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The Emigré Writers of the Empire : Other Coasts of Russian Literature and Culture: Ideas, Poetics, Contexts. Collective Monograph. Eds. Elżbieta Tyszkowska-Kasprzak, Ilona Motiejunaite and Alfija Smirnova in cooperation with Maria Gej. Scriptum, Wroclaw ‒ Krakow 2021, p. 494 ISBN 978-83-66812-37-6
Views:180This volume of studies on Russian émigré literature was published during the last year before the war in a form of scholarly cooperation between Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, and Czech scholars unthinkable today. The theme of joint research makes the work even more interesting, because Poles have a very different understanding of the mission of émigré writers than Russians. In the first chapter of the monograph, entitled The History of Emigration, we find interesting biographical portraits of prominent figures such as Alexander Herzen and Gleb Struve. In the next part we read mainly about ideological problems and ethnic stereotypes. The third chapter focuses on the problems of poetics, and the last on heterotypes. The aspects of the analyses also touch upon the poetics of space and imagology.
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Russia and Hungary: A dialogue of cultures in the space of literary texts: Book Review: Through "Alien" to "Own": Dialogue of Russian and Hungarian Cultures: Monograph / Edited by M.A. Lappo, V.V. Marosha. NGPU Publishing House, pp. 240. ISBN 978-00226-049-2, Novosibirsk, 2023
Views:230This monograph presents the results of a joint interdisciplinary project of Russian and Hungarian philologists to study the facts of interaction between Russian and Hungarian cultures in the space of literary texts. It examines various manifestations of the interaction of cultures: from the study of cases of direct influence to intertextual forms of assimilation and interpretation of elements of a foreign culture, current trends in translation reception. The volume includes papers by a wide range of authors whose texts made up the material of the study (from F.M. Dostoevsky and S. Veresh to E. Vodolazkin and Y. Berg).
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Russian literary history for advanced readers, with plenty of textual illustrations: Lukyanova, I.: Once upon a time there was Russian literature: From Ancient Rus' to the XX century. Publishing House AST.2023. Moscow. Pp. 348. ISBN 978-5-17-154945-9
Views:212Lukyanova's book was published in 2023. The author is a journalist who studies Russian literature and its history, and reviews it in a rather unique way. The purpose of the review is to determine what genre Lukyanova's book can be classified as, and to find out what its uniqueness is manifested in.
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On the Reception of the Poem The Twelve by Aleksandr Blok in German Criticism and Literature Studies of the Past 50 Years
Views:226The article examines the German reception of Alexander Blok’s poem “The Twelve” based on selected criticism and works of literary history published by Slavists, poets and translators during the last fifty years. Analyses and interpretations of the poem are presented in detail, while other post-1917 writings and statements by Blok are also mentioned in order to provide context.
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Singularity of Novel Discourse in Dostoevsky's The Idiot
Views:164The article examines Dostoevsky's novel discourse as a singular unity in the novel The Idiot. This discourse is dominated by the principle of indeterminacy, and the category of subjectivity is closely connected with the novel model of singularity. The aim of the article is to understand the principles of discursive unity organization in the novel on the level of its basic metaphors. These basic metaphors are "point" and "line".
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Ekphrasis - Chameleon of Literary studies “Theory and History of Ekphrasis: Results and Prospects of Study” Siedlce, 2018
9 p.Views:387This article aims to highlight the various methods in which ekphrasis can be analysed and new interpretations of the phenomenon in the monograph “The Theory and History of Ekphrasis: Results and Prospects of the Study” published for the 15th year anniversary of the previous work “Ekphrasis in Russian Literature” (2002). The articles touch upon the history of the study of ekphrasis, its typology, the dynamics of its functions as well as the poetics of description in the history of literature, theory and classification, including the theme of narratology, and works containing analysis from autobiographical points of view. The novelty of the monograph is that it also includes contemporary fiction which provides an excellent opportunity to redefine and reinterpret the phenomenon.
