The Murders in the Rue Morgue

1.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

2.

Author
• Edgar Allan Poe (19.01.1809 07.10.1849) - American
writer. Edgar Allan Poe was an
outstanding American writer,
poet and essayist. He was
also a literary critic and
editor. Some people accept
him as the father of modern
detective story. Poe was born
on January 19, 1809, in the
acting family.
The life of touring actors involved constant
travelling which wasn’t easy with little
children. So, Edgar was temporarily left to live
with his grandfather. When he was still little his
mother died, while his father left their family long
before that. As a result, Edgar was adopted by
John Allan’s family who was a rich merchant.

3.

Adept of romantic individualism
• The first story to be published was “Murder in the
Rue Morgue” — Graham's Magazine, in which
Poe was an editor, published it in April 1841. The
story is preceded by an extensive discussion
about analytical abilities, which, according to the
narrator, only a person with “true imagination”
possesses. This is exactly what Dupin turns out to
be, a ruined aristocrat living as a hermit,
fundamentally not looking for an improvement in
his well-being or success in society.

4.

Dupin
• Dupin had a “whim of fantasy”— he was “in
love with the night in its own name.” The
narrator emphasizes that at the first glimmer
of dawn, his friend fenced himself off from
the light of day, and left the house only after
the advent of “real Darkness” — then his
extraordinary analytical abilities were
revealed. Walking through Paris at night,
Dupin amused himself with solving various
riddles hidden in the being of other people:
“He praised me with a quiet, contented laugh
that many people, in relation to him, have
windows in their chests, and he usually
immediately confirmed such statements with
direct and very striking proofs of his intimate
knowledge of my own heart”.

5.

• Detective Dupin is a product of the period of
mature capitalism and rapid urbanization,
with the mystery and darkness of nightlife,
labyrinths of streets, shopping malls and the
human mass animating urban space. The
crowd becomes a refuge for the attacker,
makes him anonymous, unrecognized, allows
him to move freely — citizens do not care
about each other. This is where the detective
genre begins, cultural critic Walter Benjamin
believes. He highlights the figure of a flanker
— a hero who fosters his idleness and
idleness, prefers to hang around the streets
for all other things, but the thing of the city
is that everyone there is not who they seem.

6.

• In order for the hero to shine, he needs an
entourage, such for Dupin turns out to be a
narrator-friend, a kind of prehistoric Doctor
Watson, as well as clumsy policemen who do
not see beyond their noses, but are not always
able to see the solution under their noses.

7.

• In addition to the disposition "narrator — hero —
hapless policemen", the form also migrated to
the classic detective text: "information about the
crime reported to the reader; description of the
fruitless efforts of the police; appeal to the hero
for help; "incomprehensible" disclosure of the
mystery and, finally, an explanation that
introduces the reader to the course of thought of
the hero, with details and details inductivedeductive process leading to the truth

8.

• Poe didn't invent this character so much as he
saw it. “The main merit of Poe as the founder
of detective literature is that he saw the
opportunity to use criminal investigation as
the subject of a fictional narrative, in the
center of which would be a detective hero,
and was the first to realize this opportunity,”
writes literary critic Yuri Kovalev.

9.

“Lord, help my poor soul!”
• The fate of the writer was unenviable: in order
to survive, he had to be a greyhound painter,
but regular publications did not save him
from, in general, an unhappy fate. “There is a
fatal predestination; in the literature of any
country there are people on whose beaten
brow is inscribed with mysterious signs: bad
luck,” Baudelaire wrote in a biographical essay
about Poe.

10.

biography
• The writer lost his parents early, he was adopted by the
Allan family (who subsequently disinherited him). Need
led Edgar to the army, but not for long: the young man
was fired for disobedience, he was tossed around cities
and states, he suffered from lack of money, survived
the death of his wife and suffered all his life from
addiction to gambling and alcohol. Booze ruined the
writer: friends found him delirious on the territory of a
Baltimore tavern and took him to the hospital, where
he spent several days in a state of alcoholic delirium
and died with the words “Lord, help my poor soul!".

11.

The Discoverer of the Abyss
• Edgar Poe is a fan of hoaxes and
inventions. What is the legend
he created about himself that
on his way to Greece, in order,
like Byron, to participate in the
war of independence, he found
himself in Russia. However, Po
still got to Russia - for the first
time his stories were published
in the magazine of the brothers
Fyodor and Mikhail Dostoevsky
“Time” in 1847.