by Arkady Burshtein
The Reality of Myth is an interdisciplinary study that traces a hidden thread connecting poetic language, mythological consciousness, and altered states of mind. Written in the early 1980s by Arkady Burshtein — a programmer, cultural theorist, and polymath based in Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg) — the book develops an original analytical method based on the concept of semantic series: structured networks of meaning that underlie the emotional power of poetry and the formation of myth.
The book's first part (Chapters 1–4) builds a theoretical framework. Burshtein proposes that the emotional impact of poetry arises not from individual images but from the relationships between them — specifically, from patterns of repetition symmetry and inversion symmetry among semantic series. He introduces the concept of a suggestion formula: a hidden hypnotic mechanism encoded in the structure of a poem, operating below conscious awareness through the rhythmic repetition of a dominant seme (semantic unit). The analysis is supported by detailed readings of poems by Okudzhava, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Khlebnikov, and Svetlov, as well as by insights drawn from Eisenstein's montage theory, Nalimov's probabilistic model of language, and neurophysiological research on semantic generalization.
The second part (Chapters 5–9) extends these ideas into anthropology and philosophy of mind. Burshtein argues that mythological consciousness — humanity's earliest mode of understanding — structured the world through the same symmetrical semantic operations that govern poetic art. The book traces this connection through shamanic initiation rites, the Babylonian conception of time, the emergence of language in the Mousterian period, Taoist and Chan Buddhist practices of enlightenment, and the phenomenology of dreams. The central claim is that myth is not a primitive precursor to rational thought but a living reality: a mode of consciousness that persists in artistic creation and in altered states of awareness.
The work draws on literary theory, semiotics, cognitive science, comparative mythology, neurophysiology, and the philosophy of consciousness. Key interlocutors include Tynyanov, Eisenstein, Jung, Propp, Losev, Nalimov, Sartre, Zavadskaya, and Abaev. The result is a strikingly original synthesis that positions poetic analysis as a gateway to fundamental questions about the nature of mind, language, and reality.
Arkady Burshtein (1953–2024) was a cultural theorist, essayist, and literary analyst who lived in Sverdlovsk (Ekaterinburg), Russia, before emigrating to Israel. He wrote The Reality of Myth in his early thirties and produced a series of essays on Russian classical poetry offering unexpected and deeply convincing interpretations. He never sought publication; his friends and colleagues in Ekaterinburg, led by Elena Sozina, later collected and published his work in Russian. This English translation makes his ideas available to an international readership for the first time.
The English translation is by Leah Burstein and Marina Ritzarev. Rather than using existing poetic translations of the extensively quoted Russian poetry, the translators produced literal renderings that preserve the semantic relationships essential to Burshtein's analytical method — prioritizing fidelity to meaning over poetic form.