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Figures of the Young Actress in the Dramatic Art of A.N. Ostrovsky and A.P. Chekhov
Views:360The present study focuses on the turning point in drama history between the artistic concept of A.N. Ostrovsky, the founder of modern Russian theater, and that of A.P. Chekhov, who transformed the former approach in the matter of just a few decades. I propose that an analysis of Ostrovsky’s Talents and Admirers (1881) and Chekhov’s The Seagull (1896) can reveal the borderline that divides the dramatic formations belonging to these two separate periods. The analysis concentrates on the transformation of a specific motive, the portrayal and the dramatization of the chances of destiny available for the figure of the young actress. I presume that the dramaturgical features surfacing through the exploration of this portrayal will outline the differences in the approach and in the poetic means used by the outstanding representatives of these successive periods in drama history. Thus, I am not seeking intertextual instances in the narrow sense of the term. Rather, I am after a thematic and motive-based congeniality and its saturation with a new meaning, coming from the functional shift that establishes a connection between the texts of the pieces by Chekhov and Ostrovsky. This approach to intertextuality in the broader sense of the term, which is not primarily present in references at the textual level but is rather based on, for example, thematic congruity, can play an important part also in the assessment concerning functional history, in exploring reception-related peculiarities and, consequently, in the validation of the historical aspect.
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Nowe dwudziestolecie (1989–2009). Rozpoznania, hierarchie, perspektywy [The New Twenties (1989-2009): Recognitions, Hierarchies, Perspectives]. Ed. by Hanna Gosk. Warsaw: Dom Wydawniczy Elipsa, p. 530, ISBN 978-83-7151-873-7
Views:189The volume Nowe dwudziestolecie (1989-2009): Rozpoznania, hierarchie, perspektywy [The new twenties (1989-2009): Recognitions, hierarchies, perspectives] reflects on the twenty years of Polish literature and literary change between 1989 and 2009, and compares and contrasts this period with the twenty years between the two world wars. The two twenty-year periods are linked by the fact that their starting point is associated with a date of immense importance for Polish history: 1918 is the year when Poland was returned on the map of Europe, and 1989 is also the year of the change of regime in Poland. The period between the two world wars is also regarded as a separate period in Polish literary history, while the second twenty years covered in this volume are questionable as a literary unit, a question which the essays in this book seek to answer. The volume is divided into three large sections, the first focusing primarily on theory, the second on Polish characteristics and themes that characterised Polish literature after 1989, and the third large section on the genre characteristics that have characterised Polish literature since the fall of communism to this day but were also important between the two world wars.
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Metaphors in Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s Short Story ”The Queen of Spades”
8 p.Views:461In this paper it opens up how Lyudmila Ulitskaya in her short story “The Queen of Spades”develops the crisis situation whichher heroes getsinto. So, the problems of the crisis should beanalysed also from a broader perspective, however, we will confine ourselves to only one rather narrow aspect of the analysis of poetic utterance, namely the tropological one.The chosen (mechanical and animalistic) metaphors are connected with the figure of the main heroine and also her revolting daughter.
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Angelika Molnár: Reception and Analysis of the Text. Selected works. Moscow, Azbukovnik, 2023, 447 pp. ISBN 978-5-91172-236-4
Views:335The review examines a new book by Hungarian researcher Angelika Molnár on classical Russian literature of the 19th century. Molnár's book analyses the works of Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Chekhov in the context of the overlaps with the literature of the 21st century (Ulitskaya, Akunin, etc.). The main emphasis is placed on describing the principles of textual formation through the prism of discursive poetics. The history of Hungarian reinterpretation of Russian classics is widely represented in the book. The interpretations of the works reveal unusual correlations between the works and show the specificity of the writers' poetics in a new way.
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Novel-Commentary as a Method of Rethinking the Past and a Form of Authorial Reflection (on the Basis of E. Popov’s „The Real Story of the 'Green Musicians’”)
Views:492The article shows how the genre of the novel-commentary by E. Popov «The Real Story of the Green Musicians” allows the author to evaluate his short story, “The Green Musicians”, written 20 years earlier, on the one hand,and to characterize the entire Soviet epoch, on the other. The pretext commented on, serves as a typical text of the Soviet era, written under the influence of that period: the short story is an excellent example of the review of the Soviet times, while the commentary functions as an independent artistic element of the novel. Also, the article offers a classification of a complex and interconnected system of post-textual notes, which are conditionally divided into several levels. Each level of the commentaries serves Popov’s goal of expressing his attitude towards the Soviet nomenclature, which is the underlying theme of his work.
