Refusing to Love. The Paths of Russian Love from Pushkin to AI. Part I – The Golden Age

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Yury Tomin. Refusing to Love. The Paths of Russian Love from Pushkin to AI. Part I – The Golden Age

About the book

I

An obnoxious discovery. Tempest in the web. An accidental connection. Transparent hints. A voice in the digital wilderness. The past in the present. Vices and prophets. A roll call from across the ocean

II

Love Triangle. The American Angle of Love. The Yalom family as the prism of American society. A grafting of the world’s best patterns. The therapy of love misery. Techniques of normative love. The living connection of times and spaces

III

From ship to ball. Elegant pas of tender feelings. The new framework of love. The cult of striving for the ideal. Faces of beauty. Incarnations of romantic dreams. The imaginary reality of the ideal. Divine creation

IV

The poet and love. A genius of pure beauty. The consonances of divine harmonies. Lyrical hero. Tragedy of loneliness. The emptied heart. The science of tender passion. The fateful lot

V

Flight from love. Towards the northern Aurora. The fears of the indifferent heart. Anticipation of hell. Involuntary sadness. The reliable source of inspiration. Soul rebirth. Black man. Embodiments of romantic poetry

VI

The relay of Romanticism. Love-passion. The two ways of romantic love. Love-aspiration. The kidnappers of love. Faithful dreams. Flattery instead of love. Passing the baton

VII

Mask, I love you. Achilles’ heel. The saving hope. Precious needs of the heart. We are a single link in an infinite chain. Overcoming doubt. The transformation of love. About the rebirth of Don Juan. Poets and philosophers. Illusions of the romantic ideal. The first dimension of Russian love

VIII

The mystery of Turgenev’s love. The contradiction of a free man. Much explanatory connection. Mystery after mystery. How to live? Enemies of love. An important question among the eternal. What is to be done? The bell of triumphant love

IX

A heart torn apart from the mind. The mystery of the beautiful pearl. Love and vocation. The treachery of unused powers. The family drama. New thoughts on romanticism. Love of East and West. Missing links. The impotence of the society of the future. A foggy encounter in London. In AI Style

X

Test for love. Reasonable egoism of love. The neutral room. The power needs of tender feeling. The third element. Romantic permutations. The colors of true love. The perfect palette of feminine virtues

XI

The boundaries of love. Experiments with love. Contradictory feelings. The formula of Russian romanticism. The confused search for the support of love. Analysis of purified love. Playing with Mephistopheles. An example of true Russian love. Love-humility. Poor Tatiana. Negative harmony of the spirit

XII

The Peak of happiness. The steps of fading love. Why do you love me? The edge of tenderness. Family unhappiness. The poisonous thorn of the rosy phase. Sensuality as a weapon. Two loves and a third. The evil spirit of love. The trial of high love. Convictions and the element of love torments. superior humans for love

XIII

From Nietzsche to Alyosha Karamazov. The love of an intermediate person. I’m a seagull. Spoiled love. Attractive laws of nature. Escape from love. Love is the cross of life. Irreconcilable differences. Your soul is not real. The pink horizon of humanity

XIV

Return with optimism. Akunin’s another way. Aristonomia and true love. The comedian Aristophanes and the philosopher Soloviev. Symbiosis versus the ego. The clinical picture of love. Woman’s palette of feelings. The hunger of the soul

Bibliography

Отрывок из книги

In our previous book, Enjoy, Comprehend, Love: Entering the Spaces of Conscious Love, we explored the idea that love can be befriended by the mind, making it conscious and meaningful without losing the emotional intensity and vivid experience of love. The image of a journey through the spaces of love was the linking framework of the book, and spatial metaphors were used to describe the complex, paradoxical manifestations of the relationship of love.

In this new book we offer the reader a journey through time to the origins of the phenomenon of Russian love and a walk along its winding paths in the company of famous classics of Russian literature. In the course of the narrative there are references to various features of love in France and the United States, allowing the reader to get an idea of the international love triangle.

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And yet coming «black thoughts» are not only connected with the anticipation of possible complications for respectable family life in the full of temptations of the capital St. Petersburg. Pushkin’s anxieties are linked more elegantly with the first part of his letter, where he speaks of the delusions of his early youth, which were «too heavy in themselves» and intensified by slander. We may then assume the following picture of what tormented the poet. In Pushkin’s imagination, the sins of his youth collided with the giddiness of love and enclosed him in their grim embrace. This is indicated by the fact that when he received a vague but hopeful answer to his proposal, he was seized by «some involuntary sadness.» What could Pushkin then involuntarily and wistfully think about? About fortune’s goodwill and a phantom chance to redeem the sins of his «sad youth» or about the impossibility of it, regretting that he had not saved himself in spiritual purity for true love? To all appearances, Pushkin saw in this belated gift of love, albeit an illusory one, the hope of achieving spiritual equilibrium.

Having received the approval of his parents and the sovereign, hastening the wedding, he is «stunned that he can use such an expression» as «my happiness.» Pushkin is full of ideas and creative plans, the muses of inspiration are already tamed and do not require sacrifice. For the full harmony of life, he needed the support of true love, flowing into the warmth of the home and the measured joys of family happiness. Vladislav Khodasevich, who analyzed «Pushkin’s poetic household,» noted three «features of the change that happened in Pushkin» following the engagement with Natalia Goncharova. Known for mockery and contempt for family life («marriage binds the soul»), childbirth and cuckolded husbands, he becomes attentive to these things and «speaks (about them) quite seriously, businesslike, at times sympathetically.» Apparently, in the words of Don Juan from the little tragedy The Stone Guest in November 1830, he described the transformation taking place in his soul.

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