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• The Psychology of Literary Creativity in the Works of Mihail Arnaudov

  Mariyana Nyagolova

  Views:

  83

  Mihail Petrov Arnaudov (1878-1978), a Bulgarian scientist, was a famous European researcher with significant contributions to several fields of scholarship, i.e., folklore, the history of Bulgarian literature of the Renaissance, comparative literary history, the literature and culture of ancient India, the theory of literary science, the history of German and French literature of Romanticism, etc. This paper is devoted to his contribution to the study of the psychology of literary creativity. It analyses the prerequisites for Arnaudov’s formation as a psychologist of creativity, and provisionally identifies several main stages in his scientific and professional path, during which he conducted research and produced works in this interdisciplinary field. With the help of historical and psychological analysis, the general and specific features in the development of his views on the essence of the psychology of creativity and the meaning of its use in literary criticism and literary history are presented.

• Ekphrasis - Chameleon of Literary studies “Theory and History of Ekphrasis: Results and Prospects of Study” Siedlce, 2018

  9 p.

  Nóra Troitsky

  Views:

  261

  This 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.

• Figures of the Young Actress in the Dramatic Art of A.N. Ostrovsky and A.P. Chekhov

  Ildikó Regéczi

  Views:

  133

  The 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.

• 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

  Anna Kádár

  Views:

  12

  The 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.

• 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

  Ferenc Váradi

  Views:

  20

  Lukyanova'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.

• 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

  Orsolya Németh

  Views:

  47

  The 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.

• 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)

  Beáta Györfi

  Views:

  200

  Corpus 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.

• Mysterious Artist with a Movie Camera - Александр Риганов:«Тиссэ. Оператор Эйзенштейна», Санкт-Петербург: Издательство «Сеанс»,2020. ISBN 978-5-6042795-1-9, 384 pp.

  Ferenc Debreceni

  Views:

  124

  This review is a content and critical review of Alexander Riganov’s book on Soviet cinematographer Eduard Tisse (1897-1961), Tisse: Eisenstein’s cameraman, which was the first monograph of its kind published in Russian. The book follows the life of the first Soviet cameraman in chronological order from birth until his last days, with the author overviewingrelevant historic and cinematographic events throughout. Thus, there are three major stories in Riganov’s book: the life and artistic path of an artist, the history of a country, and the golden age of cinematography. Several unique archival documents, e.g. letters, diary segments, photographs etc., were first published in this book. The book’s author paid special attention to Tisse’s and Eisenstein’s joint works. The uniqueness and high professional standard of Riganov’s book makes it a piece of art worthy of attention.

• Language Registers’ Variety and its Implementation in the Commentary Novel The True History of “The Green Musicians”

  Dmitry Mazalevsky

  Views:

  199

  The 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.

• Angelika Molnár: Reception and Analysis of the Text. Selected works. Moscow, Azbukovnik, 2023, 447 pp. ISBN 978-5-91172-236-4

  Géza S. Horváth

  Views:

  12

  The 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.

• The Search for a Social Ideal as a Cultural Tradition of Russian Thought

  Natalya Matveeva

  Views:

  155

  This study investigates some important lines of Russian social thought of the 19th and early 20th centuries in the context of the interpretation of the social ideal. Four perspectives of the problem are outlined: the first one is cultural geographic, divided into three branches (Westernism, Slavophilism and, Eurasianism), the second one is sociological positivism, the third one is philosophical liberalism, and the fourth one is religious thought. The cultural-geographic orientation created  a wide field of the work of social thought in studying the paths of social development. Sociologists positivists P. Lavrov and N. Mikhailovsky, who were founders of ‘narodnichestvo’ movement, formulated the notion of social ideal as an object of sociological research. The positivist perspective that was intended for the ideals of social solidarity, transformed into the left the traditionalism that was narodnichestvo ideology. Narodnichestvo created the ideal prerequisites for the dissemination of  Marxism in Russia. Liberal philosophic thought offered the original concept of the development of personality as a social ideal (P. Novgorodtsev). The fourth perspective was closest to the modern comprehension of the processes of unification of humankind and the development of the world economic system. The issue of social ideal thus became the main tradition of thought in the pre-revolutionary Russia.

• Trans-Disciplinary Methodology: Procreation Capital as a Basic Factor in the Viability of a Civilizational-Cultural Unit

  12 p.