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Linguistic Analysis of the Development of the Term “Greenwashing” Through the Prism of Variology
Views:75This article examines the variability of the ecological neologism “greenwashing.” Based on an analysis of the media context and various corpus platforms, the main types of variability (graphic, morphological, and syntactic) are revealed. Semantic variability is also presented depending on the context. Particular attention is paid to the process of determinologization in the context of the mediatization of scientific knowledge.
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The relationship between Excellent People by Chekhov and the ideological position and artistic attitude in the late short stories of Leo Tolstoy
Views:409In Chekhov and His Prose (first published in 1965), the author, Thomas G. Winner contends that the subject matters of a few of Chekhov’s short stories written in the 1880s (such as «Хорошие люди» [Excellent People]) were created in the spirit of Leo Tolstoy, yet the one called «Несчастье» [Misfortune], written also in 1886, already marked the beginning of a series of texts that can be interpreted directly as “a light parody” of Anna Karenina (1873–1877) as well. The basic question posed here concerns whether there is really a significant difference that can be observed between the above two works and whether they reveal this sharp difference in the reception of Tolstoyan ideas that Winner's monograph suggests. The paper seeks to answer this query on the basis of the interpretation of Excellent People and the textual representation of the issue of goodness. In this analysis, particular attention is given to the way in which Tolstoy's ideas are represented and to the author's poetic choices that bring the text close to Tolstoy's late short stories.
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Double Russian Lexical Сopies in the Mari Lexicon
12 p.Views:337The author aims to reconstruct the phonetic, morphological, semantic and chronological
peculiarities of three pairs of Mari words (wočko and pečke ‘barrel’, kaďilä and ká·δәn ‘censer’,
moľo and mŭľo ‘young fish’) borrowed from Russian dialects. She comes to the conclusion
that they can compose pairs as direct and indirect borrowings, different derivational
varieties of the same verbal stem or the phonetically resembling Mari representations of two
etymologically different Russian dialectal words. -
“... studying travelogues often becomes a journey...”: A. Y. Sorochan: Travel writing as literature. Monograph. Tver, “Alpha Press”, 2024, pp. 254. ISBN: 978‐5‐98721‐073‐4
Views:312The present review analyzes the monograph of A. Y. Sorochan, published in 2024. The author is a philologist, a professor at Tver State University who specializes in the history and theory of literature. He defended his doctoral dissertation titled “Motivation in the Russian Historical Novel of the 1830s–1840s”, which focuses on a unique combination of historical and literary approaches. This monograph is thematically close to Sorochan's dissertation and consists of three parts: in the first the author speaks generally about travel literature; the second section is devoted to works of Russian literature; and the third section contains reviews of books on travel literature. In this critical article, the specificity of historical and imagological approaches in Sorochan's work on travel literature is analyzed.
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Language Registers’ Variety and its Implementation in the Commentary Novel The True History of “The Green Musicians”
Views:431The paper examines the tools and techniques Yevgeny Popov uses in his commentary novel The True History of “The Green Musicians", combining various styles and types of speech, thereby assembling a diverse linguistic picture of the Soviet era. Popov destroys the myth created by Soviet ideology and propaganda about the people supporting the government, emphasizing that the people expressed their true attitude towards the Soviet regime through adages, ditties and other genres of folklore. Gathering a broad collection of poems and proverbs, slang and officialese, examples of censorship and self-censorship, the writer gives his assessment of the Soviet totalitarian regime. Implementing a complex system of 888 notes to his early unpublished text, Popov also protests against the totalitarianism of the linear text, thus expressing his position not only at the thematic level of the novel, but also at the level of the novel’s form.
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The Features of Theatre Activity in Hungary: The Legal and Financial Basis (II)
12 p.Views:369Hungarian theatre system is the main object of the following article. The first part of article contains the general questions connected with the existing model of theatrical activity. Then there is the analytical review of the modern Hungarian legislation of area of culture and special attention is paid to the structure and content of Law XCIX / 2008 “On support and rules of employment in organizations of performing arts”. In the following part of the article all models which exist and develop in the country nowadays of direct and indirect financial support of theatrical organizations are considered. Since Hungarian and Russian theatre systems have some similar characteristics, the final part is devoted to possible partial adoption of Hungarian experience with a view to develop the institutions for the additional funding of Russian theatres.
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Grotesque and paradox: Female and male narratives in Victor Erofeyev’s novels
Views:337This paper examines the narrative dynamics of two novels by Victor Erofeyev. The female discourse of Russian Beauty is characterized by the vertical dynamics of grotesque, while the discourse of the autobiographical narrator of Good Stalin is characterized by the dynamics of paradox, a horizontal movement between opposing truths. In both novels the Soviet aesthetic canon is undermined through the dynamics of narrative that denies the possibility of a singular truth.
