Murder at the Hunt: the German Medieval Epic Plot in George Grebenstchikoff’s “Forest Kings”

Oksana Tolstonozhenko, Siberian Federal University, Institute of Philology and Language Communication, ID CLEaR2017-459;   Abstract: The aim of the paper is to analyze how the medieval plot of Siegfried’s murder could be borrowed by Siberian peasant writer in the early XX century and how it was reworked. The most possible version is that George Grebenstchikoff, who had no opportunity to read the original German epic poem, wrote his story Forest Kings (1915) trying to reproduce in prose Anna Akhmatova’s poem Grey-eyed King (1910), that was created after her honeymoon trip around Europe. Grebenstchikoff’s narrative includes many particular details that allow him, on the one hand, to create a fairytale-like story and, on the other hand, to express his own traumatic cultural experience.

Key words: comparative literature, Siegfried, Anna Akhmatova, autodidactic writer, Siberian literature.