a language revolution took place in the field of professional translation.

Family Resemblance: The Zrínyi Brothers Identities

Brothers Miklós Zrínyi (1620–1664) and Péter Zrínyi (1621–1671) were two significant politicians and poets of the early modern Kingdom of Hungary. They not only succeeded each other as Bans of Croatia (one of the highest positions in the Kingdom), but represent a peculiar chapter in the history of European Baroque literature. Both authors wrote a heroic epic about the history of the siege of Szigetvár in 1566, and the tragic death of their great-grandfather, Miklós Zrínyi. In the nineteenth century, they turned into important figures of the identity discourses in both Croatia and Hungary. This article focuses on two areas where different visions manifested and where the changes in the visions can be documented: the different versions of the genealogy of the family and the linguistic and ideological differences between the two epic poems. Their originally common agendas diverged over time. Péter abandoned his first attempt at translating the epic (which would have closely followed the Hungarian version in many respects), and instead his finished version reflects his new linguistic-poetic agenda, which aimed at the unification and standardization of Croatian dialects. After the death of Miklós, he replaced the legends of Northern descent (propagated by his brother), with those of Illyria. Both revisions served the same aim. Instead of reforming the Hungarian political system, they aimed at establishing an imagined Illyrian community, which shows how these seventeenth-century baroque literary genealogies and epic poems can be seen as precursors to nineteenth century national ideologies.

Hológrafos do século XVII numa miscelânea pessoal de D. Francisco Manuel de Melo

Abstract Not many documents qualify as material evidence of 17th century holographs in Portugal. However, personal miscellanies can provide valuable insight into textual composition and transmission in the literary scene of the time. One of the examples worth exploring is a miscellaneous volume of papers collected by D. Francisco Manuel de Melo (1608-1666), which includes several manuscripts either written by the owner himself or by the hand of fellow contemporary poets. These are clean copies with few or no layers of revision, but still relevant to a certain kind of genetic criticism without drafts (GRÉSILLON, 1993), focused on the interstices of scribal activity and distributed authorship in the early modern period. The article examines little-explored documentation from the national archive Torre do Tombo, thus broadening the scope of genetic studies into the realm of Portuguese baroque literature.

TYPOLOGICAL CONTROVERSY BETWEEN H. SKOVORODA’S POETRIES AND CALDERON DE LA BARCA’S DRAMA “LIFE IS A DREAM”

The article traces the typological controversy of H. Skovoroda’s poetries and Calderon de la Barca’s drama “Life is a Dream” in the context of Baroque literature. The closeness of the artists’ searches and discoveries in their worldview, humanitarian and aesthetic concepts, related with the Baroque era, is evident in the works of Calderon de la Barca and H. Skovoroda. In the foreground, the writers put forward the need for man, whose spiritual world is the arena of the duel between good and evil, to determine the place in the Universe and on Earth. It is emphasized that the main discovery of the philosophy of the Ukrainian artist H. Skovoroda is the problem of man, his happiness and ways to achieve it. In the works of the wandering philosopher, man acts as the measure of all that exists, because before knowing the huge and symbolic world, he must know himself. Skovoroda considered happiness to be the most important thing for a person. Happiness must be built on an unshakable foundation, which is invisibility, it does not depend on either earth or heaven. Each person has his own nature, so you can choose an occupation in “controversy” with this nature. The fate of Calderon, as the creator of baroque aesthetics, is a knot of contradictions of his era. The writer combines philosophical reflections on the meaning of human life, on the search for truth, the place in society, a person’s understanding of himself with ardent propaganda of religious fanaticism and self-denial. Despite the fact that the path of Calderon’s heroes to the realization of the meaning of being is difficult and thorny, full of losses, disappointments and doubts, the writer believes that a person is capable of defeating himself and standing in the face of inexorable fate. The aesthetic ideal of a person, built in his works, led readers and viewers to the awakening of the soul, to productive work on the way to the realization of their hidden possibilities, to the disclosure of the secrets of existence, to the search for truth. The world of symbols and allegories as a vivid reflection of baroque aesthetics brings G. Skovoroda and Calderon de la Barca closer together in the idea that the purpose of man as a social being is to wake up to life, make the world around him better, and move towards the highest absolute.