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The transformation of the camp theme in Sergei Lebedev’s novel “Oblivion”
Views:128Sergei Lebedev’s novel Oblivion offers an original reworking of the tradition of Russian camp prose. Its central themes are the legacy of Stalinist terror, the intergenerational transmission of trauma, and the necessity of a conscious resistance to their consequences. This paper explores how Lebedev, drawing on the concept of post-memory, intertwines personal family history with questions of collective memory, highlighting the destructive effects of silencing the past and the absence of accountability for historical crimes. At the core of this interpretation is an analysis of the narrator’s journey through space, time, and self-discovery, structured around the mythological motif of descent (katabasis). The funeral ritual plays a key role in the novel’s initiation structure: the symbolic burial and mourning of victims who vanished without a trace becomes an act of memory restoration, offering the possibility of reconciliation and a new beginning. Lebedev critically engages with contemporary Russian memory politics, stressing the moral imperative to uncover and give voice to the traumatic past.
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The Current Status of Corpus Linguistics in Russian Linguistics (Shuneyko, A. A. : Корпусная лингвистика. Учебник для вузов. 2020. Moscow, Yurayt ISBN 978-5-534-13603-6)
Views:339Corpus linguistics is a relatively new, however rapidly developing area of linguistics. Nevertheless, the methodology of corpus research and its results are scarcely applied in current linguistic research. In the present article a short overview of the history of corpus linguistics is given. The difficulties of the development and spreading of this discipline in Russia is also described. A brief outline of Russian textbooks on corpus linguistics is also provided with special focus on Shuneyko’s latest work.
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The Hungarian reception of Dostoevsky until the 1920s in the context of European and Hungarian Modernism
Views:230This paper deals with the questions Dostoevsky’s reception in Hungary in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The author investigates the growing interest in Dostoevsky in the context of the new trends of art and literature and gives a detailed survey of the most characteristic reactions (i.e. reviews, studies, introductions to books) about the new translations and editions of Dostoevsky’s works. Among the most relevant questions addressed arestereotypes about Russian culture and people, living in Hungary duringthe past centuries, the various interpretations of Crime and Punishment, and some comparative aspects in the analyses of this novel.
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"React with Cobra's Speed to Everyday Life" On the Trap of Actuality - Andrzej Stasiuk's Beskidy and World Chronicles (2018)
11 p.Views:214The goal of the paper is to analyze and depict the essays written by Polish contemporary
author Andrzej Stasiuk in the wider context of writing strategies. The essays were collected
in Beskidy and World Chronicles (2018). The paper also deals with Stasiuk's "workshop
comments" about the art of writing and is concerned with author's attitude to changes in social,
cultural and political life. Stasiuk searches for harmony and calmness. What he writes
about is not topicalities but universal themes: nature, philosophy of living, everyday life.
All that he can see in mass media is very strange and outlandish for him, while he looks for
eternal values, describing chaos in modern world. -
Books have their own fate…: Gregor, Ferenc: A szlovák nyelv magyar elemei [The Hungarian elements of the Slovak language]. Budapest, Kairosz Kiadó, 2023, pp. 953. ISBN: 978-963-514157-9
Views:132Ferenc Gregor, the most prominent Hungarian researcher of the Slovak language, did not live to see the publication of his magnum opus. The present review has two goals: on the one hand, to commemorate an outstanding scholar who persevered on his own path in the pursuit of scholarly value, accepting all the difficulties of a lonely struggle, and whose efforts were crowned with success, albeit posthumously, thanks to the next generation of scholars; and, on the other hand, to draw attention to the significant linguistic and cultural influence that Hungarian dialects have had on the language of the Slovaks living in the northern region of the historical Kingdom of Hungary. This influence manifested itself in several waves and in several geographical regions and took on different thematic characteristics depending on the historical situation. Using a wide range of written sources, Ferenc Gregor identified nearly 1,000 Hungarian lexemes in the vocabulary of local variants of the Slovak language. Since Gregor accurately documented all cases where the Hungarian words in question also entered other Slavic languages of the Carpathian Basin, his work is significant not only for its outstanding value in contact linguistics, but also from an areal linguistic perspective.
