Yuri Slezkine - The Cult of National Literary Genius in European Cultures

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Some nations are organized around written compilations of oral traditions: the Jewish Tanakh, the Indian Mahabharata and Ramayana, the Finnish Kalevala, the Estonian Kalevipoeg, the Kyrgyz Manas, the Mongolian Secret History, the Icelandic Eddas, and many others. Some were written by known authors (Elias Lönnrot in the case of Kalevala, Reinhold Kreutzwald in the case of Kalevipoeg, Snorri Sturluson in the case of the Prose Edda), but all are celebrated as mostly oral in origin.

 

Some national epics are represented as sacred stories written by sacred bards (and are venerated accordingly, as combinations of texts and authors). Among them are Homer's The Iliad, Shota Rustaveli's The Knight in a Panther's Skin (in Georgia), Ferdowsi's Shahnameh (in the Persian world), Njegoš's The Mountain Wreath (in Serbia and Montenegro), Gjerj Fishta's Lahuta e Malcis (in Albania), Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji (in Japan), and Nguyễn Du's The Tale of Kiều (in Vietnam). Most were written in imitation of oral traditions or illustrious predecessors (themselves based on oral traditions). Virgil's The Aeneid as the foundational text of ancient Rome was conceived as a sequel to The Iliad; Camões's Os Lusíadas as the foundational text of modern Portugal was conceived as a sequel to The Aeneid. Some, such as Dante's Divine Comedy and Cervantes's Don Quixote, were not meant to be national epics but were adopted as such by later mythologizers.

 

Most modern nations are built on the cults of one or more national bards: England's Shakespeare, Germany's Goethe and Schiller, Hungary's Petőfi and Arany, Scotland's Burns, Denmark's Andersen, Russia's Pushkin, Poland's Mickiewicz, Ukraine's Shevchenko, Slovakia's Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav, Georgia's Shota Rustaveli, Vietnam's Nguyễn Du, and Norway's Ibsen, among many others.

 

All such bards are credited with the creation of an articulate, vernacular, and personalized version of the folk tradition. Some (such as Shakespeare and Pushkin) eclipse it almost entirely; others (such as Du Fu and Li Bai in China or Rainis and Aspazija in Latvia) update and reinterpret it from within. Most find themselves at the center of an era that comes to be seen as the pinnacle of their nation's glory (cultural and otherwise): the Elizabethan Age for Shakespeare, "the Golden Century" for Cervantes and Camões, and "the Golden Age of Russian literature" for Pushkin, among others.

 

The combination of the bard's figure, texts, and time of enthronement creates a durable template for national imagination. During his stay in Oxford as a TORCH International Fellow, Professor Yuri Slezkine will attempt to write a comparative history of nationalisms based on their -- very different -- canonical texts and sacred bards. Professor Slezkine is in Oxford during Michaelmas Term 2019, and his academic host is Professor Andrei Zorin from the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages. 

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