Symbolic systems of biblical hermeneutics in the plane of poetics of works of ancient Ukrainian literature

The article is devoted to highlighting and analyzing the main types of symbolic systems of biblical hermeneutics in the structure of poetics of works of ancient Ukrainian prose.
 The study emphasizes that the canon of interpretation of the Bible long ago assumed the unequivocalness of statements and the infallibility of the understanding of the text, which was specified and commented on within the limits of hermeneutic teaching. Understanding the Bible was complicated by the co-authorship of God and man, the need to decode the sensus plenior in the Holy Scriptures in parallel with the meaning that the human author put into the Bible, different readings of the word-sign, word-allegory or word-symbol as elements of a separate figure of speech, a passage or the entire text. Biblical hermeneutics proposed as one of the means to eliminate uncertain categories of understanding, the concept of unambiguity within the biblical canon.
 The author made an attempt to use F. de Saussure's structuralist model of the linguistic sign in the inseparable unity of the signifier and the signified as a tool for interpreting biblical texts in the works of Ukrainian baroque literature, as well as the improved triadic system of the sign of Ch. Peirce, where the sign consists of the representamen – the form that the sign takes, and it does not necessarily have to be material, the interpretant, which, regardless of the name, is mostly not an interpretation, but rather a meaning obtained from a sign and gives the sign meaning even in the absence of an interpreter, the object – that which the sign is sent.
 Ancient exegetes considered the complete content of the Bible, i.e. the coherence of its individual parts and books, to be the indisputable intention of God, which cannot be understood outside the sensus plenior. The controversial reading of certain parts of the text of the Holy Scriptures was supposed to be removed by the introduced four-way biblical hermeneutics.

Más aquí… o más allá. La evolución del personaje hagiográfico entre fines del siglo xvi y comienzos del siglo xvii a partir de las primeras biografías piadosas sobre Teresa de Ávila (1590-1609)

The aim of this article is to analyse the evolution of the hagiographic character between the late 16th century and early 17th century, basing itself on study of the first pious biographies of Teresa of Avila (1512-1582). The article focuses on the psychology of the saint in the texts written by the Jesuit Francisco de Ribera (1590) and by the Carmelites Tomás Sánchez Dávila (1606) and Juan de san Pedro y Ustárroz (1609). Proceeding in this way, we can observe that their prose expresses the development of new character traits in the protagonists of the vitae sanctorum. Humanist development gives way to the growing abstraction of Baroque literature, at a time when interconfessional conflicts prompted a redefinition of the figure of the saint within Catholic theology.

КУЛТУРА СВАКОДНЕВНИЦЕ: РЕПРЕЗЕНТАЦИЈЕ ДРУШТВЕНЕ СТВАРНОСТИ У ДУБРОВАЧКОЈ КОМЕДИЈИ ЈЕРКО ШКРИПАЛО

The paper investigates the ways of literary modeling of Dubrovnik cultural patterns in the anonymous play Jerko Škripalo, with the aim of illuminating representations (interpreted in the key of theoretical concepts of contemporary cultural studies) of Dubrovnik social reality, ie elements of intangible and material culture. Analyzing the reflexes of everyday life of Dubrovnik society in the 17th century in the literary world of this play, as well as the oscillation between genre and reality in character formation, points to the spectrum of reality and fiction in the artistic pattern of Dubrovnik anonymous comedies, and their cultural significance in the broader context of Dubrovnik Baroque literature.

Characteristic Features of Galileo’s Scientific Style in His Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Lorraine

This article is carried out within a scientific project supported by the “Zhivaya traditsiya” (Traditioviva) Development Fund and dedicated to a detailed theological and philological analysis and commentary on the translation of the Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Lorraine (1615), which is part of the series of “Copernican Letters” by Galileo Galilei. It was in these letters (besides the letter to Christina, there are also a letter to Benedetto Castelli of 1613 and two letters to Piero Dini of 1615) that Galileo formulated the principles of a new scientific method of understanding the world, referring to the discoveries of Nicolaus Copernicus. In the letter to Christina, the most striking and important of this series and still not translated into Russian, Galileo expounds in particular detail, consistently and fully his position as a natural scientist, parrying reproaches for the incompatibility of his scientific conclusions with the Holy Bible. But Galileo is not only a scientist, theologian and philosopher. He is also known as a man of letters, a writer, a representative of baroque literature and the founder of the scientific style in the Italian language, which deserves special attention. In the Letter to Christina, one can note the characteristic features of Galileo’s scientific style: simplicity of terminology, metaphorical scientific descriptions, emotionality, complex syntax, aggravated by multitiered subordinate clauses, homogeneous subordinate clauses, wide use of gerunds.