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Musical Ekphrasis in I.S.Turgenev's Novel Rudin
Views:445Turgenev-scholars often use the word "musicality" or "musical code" in the analysis of the writer's fictional prose, since Turgenev often refers to music in dialogues, in descriptions of the characteristics of the heroes. This article focuses on a musical piece, which occurs in the third chapter in Turgenev’s Rudin,F. Schubert’s famous “Erlkönig” Lied. This musical scene of the short novel evokes the mysterious atmosphere of Goethe’s ballad. Schubert’s “Erlkönig” thematizes some of the parallel motifs that appear in the novel such as travel, the motive of finding a path, and the problem of intransmissibility. My aim is to examine how these motifs are manifested in Turgenev’s novel. On the one hand, this research examines the purpose of the musical ekphrasis and how it might foreshadow his fate. This mimetic musical ekphrasis allows us to interpret the novel from different aspects. On the other hand, this intertextual element can be perceived as “mise en abyme” (L. Dällenbach), proceeding from the fact that the function of a diminutive mirror provides a key to a deeper understanding of the text.
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A Big Change Starts Small – Pronominal Clitics in 12-15th Century Old Russian Chronicles
14 p.Views:516East Slavic languages, in contrast with South and West Slavonic ones did not retain enclitic pronominals. In Old Russian (ОR) however, these forms were widely used. As manuscripts suggest, they dissapeared from the language by the end of the OR period, i. e. by the 15th-16th centuries. The paper gives an overview of the use of enclitic pronominals in the text of five OR chronicles relying on the diachronic corpus of Russian National Corpus. The analysis focuses on the distribution of clitic pronominals, their placement, clusterizing properties and deviating constructions. The last section is devoted to the placement of the investigated phenomenon in the complex of parametric variation envoked by the disintegration of the tense-aspect system.
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The Function of the „Author’s Mask” in “The Soul of a Patriot or Various Epistles to Ferfichkin” by Yevgeni Popov
Views:351Playing with the author’s figure is not a new device in Postmodernism. One may refer to “Either/Or” by Søren Kierkegaard or “The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin” by Alexander Pushkin, or “The Fiery Angel” by Valery Bryusov. At the same time the foreword of “The soul of a patriot or Various epistles to Ferfichkin” proves that in Postmodernism this game is taken to the next level. The author who abandoned their fictional space and renounced theirauthorial role during Modernism returns and re-takes their formal place. However, he does not do it seriously but hiding behind the mask of the author – says Malmgren, introducing the term of the author’s maskinto literary discourse. In this analysis I state that Popov, using the author’s mask, turns the traditional interpretationof the author’s role inside out. I conclude that, on the one hand, the author’s mask ridicules the concept by which the author’s biography is the key to his work. On the other hand, it makes fun of Vinogradov’s view, according to which there is always an abstract author hiding in the text who carries its real meaning. I come to the conclusion, that Popov uses this narrative technique to emphasise that it is impossible to look at a literary work as an arsenal of ultimate truths and statements.
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A Witness of the Era: A New Biography of Slovak Writer Pavol Strauss (1912–1994): Ivan A. Petranský: Pavol Strauss a jeho 20. storočie [Pavol Strauss and his 20th century]. Bratislava, Marenčin PT, 2025, 572 p. ISBN: 978-80-5569-1379-6
Views:72Petranský’s book Pavol Strauss a jeho 20. storočie [Pavol Strauss and his 20th century] is a comprehensive biography of the eminent Slovak poet Pavol Strauss (1912–1994), an essayist and aphorist who had been associated with Catholic literary circles since 1946. Pavol Strauss came from a Jewish, intellectual family. From his childhood, he showed an aptitude for literature and music. In the 1930s, he completed his medical studies at a German university in Prague, where he also made his literary debut with two volumes of poetry in German. Before the World War II, he returned to Slovakia, where he began working as a doctor. In the early 1940s, he was baptised into the Catholic faith, which may have saved him from the Holocaust, and in the mid-1940s he began writing in Slovak. He chose to become a Slovak writer, combining literature with his work as a surgeon in hospitals.
In the late 1940s, he was persecuted by the security services. He was subject to a ban on publication in Slovakia for almost the rest of his life. He published sporadically in Slovak Catholic publications and in Rome. Despite the repression, he continued to write and became increasingly respected within literary circles. In the 1970s and 1980s, he also became involved in the Catholic samizdat movement.
