Acknowledgements
This article was supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, grant no 18-512-23002 (2018–2021).
Abstract
The essay focuses on the interrelated phenomena of literary cult and cultic text. Bearing on the conceptual ideas of Sergey Zenkin and Péter Dávidházi, we problematize the boundaries between text and cults on the example of two case studies. One has to do with a recent interpretation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a nineteenth-century bestseller novel that had a great impact on literary and political life of the United States in the antebellum period. David S. Reynolds argues that Ulyanov-Lenin’s escape from the Finnish mainland by breaking his way on the broken ice of the river to an island might have been inspired by Uncle Tom’s Cabin where a fugitive slave Eliza does exactly the same thing. This essay suggests seeing this random encounter of the East and the West, the fictional and the “real” not as а curious anecdote or coincidence but as a mechanism of inventing a cultic text. What happens when one of the prominent figures of the European historical narrative, the crown prince assassinated in 1914, reads the works of the Russian poet before the fatal day in Sarajevo? Milorad Pavić building his short story Prince Ferdinand Reads Pushkin upon recognizable allusions to Pushkin’s texts, highlights similarities and differences, the fatal and the accidental in the stories of the poet shot in the duel and the Austrian crown prince being a victim of an assassination — two intersective storylines that may be described as “isomorphic plots.”
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