  Dmitrii Reut

  Views:

  136

  The main problem raised in the paper is in line with a new trend of research, conceptual programs and practical activity that can be termed “hygiene of culture”. The study is transcritical in its character and proposes to consider the category of capital generated by the economy in relation to the reproduction of the population in its structural units of civilization and as a cultural community. Trans-discipline methodology is currently being developed, which makes the work is up-to-date. It develops basic aspects of the procreation capital category, which claims to be a generalization of the human capital category. The problem is the restoration of European culture, which has been eroded by the distortion of the ideas of market economy. The reason why it is particularly urgent to find a solution to the problem is the threat posed by the demographic situation of the developed countries of European culture and the adjacent countries of the Slavic-Orthodox cultural cluster by the actual organization of housing.

• 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

  Josef Dohnal

  Views:

  38

  The 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.

• S. S. Bobrov’s Ode "The Kingdom of Universal Love": Erotogenesis and Phenomenology of Love (1785)

  Aleksey Petrov

  Svetlana Rudakova

  Views:

  162

  Among the genre concepts of Love formed in the poetry of the 18th century (erotic-political myth about the love of monarchs in an epithalamic ode; triumph of flesh and physiology in priapic ode; hedonism in anacreontic ode) a special place is occupied by the concept of historiosophical ode. In one of the works of this genre – «The Kingdom of Total Love» by S. S. Bobrov – an attempt was made to combine Eros and History. The ideas of Bobrov, a freemason poet, about the origin of Love go back to the myths of various genesis. Another idea was that Love brings light and harmony to non-living nature, and living nature is completely submitted to the Law of Love – the Law of the continuation of Life. In general, Love appears in Bobrov's historiosophical ode as a harmonizing cosmic force.

• The Cultural Heritage of the Ancient Russian City of Yelets

  Tatyana Yudina

  Alexandra Merkulova

  Views:

  134

  This article provides scholarly evidence the small historical city of Yelets as a potential cultural heritage site in the context of its socio-cultural significance for the state, society and the local community. The paper overviews the results of a comprehensive sociological study of the issues of the cultural heritage of this ancient Russian city. The issues of the cultural heritage of Yelets is considered from the perspective of internal and external identification processes which transformed it and make it lose its unique urban identity. For the analysis of cultural heritage, the types of identity of the city are identified: historical and cultural, visual and spatial, socio-psychological and communicative spatial. The main factors of the identification processes of the city are analyzed, such as urban identity, history, culture, social interaction and language.

• Harms – Gogol – Dostoevsky (“Old Women” – “Vij” – “Crime and Punishment”)

  14 p.

  Sergey Shults

  Views:

  168

  In terms of historical poetics and intertextuality, parallels are drawn between "Old Woman"
  by D. Harms, "Vij" by N. Gogol and "Crime and Punishment" by F. Dostoevsky. As far as the
  three authors are concerned, their common features are revealed, together with the transformation
  of the motives of the ugly infernal old woman, which are depicted in the context of
  mythopoetics, historiosophy and social history by the three authors. Concerning the texts produced
  by their followers the term “post-text” is introduced, which is meant to include the dialogical
  connotations of literary evolution. The role of “vertex composition” (a term coined by
  V.M. Zhirmunsky) in works of Modernism/ Avant-garde is also touched upon.

• Lecturer, Researcher and Translator in One Person. In Honour of József Goretity's 60th Birthday

  Ildikó Regéczi

  Views:

  118

  József Goretity has been working at the Institute of Slavonic Studies at the University of Debrecen since 1985 and has been the head of the institute since 2012. During this time he has been teaching courses on 19th and 20th century West-European and Russian literature focusing on the tradition of the novel and mythopoetics at the Department of Comparative Literature as well. In 1996 he was appointed head of the department. Between 1992 and 1999 he was a lecturer at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Miskolc. Besides his teaching activity, József Goretity’s work in the field of literary translation is also outstanding. He has brought such prominent Russian writers to Hungarian-speaking audiences as Narine Abgaryan, Sergey Dovlatov, Viktor Yerofeyev, Viktor Pelevin, Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, Yuri Polyakov, Grigoriy Ryazhskiy, Marina Stepanova, Alexandr Terekhov or Lyudmila Ulickaya. Besides literary texts he also translated literary and cultural studies into Hungarian, such as P. P. Apryshko’s influential monograph The History of Russian Philosophy. József Goretity’s most influential academic works are Idézet paródia és mítosz Fjodor Szologub két regényében and Töredékesség és teljességigény. Huszadik századi orosz prózai művek értelmezése. In 2014 he was awarded the Medal of Pushkin by the President of the Russian Federation. In 2019 he received the prestigous state award, the Golden Cross, for his achievement.

