Literary Muses on the Path to Conscious Self-sacrifice: A Jungian Archetypal Approach

This research examines how the Jungian concept of the return of the ego to the unconscious in the form of selfless devotion to the beloved “anima” and “animus”, reflects itself in the life of two literary muses of the twentieth century modern literature; namely, Olga Ivinskaya, the poet, translator and beloved who inspired the character Lara in Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (1957), and Milena Jesenská, a journalist, writer, translator and Franz Kafka’s confidante in his Letters to Milena (1952). This paper reads these two literary muses through the lens of Archetypal Psychological Criticism, and argues that the path of the divine feminine archetype, the two muses chose to embark on, necessitated a form of self-sacrifice that would bring about the sacred marriage of the “anima” and “animus” on a soul level.