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- Abstract:
The article can be regarded as a very belated response to Rostislav Schultz's book “Pushkin and the Knidian myth”. The term “Knidian myth”, originally used to designate the storyline of the legends about the lovers of Aphrodite of Knidus, is treated in Schultz’s book as “the myth of the separation of man and woman by a supernatural force". The article deals only with a complex of subjects about a human's love for a statue or a statue’s love for a human and makes an attempt to trace transformations of the mentioned subjects in the literature of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Formed in the beginning of Christian era, having received a new development in medieval miracle plays, the plot of the statue of Venus entered the literature of the 19th century being quite recognizable and underwent curious metamorphosis. In the era of fascination with mechanical miracles and attempts to create a perfect automatic android, the plot of a jealous, destructive statue transformed into a plot of the destructive doll, absorbing the satirical tradition of mechanistic anatomy and the unfolded metaphors of "worldly doll" and "dollishness" of the world. At this intersection both statues and androids, refracted in the prism of romantic philosophy, acquired new literary connotations, the trail of which can be traced in literature to the present day.
- Keywords: literature of romanticism, animated statue, doll, automaton-android, plot theory.
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Tatyana A. The Nutcracker and the Cnidian myth (Statues, dolls and machines in Romantic literature). Literary fact, 2018, no. 8, pp. 176–195.
- References:
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