A Monument to a Scientific Error: Revisiting Vysotsky’s Version of James Cook’s Death

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.22455/2541-8297-2024-34-270-281
EDN:

https://elibrary.ru/ORTSGI
УДК / UDK: 821.161.1.0
Issue:

2024. no. 4 (34) 
Author: Alexander K. Zholkovsky
About the author:

Alexander K. Zholkovsky, PhD in Philology, Professor, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA.

E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Abstract:

In his recent analysis of Vladimir Vysotsky’s song “A Scientific Puzzle, or Why Did the Aboriginals Eat Up James Cook” (New Literary Observer, 2018) the author identifies a methodological shortcoming: the formulation of the song’s theme does not fully reflect the dominant role of the properties of monorhyme in the text’s design. The article revises these aspects of the previous description and discusses the broader lessons of such a self-heuristic approach. As a result, the song's message appears, in the context of Vysotsky’s poetic world, as a farcical variation on the bard’s central invariant: “confrontation between an independent protagonist (a man, poet, athlete, wolf) and an aggressive mass of antagonists (boors, censors, opponents, hunters) who try to corner and destroy him.” The song’s protagonist, James Cook, is besieged not only by hungry cannibals but also by supposedly convincing reasons for an attempt on his life, three of which are stated in the text, while one remains implicit, yet is undeniable, consisting, as it does, of a chain of monorhymes — akin to the “flags” in Vysotsky’s “Wolf Hunt” — through which he cannot break loose. Thus, the monorhyme functions as an iconic projection of this structural-semantic construction. The article’s dedication to the memory of Andrei Nemzer is motivated by the history of the scholarly dialogue between the author and his esteemed late colleague.
Keywords: Vladimir Vysotsky, James Cook, Pareto principle, literary analysis, testing, revision, monorhyme, puzzle, theme (message), variations, poetic world, iconicity, performance.
For citation:

Zholkovsky, A.K. “A Monument to a Scientific Error: Revisiting Vysotsky’s Version of James Cook’s Death.” Literaturnyi fakt, no. 4 (34), 2024, pp. 270–281. (In Russ.) https://doi.org/10.22455/2541-8297-2024-34-270-281
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