Petranský’s biography draws on numerous previously unknown sources, including material from family archives, the security services’ archives, and the Vatican archives. Petranský paints a highly detailed picture of the era of totalitarianism and the situation of a man living by moral principles that remained unshaken by the tragic events of the time. The portrait of the life of this poet and essayist, whose work was only recognised after his death, is also a portrait of Slovakia’s post-war history. Strauss began his life as a citizen of Austria–Hungary and ended it as a citizen of independent Slovakia. He witnessed great historical changes and bore witness to them in his work. Today, he ranks among the most outstanding Slovak writers associated with the Catholic movement. -
On the meaning of disjunction and conjunction in Lermontov’s The Demon
Views:301The paper analyzes Lermontov’s verse narrative (poema) The Demon by focusing on some clear-cut binaries, representing and suggesting, as their primary meaning, dichotomic pairs related to the system of literary characters (the Angel or Tamara vs. the Demon), evaluative concepts (e.g. good vs. evil), and notions comprising ideological views (the celestial, the earthly world, or the netherworld). The interpretation takes a distance from these definitions, examining the poetic modes of neutralizing and removing the dichotomies in the text by weakening the semantic motivation for setting and interpreting the binaries; the emergence of mono-dualistic antinomy, and the creation of equivalences of motifs and constructs of reverse symmetry with the transformation of their reference. Resulting from these strategies for meaning generation in Lermontov’s text, a shift from an axiological conceptualization of the world to the literary model of the human existential experience of the soul can be traced.
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A Possible Slavic Etymology of Hungarian kullancs ’tick’
9 p.Views:326The present article is dedicated to the etymology of the Hungarian noun kullancs ”клещ (lat. Ixodes ricinus)”. The Slavic origin of the word was assumed in the 19th century, however this idea was rejected in the 20th century owing to phonetic reseasons. After a short overview of the history of the research of this word, arguments are lined up in favour of the fact that the phonetic difficulties can be ignored or at least taken as irrelevant when comparing the Hungarian word kullancs with its Slavic equivalents. Therefore, it is inevitable to raise the question of its Slavic origin again.
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Ornamentality, rhythm and repetition of prose: G. G. Bagautdinova: “Poetics of I. A. Goncharov’s non-novel prose”. Yoshkar-Ola, Mari State University, 2024, pp. 296. ISBN: 978-5-907622-93-7
Views:256This paper examines the relevance of G. G. Bagautdinova's book Poetics of I. A. Goncharov’s non-novel prose, which is undeniable and is due to a range of reasons indicated in the paper. First, it reviews the holistic understanding of I. A. Goncharov's creative path in his so-called "essay" works. The scholarly novelty of the monograph is analyzed point by point parallel to the constructed structure of the book. In this regard, the following so far little-studied and unexplored aspects are examined: the framework text, the cumulation of folklorism, "ornamental prose", the rhythm of prose, and the poetics of repetition. The unconditional discoveries of this work are the conclusions in terms of the objective results achieved.
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Word Skepticism and Word-magic in Afanasy Fet’s Poetry
Views:241This paper is devoted to Afanasy Fet’s philosophy of art. In Fet’s poetry, the virtuosic use of words is combined with linguistic skepticism, involving a feeling of verbal inexpressibility and the apotheosis of silence. The topic of his poetry is the inexpressible and unspeakable, which, paradoxically, becomes expressible and describable through impressionistic imagery, metaphoric nomination, musical effects, and metalinguistic means. Fet’s poems are highly polysemic, and the semantic implications of his texts are inexhaustible.
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Culture in Digital Format
12 p.Views:418The article analyzes the changes in traditional culture triggered by technologies and development of its new formats as a result, such as clip culture, screen culture, culture of computer games, etc. It touches upon the influence on culture of the personal computer and other numerous digital devices, in particular the Internet, artificial intelligence, computer graphics, and virtual reality. Traditional means of communication (books, photographs, audio and video recordings, digital TV, etc.) that are most influenced by digital technologies are also discussed. As traditional culture is losing its original features that emphasize the difference between different peoples, societies and their individual characteristics, all these processes are extensive, generating not only progressive, but negative trends. On the one hand modern culture has become accessible to everybody, on the other hand, it has lost the «romance» of personal communication. The article points out that nowadays the investigation of culture in digital format does not primarily mean analyzing its phenomena and artifacts in themselves. It is rather a matter of monitoring further transformations and contributing the unique features of traditional culture preservation, without diminishing the importance of digital technologies as a whole in society.
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Metaphoricity in the novel Pelagia and Black Monk by Boris Akunin
Views:277The paper discusses the tropological game in Boris Akunin's detective novel Pelagia and the Black Monk. The author focuses on the transformation of the main images in this contemporary work. Various periphrases and similes are then studied, as well as the destruction and renewal of redundant tropes, and the generation of new metaphors, particularly those related to color, nature, and zoomorphic images (e.g. the color black, rays). The figurative order of the text of the novel offers such potential correlations that expand the plan of interpretation of the novel in a new and unexpected direction, testifying to a truly postmodern rewriting of lingual, literal, and poetical clichés. A key role in this process is played also by details (see Z. Hajnády).
