4. E. Allan Poe. The Raven. The Gold Bug.

EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809-1849), a southerner, shares with Melville a darkly metaphysical vision mixed with elements of realism, parody, and burlesque. He refined (усовершенствовать) the short story genre and invented detective fiction. Many of his stories prefigure the genres of science fiction, horror, and fantasy so popular today.

Poe's short and tragic life was plagued with insecurity. Like so many other major 19th-century American writers, Poe was orphaned at an early age. Poe's strange marriage in 1835 to his first cousin Virginia Clemm, who was not yet 14, has been interpreted as an attempt to find the stable family life he lacked.

Poe believed that strangeness was an essential ingredient of beauty, and his writing is often exotic. His stories and poems are populated with doomed, introspective aristocrats (Poe, like many other southerners, cherished (лелеять) an aristocratic ideal). These gloomy characters never seem to work or socialize; instead they bury themselves in dark, moldering castles symbolically decorated with bizarre rugs and draperies that hide the real world of sun, windows, walls, and floors. The hidden rooms reveal ancient libraries, strange art works, and eclectic oriental objects. The aristocrats play musical instruments or read ancient books while they brood on (размышлять о) tragedies, often the deaths of loved ones. Themes of death-in-life, especially being buried alive or returning like a vampire from the grave, appear in many of his works, including "The Premature Burial," "Ligeia," "The Cask of Amontillado," and "The Fall of the House of Usher." Poe's twilight realm (зона) between life and death and his gaudy (витиеватый), Gothic settings are not merely decorative. They reflect the overcivilized yet deathly interior of his characters disturbed psyches. They are symbolic expressions of the unconscious, and thus are central to his art.

Poe's verse, like that of many Southerners, was very musical and strictly metrical. His best-known poem, in his own lifetime and today, is "The Raven" (1845). In this eerie poem, the haunted, sleepless narrator, who has been reading and mourning the death of his "lost Lenore" at midnight, is visited by a raven (a bird that eats dead flesh, hence a symbol of death) who perches above his door and ominously repeats the poem's famous refrain, "nevermore." The poem ends in a frozen scene of death-in-life.

Poe's stories -- such as those cited above -- have been described as tales of horror. Stories like "The Gold Bug" and "The Purloined Letter" are more tales of ratiocination, or reasoning. The horror tales prefigure works by such American authors of horror fantasy as H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King. All of these stories reveal Poe's fascination with the mind and the unsettling scientific knowledge that was radically secularizing the 19th-century world view.

In every genre, Poe explores the psyche. Profound psychological insights glint throughout the stories. To explore the exotic and strange aspect of psychological processes, Poe delved into accounts of madness and extreme emotion. The painfully deliberate style and elaborate explanation in the stories heighten the sense of the horrible by making the events seem vivid and plausible (правдоподобный).

Poe's combination of decadence and romantic primitivism appealed enormously to Europeans, particularly to the French poets Sté Mallarmé, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Valé, and Arthur Rimbaud. But Poe is not un-American, despite his aristocratic disgust with democracy, preference for the exotic, and themes of dehumanization. On the contrary, he is almost a textbook example of Tocqueville's prediction that American democracy would produce works that lay bare the deepest, hidden parts of the psyche. Deep anxiety and psychic insecurity seem to have occurred earlier in America than in Europe, for Europeans at least had a firm, complex social structure that gave them psychological security. In America, there was no compensating security; it was every man for himself. Poe accurately described the underside of the American dream of the self-made man and showed the price of materialism and excessive competition -- loneliness, alienation, and images of death-in-life.

"THE RAVEN" is a narrative poem by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in January 1845. It is often noted for its musicality, stylized language, and supernatural atmosphere. It tells of a talking raven's mysterious visit to a distraught (обезумевший, потерявший рассудок) lover, tracing the man's slow descent into madness. The lover, often identified as being a student, is lamenting the loss of his love, Lenore. Sitting on a bust of Pallas, the raven seems to further worsen his distress with its constant repetition of the word "Nevermore". The poem makes use of a number of folk and classical references.

