Stories from the Next World. Susan Taubes: Divorcing and Maria Rybakova: Anna Grom i ee prizrak [Anna Grom and her Ghost]
Stories from the Next World. Susan Taubes: Divorcing and Maria Rybakova: Anna Grom i ee prizrak [Anna Grom and her Ghost]

Summary/Abstract: This study deals with the parallels between two novels that are separated by almost 40 years. The first novel came out in New York in 1969. Its author is Susan Taubes, an American religious studies scholar, philosopher, actor and writer with Jewish and Hungarian roots, whose life was marked by prewar emigration and postwar migration. The second novel came out in 1999 in Russian (the German translation followed in 2001) and its author is Maria Rybakova, a classical philosopher and cultural studies scholar, writer and university professor. She, too, decided on life as an émigré from the latter half of the 1990s (at the time she wrote the novel under review she was in Germany). Based on the biographical background to the novels and the subject and compositional parallels, as well as the narrative levels the study analyses the connections between the two works. These are primarily the phenomena of immigration, the vacillation between identity and alterity and the artistic image of human awareness in the „third space“ between life and death. The author wishes to engage in a more detailed analysis of the philosophical context behind both novels (particularly gnosticism and its conception among the postwar Western European and American intelligentsia, Heidegger’s philosophy and its relationship to psychoanalysis and the deconstruction of the ritual) in some of her other studies.

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