Search
Search Results
-
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:233This 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.
-
New Trends in the Use of Metaphors and Similes Including Names of Food in Modern Russian Prose
Views:337The article discusses metaphors and similes including culinary vocabulary, functioning in modern Russian prose. The purpose of the article is to identify new trends in the use of such figurative constructions in modern prose compared with the previous period in the development of Russian literature. The work outlines the main thematic groups of names of food and drinks used in prosaic texts, and notes changes in their composition and character. New elements in the semantic classes of «vehicles» of metaphors and similes are also revealed. A tendency towards the differentiation and concretization of images of comparison, which is characteristic of modern prose, is noted, and the means of its implementation (specific names and qualifying definitives) are described. The article considers new subjects of comparison and figurative parallels used in modern prose texts.
-
Intimacy or exposure: Ukrainian artists and the camp wound in relations with Russia
Views:389The aim of the paper is to provide an interdisciplinary analysis of cultural testimonies of the unique wound left by the camps in Ukrainian–Russian relations. Gulag literature, explored for decades in philology, is perceived mainly through the prism of the heritage of totalitarian systems and creative attitudes in the face of suffering, as extreme physical and mental experience. The aim of the paper is to analyze the works of Ukrainian artists of recent decades created as a result of imprisonment. Their literary and film creations make up the image of a wound inflicted in the name of achieving imperial goals while imprisoned in a camp. The juxtaposition of their diverse artistic reactions to the suffering of testimonies help to highlight the power with which the unsettled, forgotten, silenced, and now and unexpectedly updated wound of the camp past is reflected in today's attitudes of Ukrainians towards Russians.
-
Ekphrasis - Chameleon of Literary studies “Theory and History of Ekphrasis: Results and Prospects of Study” Siedlce, 2018
9 p.Views:498This 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.
-
Hero of Contemporary Russian Prose: Anna Skotnicka, Szczelina. Bohater współczesnej prozy rosyjskiej i jego światy, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, Kraków 2020, 335 s. ISBN: 978-83-233-4771-2
Views:251The text contains a review of the monograph by the Polish literary critic Anna Skotniсka A fissure: A hero of contemporary Russian prose and his worlds. The author considers incompleteness, absence, and insufficiency as a property of the existence of the character of the works of Russian writers of the late 20th to early 21st centuries. The sources of this problem, according to Skotnicka, can be seen in the state of disintegration of the social, psychological and mental image of the world in a changing reality, especially historical changes: the collapse of the Soviet Union, as well as political, cultural and social transformations. With these phenomena, the Polish literary critic also connects the concept of chaos, which is characteristic of the postmodern perception of the world as disunited, incomprehensible, alien in relation to people. Skotniсka considers these problems based on the works of Mikhail Kuraev, Svetlana Aleksievich, Roman Senchin, Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Vladimir Makanin, and Mikhail Shishkin. The author refers to the current achievements of the humanities, especially philosophy. The work is innovative and stimulates reflection on the state of the modern human.
-
Gender and Space in Literature and Cinema (Bogomil Rainov’s Roads to Nowhere and Metodi Andonov’s A White Room)
Views:307The article discusses the structural link between the gender model and the fictional space in Bogomil Rainov’s short story Roads to Nowhere (1966) and its film adaptation—Metodi Andovov’s A White Room (1968). The transformations of the original text are traced via several semantic oppositions (masculine-feminine, rational-emotional, order-chaos) and the influence of two aesthetic paradigms—noir and the existentialist “new wave”. These transformations are interpreted in the socio-cultural context of the Bulgarian “thaw” with its quest for the marginal, regional, personal alternatives within the socialist system.
-
The beginnings of the collective identity of Slovaks in the Central European context
Views:269The study analyses the linguistic, literary and cultural contexts of the formation of Slovak national identity during the Enlightenment and the early national movement. The Slovak intellectual elite identified and defined Slovaks and the Slovak nation in terms of modern Austrian statehood, traditional Hungarian patriotism and cultural Slavism. The study shows that modern Slovak nationalism was already richly structured atits beginnings, adopting diverse ideological impulses and establishing relations with neighboring Slavic and non-Slavic cultures.
-
Language Registers’ Variety and its Implementation in the Commentary Novel The True History of “The Green Musicians”
Views:410The 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.
