Aleksandr Tikhonovich Parfyonov. An eminent Russian scholar of Shakespeare

Abstract

The essay introduces a block of materials in remembrance of the literary scholar Aleksandr Tikhonovich Parfyonov. His field of interest was Shakespeare, his time and contemporary playwrights. The object of Parfyonov’s first thesis was Christopher Marlowe and the legend of Tamburlaine; for his doctoral degree he chose another genre: Ben Jonson’s comedy Volpone. This shift was partly inspired by the publication of M. Bakhtin’s book on Rabelais and folk culture of universal laughter. The essay presents the scholar and provides some personal recollections of a joyful, witty man with an enthusiastic involvement in all arts while music stood out first. When in 1988 an organiser of the Russian Shakespeare studies, Anikst, died, Parfyonov felt the responsibility to go on with his unifying efforts, though the time of social stress was not fit for a serious academic work. For the current publication, one of the chapters written by him for an unpublished school book on literature was dug up from the scholar’s archive. A close reading of Hemingway’s short story represents Parfyonov’s deep penetration and his literary taste.