Poe claimed to have written the poem very logically and methodically, intending to create a poem that would appeal to both critical and popular tastes, as he explained in his 1846 follow-up essay "The Philosophy of Composition". The poem was inspired in part by a talking raven in the novel Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty by Charles Dickens. Poe borrows the complex rhythm and meter of Elizabeth Barrett's poem "Lady Geraldine's Courtship", and makes use of internal rhyme as well as alliteration throughout.

"The Raven" was first attributed to Poe in print in the New York Evening Mirror on January 29, 1845. Its publication made Poe widely popular in his lifetime, though it did not bring him much financial success. Soon reprinted, parodied, and illustrated, critical opinion is divided as to the poem's status, though it remains one of the most famous poems ever written.

Poe wrote the poem as a narrative, without intentionally creating an allegory or falling into didacticism (поучительность, назидательность). The main theme of the poem is one of undying devotion (loyalty). The narrator experiences a perverse (упорный) conflict between desire to forget and desire to remember. He seems to get some pleasure from focusing on loss. The narrator assumes that the word "Nevermore" is the raven's "only stock and store", and, yet, he continues to ask it questions, knowing what the answer will be. His questions, then, are purposely self-deprecating (самоуничижительный) and further excite his feelings of loss. Poe leaves it unclear if the raven actually knows what it is saying or if it really intends to cause a reaction in the poem's narrator. The narrator begins as weak and weary, becomes regretful and grief-stricken, before passing into a rage and, finally, madness.

“THE GOLD BUG” is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. Set on Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, the plot follows William Legrand, who was recently bitten by a gold-colored bug. His servant Jupiter fears him to be going insane and goes to Legrand's friend, an unnamed narrator who agrees to visit his old friend. Legrand pulls the other two into an adventure after deciphering (расшифровать) a secret message that will lead to a buried treasure.

The story is often compared with Poe's "tales of ratiocination (логическое рассуждение с использованием силлогизмов)" as an early form of detective fiction. Poe became aware of the public's interest in secret writing in 1840 and asked readers to challenge his skills as a code-breaker. Poe took advantage of the popularity of cryptography as he was writing "The Gold-Bug" and the success of the story centers on one such cryptogram. The characterization of Legrand's servant Jupiter has been criticized as racist from a modern perspective especially because his speech is written in dialect and because of his often-comical dialogue.

Poe submitted "The Gold-Bug" as an entry to a writing contest sponsored by the Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper. His story won the grand prize and was published in three installments, beginning in June 1843. The prize also included $100, likely the largest single sum Poe received for any of his works. "The Gold-Bug" was an instant success and was the most popular and most widely-read of Poe's works during his lifetime. It also helped popularize cryptograms and secret writing.

PLOT: Legrand is a descendant of an aristocratic family that lived in New Orleans. But he is a very unlucky man. When he loses all his wealth and falls into poverty, he leaves his hometown and settles on a small deserted island near the Atlantic coast. Legrand builds a hut (хижина) to live in. There he lives with his African-American servant Jupiter and his dog. Legrand’s loneliness is brightened up by books and searches for insects: Legrand is an obsessed entomologist.

The narrator is a friend of Legrand’s. Once he visits his friend and sees his last finding – a golden bug. Legrand believes that this finding is a happy omen and he will soon become rich and happy again. Jupiter is very anxious. He tells the narrator that his master counts something all the time and permanently disappears from the house.

The next time the narrator visits Legrand, three men and the dog set out for a strange journey. The narrator and Jupiter have no doubts that Legrand lost his mind. The purpose of their journey is a tulip tree of extraordinary heights. Jupiter must climb up this tree and take the golden bug with him. He does it and sees with horror a skull of a dead man. Then he hears another order from his master: he now must drop the bug through one of the eye sockets. From where it falls, Legrand determines the spot where they dig. They find treasure buried by the infamous pirate "Captain Kidd".

The narrator is on tiptoe with curiosity. How did Legrand find out that it is not a simple bug and that the treasure is buried just there? And Legrand tells him a story. When he found the bug, it bit him. Then he saw a small piece of paper in the sand. He took it and put the bug into it. When he came home, he realized that the piece of paper was a parchment with a strange code. This very code led him to the treasure. “But why did we have to drop the bug through the eye socket?” asked the narrator. “I was a little bit angry about you thinking that I’m a madman”, answered Legrand, “so I decided to pay you a little mystification”.