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M. Sokolov, a Russian art historian, has written an article on Evelyn Waugh's use of Antonio Canova's Cupid and Psyche sculptural grouping to illustrate his 1953 story, Love Among the Ruins. The article was originally a paper presented at an April 2004 conference on the theme "Canova and His Age." An expanded version appeared later in the Russian journal Voprosy literatury [Questions of Literature] 1 (Jan./Feb. 2005): 111-23, entitled (in English translation) "Canova's 'Cupid and Psyche' in Evelyn Waugh's Love Among the Ruins: Toward the problem of pure form in neoclassicism and modernism."
The article is written from the perspective of an art historian, whose other works cited in the article relate to art of the Renaissance. Sokolov begins with a history of Canova's Cupid and Psyche; it exists in two versions-one in the Hermitage from the collection of Prince N. B. Yusupov, who commissioned it, and an earlier version in the Louvre. The article relates the two versions to the myth as told by Apuleius.
Drawn to Waugh because he was both a writer and an artist, Sokolov focuses on the illustration on the title page of the story as originally published: Waugh's rendering of Canova's sculpture. In Waugh's version, Cupid has lost his wings and Psyche is sporting a beard. Sokolov sees the story's main characters as representing the two figures in the drawing: Miles Plastic is Cupid, and Clara, the dancer who grows...