Genius and androgynos: Plato's symposium and Alexander Pushkin

Platonic myth of Androgynos, - the creature of uncertain sex (Symposium, 189d-193d), - being re-interpreted as a myth related to artistic creativity, started to play its role in modern literary works from the times of Goethe. The paper deals with an episode in the history of establishing of the connection between androgyny and geniality, as we find it in the works by famous Russian writer Alexander Pushkin, mostly dated to the second decade of the 19th century. In an earlier article the author had an opportunity to look at the way Pushkin connects the idea of geniality with Socratic daimonion. On this occasion we try to prove that the concept of geniality is closely linked in his thought with the myth of androgynos, at that time hardly a commonplace of literary aesthetics, and that the idea of this connection occurred to Pushkin on the basis of Platonic text or its relatively adequate rendering into Russian.