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Aglaya Returns Home, The Mystery of The Apocryph of Aglaia. Ed. by Elena Kozmina. INTMEDIA, Yekaterinburg 2020, 231 pp. ISBN 978-5-6040560-8-0
Views:192This collection of studies is a unique example of a collective monograph written by Russian, Polish and Hungarian scholars on a contemporary Polish literary work. The novel by Jerzy Sosnowski entitled Aglaia’s Apocrypha is an ideal subject of analysis because of its complicated narrative structure, multilevel composition and genre complexity. The authors of the studies describe the connections between the storytellers and the author, define the context of the novel both in high and popularculture. Some of them represent the best traditions of Russian poetics of prose. Jerzy Sosnowski began his career as a literary critic and literary historian, he was an influential interpreter and promoter of the new tendencies in the Polish literature of the eighties.When he became a prosewriter, he followed the new aesthetic trend of Polish postmodernism. Jerzy Sosnowski as the author of a novel written about an erotic cyborg, its/her admirer and the operator was a forerunner of posthumanism.
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An insight into Russian history from the Middle Ages to the present: Tamás Krausz,Klára Radnóti and Endre Sashalmi (eds.): Apologia Historiographiae: Az orosz történelem évszázadai[Apologia Historiographiae: Centuries of Russian history]. Budapest, Martin Opitz Kiadó, 2023. Pp. 557. ISBN: 978-615-6388-37-7
Views:165The collection of studies presented in the volume is a scholarly and informative compilation celebrating the birthday of Professor Gyula Szvák. It publishes new research results by Hungarian scholars into the historical past of the Central and Eastern European Slavic peoples and Russians. The volume is thematically rich, with short studies on the medieval Mongol rule, the political ambitions of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and many other topics. The value of the book lies in the fact that the editors have made it possible – with a view to completeness – to present analyses by outstanding Hungarian representatives of the discipline of Russian Studies.
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Bugs, Burrow, Inquisitor: Dostoevskian Intertexts in Eyeless in Gaza
Views:225The present article is devoted to the discussion of intertextual connections between Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza (1936) and three works by Dostoevsky: Notes from the Underground(1864), Crime and Punishment (1869) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880, Grand Inquisitor scene). As is well-known, the Dostoevskian novel of ideas was a major inspiring force for Aldous Huxley’s art: Huxley’s rewriting of the Grand Inquisitor episode in Brave New World (1932) is probably the best-known case in point. Nonetheless, insufficient critical attention has been devoted to the actual intertextual connections between the two novelists’ output. As I have demonstrated earlier, on closer inspectionPoint Counter Point (1928) turns out to be a rewriting of Devils (1872), which, however, alsoproves to be a low point in Huxley’s assessment of Dostoevsky – a companion piece to his incidental vicious critique included in his 1929 essay on Baudelaire, in which Huxley also targets spiritual quest. Let me argue that Eyeless in Gaza can be read as a sequel to that polemic, in which a change of Huxley’s attitude to Dostoevsky is clearly notable: the novel provides a much more subtle and even respectful critique of Dostoevsky by implying the universal relevance of the Dostoevskian underground to the understanding of the modern human condition and by re-embracing spiritual quest.
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Issues of Translation from Russian to Hungarian and from Hungarian to Russian: Studia Litteraria 2020/1-2, LIX. évfolyam. Orosz irodalom fordításokban. Debrecen 2020, 146 p. HU ISSN 0562-2867
Views:161This review is a content overview of the issue 1-2/2020 of Studia Litteraria, a Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies. This collection of scholarly articles is an excellent material for a varied and comprehensive look at current matters of translation and contemporary literature. The authors of the articles are practicing translators, therefore the general positions are explained through their own, specific works and practical experience. The purpose of this review is to briefly acquaint readers with the content of scholarly papers which have been categorized by topics for convenience.
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Images of the East in the Short Fiction of Ivan Bunin
16 p.Views:335The article examines the images of the East in the short fiction of Ivan Bunin. With the help of the narrative model of Jan van der Eng, consisting of three basic thematic levels (action, characterization, geographical and social setting) we read and arrange the works of Bunin through the prism of postcolonial criticism. On the one hand, we will consider the arguments of traditional postcolonial studies; on the other hand, we will also take into account the postcolonial theory regarding the “second world” (Russia, Eastern and Central Europe).We start our analysis with the texts in which images of the East are only featured on one thematic level, gradually directing our attention towards the short stories in which these images determine the whole semantic structure.