스페인 중세 시 『죽음의 무도』에 드러난 사회 비판 연구

The purpose of this study is to analyze the change in social consciousness after the outbreak of the Black Death, which was revealed in the late medieval Spanish poem Danza General de la muerte, and to reflect on its significance. As is well known, the Black Death Pandemic sacrificed nearly a third of Europe''s population between 1347 and 1351, and was taken a significant opportunity to accelerate the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Danza de la muerte as new motif in literature and art that emerged in many European countries after the Black Death, contains sharp social criticism as well as views on life and death changed after the Black Death. In particular, the consciousness of equality of all people in the face of death and the strict judgment of the vested classes who have corrupted or forgotten their duties is remarkable. In that sense, Danza general de la Muerte served as a new milestone in the satirical literature that criticized the hierarchical order and privileged groups of medieval society, and had a great influence on Renaissance and Baroque literature thereafter. Since the Black Death is a representative example of how pandemic played a decisive role in changing the direction of history and the appearance of the times, it is expected to be a reference point when considering the change of direction in the post-COVID-19 era in the future.

A Precious Heritage. The Contribution of Hans Rothe to Slavic Studies

The authors present some of the most important writings of the well-known professor emeritus of Bonn University, Hans Rothe (1928-2021), offering an overview of the main ideas he developed and the methods he applied in his research. Due attention is given to his indefatigable activity as an editor of important, mostly unduly forgotten medieval and early modern texts. His commentary to the first translations of the Bible for many Slavic peoples remains a milestone of Slavic studies. He was a pioneer in fostering research about Slavo-Byzantine liturgical and religious texts, devotional songs, and baroque literature in Russia and Ukraine. No less remarkable are his articles about the Enlightenment and such giants of literature as Lesja Ukrajinka, Deržavin, Puškin and Tolstoj.

Певец граций: галантный Монтескье («Книдский храм» и «Путешествие в пафос»)

The article represents the first academic study of two early Montesquieu’s works — “The Temple of Gnidos” (1725) and “Journey to Paphos” (1727). Under the guise of ancient heroes and gods these “novels with a key” portray real people easily recognizable by contemporaries — the author himself and his entourage. Mixing reality and fiction, Greek and Roman gods, using allegories, Montesquieu creates a “possible impossible world,” characteristic for the Baroque literature of the 17th century. The term was proposed by L. Dolezel, the founder of the theory of “possible worlds,” which allows a deeper understanding of how Montesquieu portrays an ideal world, opposed to the French reality, which he criticizes, as in his first novel “Persian Letters.” However, such features as fragmentation, frivolity, double meaning, hedonism are characteristic of the Rococo aesthetics that took shape in France at the beginning of the 18th century. These features are also inherent to such recognized author’s masterpieces as “Persian Letters” and “The Spirit of Laws” which prove out the unity of his artistic manner. Montesquieu’s early works clearly demonstrate the connection between the Baroque and the Rococo and represent the future author of the “Spirit of Laws” with a completely different side as a “singer of Graces” who contributed to the formation of a new aesthetics.

Carlo Emilio Gadda and the Siglo de Oro: Translation as “open work”

ABSTRACT This article examines Carlo Emilio Gadda's translations of two Spanish texts from the Siglo de Oro. In the first section, by situating Gadda's translations in the context of the “rediscovery” of the Baroque in Italy, his work is presented as the result not only of his literary preferences and long acquaintance with Baroque literature, but also as the product of an activity that fully engages with its contemporary cultural system. In the second section, the goal is to read Gadda's translations through the lens of Umberto Eco's “open work”, a notion that stemmed in part from the same context of rediscovery of the Baroque in the 1950s.

Persia in German Baroque literature—Sa‘dī’s Rose Garden and Adam Olearius’s embassy to Persia

Despite renewed efforts to establish world literature, most of the presently available theoretical models do not provide solid concepts as to the meaning and relevance of this approach. After a critical review of recent publications, this article analyzes a unique and most revealing case, the reception of medieval Persian literature (Sa‘dī) through translations into European languages beginning in the seventeenth century, primarily by the German diplomat, traveler, librarian, philologist, and linguist Adam Olearius. Here we can observe what truly constitutes world literature, with Sa‘dī serving as a major literary inspiration for early modern reflections on virtues and vices, relevant also for Western audiences. He was not a Christian, but the poet’s truly noble ideals were to have a deep impression on his future readers in East and West, especially since the early modern age.

Іvan Vyshenskiy as the representative of the archetypical image of a spiritual man in the Baroque literature

Іvan Vyshenskiy as the representative of the archetypical image of a spiritual man in the Baroque literature

Architecture in Spanish Baroque Literature

Architecture in Spanish Baroque Literature