-
On the Mystery of Interpretation: Studia Humanitatis. Ars Hermeneutica. Metodologie A Theurgie Hermeneutické Interpretace IX. Kolektiv autorů. red.: Jan Vorel. Ostravská univerzita: Ostrava 2022., 148 p., ISBN: 978-80-7599-333-5
Views:175The aim of this review is to introduce the ninth volume of the publication series Studia Humanitatis, Ars Hermeneutica, published by the Department of Slavonic Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Ostrava in the Czech Republic. The monograph is an output of proceedingsfrom conferences which are regularly organized by this department. Attention to the art of interpretation and the related need to situate works of art in a complex web of cultural and historical connections is an important part of the effort to understand the deep context of artistic creation as such and the possibility for recipients to gain the most accurate understanding of the message conveyed by a work of art. The monograph highlights a number of aspects of artisticcreation: it notes the circumstances of the creation of the artwork, the ability of the interpreter to place the artwork in the context of the historical conditions in which it is created, and the theoretical concepts that can be used for its interpretation.
-
«Doktor Zhivago» and Leonid Pasternak
Views:304In this article, we analyze the transformation of values in the literature and art of the first half of the 20th century through the creative strategies of two closely linked people: the poet Boris Pasternak and his father, the painter Leonid Pasternak. An academician of painting, Leonid Pasternak renewed the traditions of realism, being in close contact with Leo Tolstoy while working on the illustrations for Tolstoy’s novel “The Resurrection”. Having made a creative journey from the movement of “peredvizhniki” (“the Itinerants”) toward Impressionism, he did not accept the newest trends, as opposed to his son who had undergone a long period of fascination with Futurism, as well as the influence of Modernism. This conflict of aesthetics lost its poignancy with the passing of the years and with the geographical distance (Pasternak the father having emigrated in the beginning of the 20s). Thus, Boris Pasternak returned to the poetics of the classical Russian prose in his novel “Doctor Zhivago.” But the Christian values on which the conceptual basis of the novel rests, remained unknown to the father, who had passed away just before his son began working on the novel. The result was the novel itself with its covert subtextual influence and the polemics of the son and the father, the poet and the artist.
-
Metaphoricity in the novel Pelagia and Black Monk by Boris Akunin
Views:270The 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).
-
“Hungarian Subject Matter” in Chekhov (The Short Story The Unnecessary Victory)
Views:303The paper considers “The unnecessary victory” as one of the notable works of the earliest stage of Chekhov’s creativity. The Hungarian theme of the story, inspired by the novels of Mór Jókai translated into Russian, and its plot, related to the traditions of the European career novel, address a wide audience. The young writer plays along with this reader with exotic narrative elements and delineates the difference between serious and marginal literature. This hoax, together with other skits of those years, reveals the young writer’s view of literary pursuits as an exciting game in which the main expectation is to be truthful and graceful. The same goals, according to Chekhov, characterize literature in general, regardless of the field of its competence and of the readership coverage.
-
"React with Cobra's Speed to Everyday Life" On the Trap of Actuality - Andrzej Stasiuk's Beskidy and World Chronicles (2018)
11 p.Views:271The 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. -
On the Reception of the Poem The Twelve by Aleksandr Blok in German Criticism and Literature Studies of the Past 50 Years
Views:307The 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.
-
The Hungarian reception of Dostoevsky until the 1920s in the context of European and Hungarian Modernism
Views:313This 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.
-
Georgy Adamovich ‘The Beginning of the Story’, ‘From a Clogged Notebook’ - about the Turgenev’s Subtext
11 p.Views:328The discourse of ‘Ich-Erzählung’ creates visibility, or an autobiographical narrative,
where the author narrates the more famous classical texts on the theme of ‘love as strong as
death’. The narration of stories is based on the principle of the repeatability of individual
thematic units built on similarities and contrasts. The text that is being created does not translate into an autonomous story about Maria Leopoldovna, but it exposes the technique of reminiscence poetics. Quotes and auto-quotes form or create a peculiar language of the major art,
where the names of Turgenev and Tolstoy are markers of the story. Turgenev’s subtext is
connected with the way meaning is constructed in the story, which is told about love that has
never come true but is remembered all one’s my life. -
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:256This 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.
-
Bugs, Burrow, Inquisitor: Dostoevskian Intertexts in Eyeless in Gaza
Views:303The 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.
-
From the Classic Novel to the Crime Novel: A Genre Paradigm Shift in Artistic Reception
Views:196The article deals with the cases of classical works completion, in which their genre nature undergoes a change. The texts are transferred from the sphere of high literature to the low one, as the continuing of the plot with the criminal line becomes the main method. The material for the analysis is “The very same Tatiana” by A. and S. Litvinovs, as well as the novel “Death Comes to Pemberley” by P.D. James. I show that one of the most relevant genres in this change of genre paradigm is “by victim investigation”, which allows to retain some recognizable items of the classic primary source.
