Russian neurotic poetry
The SPbU Representative Office in Spain invites you to an online lecture on "Russian neurotic poetry," given by Nikolay Karpov, Associate Professor at the Department of the History of Russian Literature at the SPbU Faculty of Philology.
Philological scholarship, and indeed cultural consciousness as a whole, tends to accept the artist’s words rather uncritically. This attitude to the author’s word as unquestionably authoritative arose first within the culture itself and was later adopted by literary criticism tradition.
Post-structuralism, as exemplified by Paul de Man, suggests a radical way of looking at literature. It argues that a text, at its core, often contradicts its own content. From this viewpoint, the text is no longer a unified whole guided by the author’s intentions. Instead, it becomes a complex structure with various parts that might not align with each other.
When we analyse a text from a mental and psychological perspective, seeing it as a reflection of human thought, de Man’s idea can be reinterpreted. The hidden, psychological content of the text, which the author might not even be aware of, can challenge and change its intended meaning. The more the author tries to infuse the text with strong ideological messages or intense emotions, the more the text may stray from their original intentions. The "unconscious" aspects of the text resist the author’s control, making them more vulnerable to unexpected interpretations.
During our upcoming lecture, we will explore how the concept of the unconscious has been studied in literature over the past decades. We will also discuss which texts are commonly referred to as "neurotic" and why.
Lecturer
Nikolay Karpov graduated from the Philology Faculty of St Petersburg University in 1998. He completed his postgraduate studies in 2001 and successfully defended his PhD thesis on the work of Nabokov in 2002. Afterward, he worked as a junior research fellow at the Pushkin House, Institute for Russian Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 2005, he was appointed as an Associate Professor. Since 2003, he has been teaching the history of Russian literature and Russian emigrant literature at St Petersburg University.
Dr. Karpov is a laureate of the St Petersburg University Prize in the category "For Fundamental Achievements in Science" for his monograph "Romantic Contexts of Nabokov." He has also lectured and taught courses at universities in Germany, Spain, Italy, and China. Additionally, he is the author of 49 academic and educational publications.
His research interests include Russian literature of the first half of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Russian emigrant literature, textual criticism, source criticism, intertextual analysis, Russian satire and humour of the first half of the 20th century, and psychological aspects and methods in the study of literature.
The lecture will be streamed online in Russian with simultaneous translation into Spanish as part of the celebration of the 300th anniversary of SPbU — Russia’s oldest university.