Leonid Kolker, Ph.D.

According to Kant, “thoughts without content are void; intuitions without conceptions, blind.” Arguing that space and time are forms of intuition that are inseparable from sensibility, the...

Milton’s Paradise Lost is grounded in Protestant theology. God’s Son first appears in the poem as the resplendent progeny of God the Father, co-eternal with Him: Hail holy light, offspring of...

“The Tyger” is one of the most famous poems by Blake from his Songs of Experience. It forms a parallel to “The Lamb” from Songs of Innocence. Copious interpretations of “The Tyger” reflect a...

In his play An Ideal Husband, Oscar Wilde portrays his contemporary England. It is possible to discern the author’s attitude to his society from the title of the play. We observe a seemingly ideal...

Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote reflects both a humorous and a satirical approach to its subject matter. Admittedly, it is a satire on chivalric romance. In fact, the word satire in the sense of...

Gorgias is usually attributed to the transitional period in Plato’s work. That is, the period between a purely Socratic method of discovering the truth through questions and answers, and a...

The atmosphere that Thomas Campbell creates in "Lord Ullin's Daughter" is charged with gloom and doom. We sense something of it from the very first stanzas of the poem. The setting is the Scottish...

We can point out quite a number of textual details which highlight how Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur version of Arthur's death is different from that in Tennyson's Idylls of the King. First of all, in...

There are numerous embedded narratives and other insertions in the main story of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander. The three lengthier ones involve Leander and Neptune, Mercury and the country maid, and...

In act 2, scene 1 of The Pot of Gold by Plautus, Megadorus’s sister, Eunomia, engages in conversation with him in order to persuade him into getting married. She prefaces her main point with quite...

In his comedy The Pot of Gold, Plautus ridicules avarice which reaches absurd dimensions in Euclio, who makes his own life as well as the lives of those around him miserable. He behaves...

In Malory’s Le Morte d'Arthur, as king Arthur comes back to Britain, he finds out that Mordred, his son and vicegerent, has usurped his throne. The king wants to bring the traitor to justice, but...

In Plautus’s comedy The Pot of Gold, poor Euclio strikes upon the buried treasure, which gets him into trouble. He does not know how to use the gold, and he is tormented by the fear that someone...

The Romans, according to the Histories of Polybius, had three forms of government, though the Roman constitution was never codified as a written document. All the functions were distributed among...

It is interesting to trace how some of Renaissance and Reformation ideas interact in The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus by Christoper Marlowe. Protestantism which established itself in England and...

Protagonists of the Elizabethan drama, exclusive of Shakespeare’s positive characters, are all individualistic. Their individualism is both a historical necessity and a source of their tragic fate....

In his Essays, Montaigne inquires about limits of human knowledge and self-knowledge. He says time and again that God is not fully knowable nor are we to suppose that we can reach complete...

Like Renaissance humanists, Rabelais expresses in his masterpiece Gargantua and Pantagruel an absolute belief in the goodness of human nature. One of the central characters of the novel, Panurge,...

The aphorism "Poetry…is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history" comes from Aristotle's Poetics. In order to understand what the great philosopher means, it is important to view this...

It has been established by scholars that the Iliad contains textual layers that pertain to various epochs beginning from Pre-Mycenaean era and ending at least with the ninth century BCE. Thus,...

In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer pays great attention to the clergy. Already in the Prologue, six clerics are described in detail. These are the Prioress, the Monk, the Friar, the Summoner, the...

In 1934, Dylan Thomas’s first book, 18 Poems (which brought him fame), was published. While other poets of the 30s were mainly focused on social issues, Thomas set about writing poetry dealing with...

Richardson's negative attitude toward aristocratic traditions of the seventeenth century and his democratic affinities find particular expression in the fact that he made the protagonist of his...

The three characters of Plautus’s Pot of Gold (Aulularia, or the Concealed Treasure) embody three different attitudes to the concept of marriage. The rich Megadorus wants to marry his poor...

In Message to Siberia (1827, published in 1856), Alexander Pushkin deals with the theme of remembering those who have been sent to katorga (penal colonies in Siberia) for their “rebel thought” (1,...

C. P. Cavafy’s Ithaka (or Ithaca, 1911) is a philosophical and didactic poem on the Homeric theme of homecoming. The background of this poem is Odysseus’s return to his native Ithaka after many...

Pedro Calderón’s drama Love After Death (Amar después de la Muerte, ca. 1633) is centered on the theme of Don Alvaro Tuzani’s tragic love of Doña Clara Malec. Both of them are Moriscos, descendants...

In the great Castilian epic poem El Cantar de mio Cid (The Song of My Cid), composed in the twelfth or the thirteenth century by an unknown author, the main character, El Cid, loses favor with King...