• 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

  Lajos Pálfalvi

  Views:

  81

  This 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.

• Censor Nikolay Ratynsky’s Role in Russian Journalism of the Second Half of the 19th Century

  12 p.

  Dmitriy Mazalevskiy

  Views:

  165

  Recently, the political climate in Russia has caused the question of censorship to become
  an increasingly relevant issue, the history of which is necessary to explore and understand.
  The prevailing view regarding censorship is that it is a tool used to suppress the freedom of
  speech by stifling the writer’s thoughts. However, there were some eminent censors such as
  the poet Fyodor Tyutchev and the writer Ivan Goncharov. In this regard, it has become commont
  to consider censorship isolated from any moral categories and interpret g it only as a
  professional activity. In this context, the work of the censor Nikolai Ratynsky is of particular
  interest to us. Until now, little has been published on his influence as a censor on the writers
  of his time on the high professional level of his work in this capacity. Most of the corrections
  Ratynsky made were valid and justified by the political situation in the Russian Empire. He
  himself is further proof that, along with Tyutchev and Goncharov, there were honorable and
  qualified men among the censors of the time. All this allows us to claim that it is necessary
  to objectively consider and study the work of censors and ignor preconceptions and stereotypes
  that are usually associated with the word censor.

• The features of the use of color and light in the best works of the festival of video poetry “Videostikhiya”

  Svetlana Rudakova

  Views:

  19

  This paper deals with video poetry as a phenomenon of contemporary art. A brief excursion into the history of video poetry is presented. The popularity of video poetry in the early 21st century is explained in this paper throughmany factors, one of which is the systematic, since 2002, holding of various festivals and contests of poetic video clips. The main attention is focused on the analysis of video clips presented at the international festival of video poetry ‘Videostichia’. The peculiarity of the use of such a technique as color in the best video clips is revealed. It is noted that video poetry revises the idea of color, making it more symbolic and memorable. Each clip transforms the ordinary perception of color, turning it into a symbol of art and life.

• A Possible Slavic Etymology of Hungarian kullancs ’tick’

  9 p.

  Ádám Galac

  Views:

  101

  The 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.

• On the meaning of disjunction and conjunction in Lermontov’s The Demon

  Katalin Kroó

  Views:

  13

  The 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.

• The Transformation of Spiritual Culture in the Context of the Formation of the "New Ethics" (Problem Statement)

  Andrey Chukurov

  Views:

  151

  The article is devoted to the analysis of the spiritual values that are being formed today and the reasons for the actualization of the New Ethics. Catastrophic dynamism leads to the elimination of the stable social groups as well as to the maximum diffuseness of personal boundaries. At the same time, the transformation of the communication system brings an extremely vulnerable virtual body to the forefront of cultural life. The new communication system, social atomization, the lack of understandable guidelines in the process of socialization and self-identification - all this turns the concept of “border” into a basic one for the New Ethics. However, the design of boundaries and self-defense mechanisms does not always lead to the expected positive results. We come to the conclusion, that an initially inadequate assessment of the aggressiveness of the environment forces a person to build the most aggressive defense mechanisms: the man himself is transformed into a source of toxicity, which in turn makes the environment even more toxic than it was originally.

• The Czech Language in Volhynia A. Arkhanhelska, O. Bláha, U. Cholodová (eds.): Čeština na Volyni. 2020. Olomouc. Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci. ISBN 978-80-88278-62-7

  Martin Henzelmann

  Views:

  114

  In 2020, a collective monograph was published in Olomouc dedicated to the nature of the Czech language and culture in Volhynia in today’s Ukraine, overviewing the settlement and history of Czech migrants in this area, including  culture-specific features of the local Czech identity, especially in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Language features, which play a significant role,are also described. The volume sheds light on phenomena of language contact, in subsystems such as phonetics and phonology, morphosyntax, and lexicology. In this context, the authors present and analyze empirical material. The book is an important contribution to the study of Czech cultural heritage outside the country’s borders.

• Identity Problems from Historical, Cultural and Literary Aspects

  7 p.

  Andrea Posta

  Views:

  201

  This critique focuses on the latest part of the publication series by the Slavic Historical and Philological Association entitled “Individual and Collective Identities”, which is of great importance for the field of Russian Studies in Hungary as it provides a regular platform for academics with annual conferences. In the three main chapters of the book, identity is approached in different contexts from a historical, cultural, and literary point of view. For this reason, we can say that this collection stands out due to its interdisciplinary nature and complexity serving as a useful resource for those who deal with identity issues.