| This study compares eight works of Puskin--the ballad There once lived a Poor Knight, the oral tale The Solitary House on Vasil'evskij Island, the drama The Stone Guest, two Belkin tales The Coffinmaker and The Shot, the poem The Bronze Horseman, the tale The Queen of Spades, and The Fairytale of the Golden Cockerel--with the Cnidus Myth. This myth denotes a recurrent construct: the separation of man and woman by a supernatural force. It carries different names in different countries. In France it is called the Legend of the Statue of Venus and in Germany, the Story of the Marriage to a Statue. However, in Denmark a scholar called it the Cnidus Myth, which seems the most appropriate term to use, since the archetype contains the encounter between a Cnidian youth and the statue of Aphrodite, erected at Cnidus by Praxiteles.; The first constant of the myth about man's encounter with avenging supernatural forces comprises stories of man's liaisons with the goddess Venus. In the second constant one has the same plot kernel (separation of man and woman by a supernatural force) but a different antagonist: Venus has been replaced by the Virgin. Yet, in other more recent variants other statues and other supernatural forces like statues of men (the Legend of Don Juan), other demons and even skeletons play the role of the antagonist, while the plot kernel itself remains unchanged: (1) Man (the protagonist) is tempted by a supernatural force or its mediator; (2) Man impetuously challenges the supernatural force; (3) The supernatural force immediately accepts the challenge; (4) During this encounter the supernatural force separates the man from the woman he loves; (5) After this encounter the man either dies, goes insane or is saved (usually by an intercessor).; Finally, attention is focused on 14 invariable components which appear not only throughout the two-thousand-year-old tradition of the Cnidus Myth, but also in the eight works of Puskin discussed herein. |
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