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Fragmentation in Byron’s “The Giaour” as a model for Lermontov’s “A Hero Of Our Time”
Views:123Lermontov never hid his enthusiasm for Western literature and especially for Byron’s poetry. The similarity between the two poets’ personalities and certain character types and motifs in their works has already been established in the literature in the 19th century. This paper aspires to prove that there can also be a connection between the narrative poem The Giaour and the novel A Hero of Our Time from the perspective of literary fragmentation, especially omissions and gaps found in narration, structure and chronology in the two texts.
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The Generational Narrative in Criticism of New Realism
Views:297At the end of the 20th century, New Realism emerged in contrast to postmodern literature. The representatives of this school defined themselves in their manifestoes and critical writings as a generation with the same aesthetic and ideological principles. The anthology of New Russian Criticism, edited by Roman Senchin, is a demonstration of this common action. The present study aims to present how and what elements of this generational consciousness and cultural identity are created, i.e. how thinking about literature has changed.
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Biblical parallels in Chekhov’s short story Murder
Views:186The paper explores biblical allusions in Anton Pavlovich Chekhov’s short story Murder. It aims not merely to identify certain biblical themes, but, through an analysis of Chekhov’s text and its biblical parallels, to attempt to provide a deeper understanding of the main character’s changing worldview (a question interpreted by researchers in different, often conflicting ways). The paper also points to motivic and semantic connections between the biblical text and the internal struggle of faith that affects Chekhov’s heroes. On one hand, two Old Testament stories from the Book of Genesis are examined: the fratricide of Abel by his brother Cain, and Jacob acquiring first-born status and the paternal blessing instead of his brother Esau, as well as Jacob’s struggle with the angel. On the other hand, certain sections of the New Testament Gospel according to Matthew are explored, as referenced in Murder, which point to two groups of ideas: the argument between Jesus and the Pharisees concerning proper religious practice and the true essence of faith, and Jesus’s allegory about the camel, as well as his words on murder, which both ratify and amend the Ten Commandments. Through the prism of these references, Yakov’s (and also Matvey’s) internal journeys are interpreted as a shift between the law of the Old Testament and the teachings of the New Testament.
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On the Existence of Expletive Subjects in Russian
11 p.Views:233According to traditional grammars, Russian does not contain expletive subjects. However,
investigations in the generative framework suggest, that the pronoun это with certain
predicates can be perceived as an expletive subject. The present article gives a short overview
of previous investigations and aims at providing a unified analysis of constructions with -o
final adverbial predicates or with the verbs бывать and нравиться. -
With them or without them? Jangfeldt, B.: Mi és ők: Az orosz eszme története [Us and them: History of the “Russian idea”]. Swedish to Hungarian translation by Imre Bartók. Budapest, Helikon Kiadó, 2024, pp. 224. ISBN: 978-963-620-057-2
Views:118Jangfeldt's book Us and Them: History of the "Russian idea" was published in Hungarian translation in 2024. The author is a Swedish writer and translator from Russian, associate professor of Slavic languages at Stockholm University. The aim of the review is to show what ideological and philosophical currents Jangfeldt's book discusses, and how all of these have influenced Russian history and culture in the past 300 years.
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Rácz, Ildikó Mária: A lét és a szerelem szentsége. Ivan Bunyin művészi világképe. L’Harmattan, Budapest 2020, 373 pp. ISBN 978-963-414-681-0
Views:230This review presents a critical analysis of the monograph on Bunin by the Hungarian researcher Ildikó Mária Rácz. The author describes the main thematic blocs of the volume, for example, the influence of classic Russian literature on Bunin (Turgeniev, Tolstoi, Chekhov, and Tiutchev), the role of Eastern philosophy in the evolution of Bunin’s art, the connection between the modern psychological concepts (Freud, Jung) and the short stories as Mitya’s love or The grammar of love.
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Hungarian–South Slavic film relations: An introduction
Views:202This study is an introduction to a larger work on Hungarian and Southern Slavic film relations. After reviewing the theoretical and conceptual considerations, the paper attempts to interpret the concepts of national film and transnational film, and it also outlines the types of Hungarian–Slovenian, Hungarian–Croatian, and Hungarian–Serbian film relations. Thus, from the Southern Slavic community, the study focuses on Slovenian, Croatian, and Serbian culture and film. Films from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria and Northern Macedonia, and their Hungarian dimensions are also referenced, but the primary focus is the film culture of the three countries neighboring Hungary.