On the wits and Ardour in Plato’s symposium: Socrates’ educator’s formula of love in Alexander Kushner’s poem

The article examines a poem written by a contemporary Petersburg poet, Alexander Semyonovich Kushner “And what a foreign lady said…” The poet mentions the Athenian thinker Socrates and a foreign lady, never giving her name. It is clear that he speaks about the priestess Diotima of Mantinea (an ancient city in Arcadia), with whom Socrates, a character in Plato’s dialogue Symposium (Plato, Symp. 201d-212b) conversed. Why should the story of love told by the Mantinean priestess have failed to inspire the Russian poet when he read it for the second time (“this time”)? Why did Kushner think that Symposium is “less about ardour, / Than a long invocation of wits”? It is the most erotic not only in Plato’s works but also in the whole classical philosophy. Diotima praises Eros’s might and valour, she calls him a great genius, a mediator between the immortal and the mortal. Socrates’ educator in “the philosophy of love” says that love is an ascent from the contemplation of the physical beauty to the contemplation of the beauty proper (Plato, Symp. 210а-212а). What the priestess in the ancient Greek philosopher’s dialogue tells about love, virtue, aspiration to engender the beautiful and the immortal, Kushner “applies” to the experience of earthborn sentiment. In his “antiquity-oriented” poem he does not agree with the “formula of love” proposed by Diotima (Socrates = Plato). The poet seems to regard “the Diotima formula” as abstract, divorced from reality, which is more multifaceted and complicated than any theory. In this “non-platonic” work, Kushner estranges himself from Plato’s Symposium and says that love cannot comply with any “formula”.