The Spectral Father and the Corpse-Self: Patriarchal Haunting in Plath’s “Daddy” and Husky’s “Revanche”

This article conducts a comparative analysis of the paternal image in Sylvia Plath’s 1962 poem “Daddy” and the contemporary Russian rap song “Revanche” by Husky. While Plath’s work is a cornerstone of Anglo-American confessional poetry and Husky’s belongs to the Russian hip-hop tradition, both works centralize a haunting by a dead father figure as a catalyst for exploring trauma, identity, and liberation. This paper argues that Plath externalizes the father as a monstrous, historical antagonist (the Nazi/Vampire) whom she must symbolically kill to reclaim her self. In contrast, Husky internalizes the paternal legacy, portraying it as a parasitic, decaying doppelgänger that threatens to replace the speaker entirely. Despite these differing strategies, external exorcism versus internal invasion, both works use vivid, grotesque bodily imagery to represent psychological torment and culminate in a complex, ambiguous act of “revenge” that is as much about self-destruction as it is about liberation.