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New Trends in the Use of Metaphors and Similes Including Names of Food in Modern Russian Prose
Views:359The 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.
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Leonid Andreyev’s Panpsychic Drama “Requiem”
Views:81This article examines the role of Leonid Andreyev’s work in the emergence of the New Drama in Russia and, through an analysis of the play Requiem, highlights the genre-specific and formal characteristics of panpsychic dramas. The author emphasises that Andreyev’s panpsychic drama is a groundbreaking experiment that demonstrates just how far the concept of the dramatic genre can be expanded. The text of the panpsychic drama shows that eventfulness, previously considered one of the main criteria of drama, is by no means fundamental in the New Drama. In this way, the frequency of external events decreases, while the significance of internal events increases, and the role of mental and psychological events becomes increasingly important. On the other hand, Andreyev’s dramatic text already contains within itself an impoverishment of the referential function of artistic language, and the pursuit of the autonomy of tropes becomes the organizing principle of the drama’s structure. These phenomena give Andreyev's drama panpsyche special significance on the way to the contemporary understanding of the New Drama.
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Language Registers’ Variety and its Implementation in the Commentary Novel The True History of “The Green Musicians”
Views:430The 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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Ecological terminology: The term "use of natural resources " in Russian texts of various registers
Views:288The relevance of this paper stems from the rapid development of ecological knowledge, accompanied by the active formation and integration of new specialized terminology. Due to a growing interest in issues of applied ecology, sustainable development, and rational use of natural resources, ecological vocabulary is steadily expanding and becoming established in texts of various genres and functional styles. This dynamism necessitates a linguistic analysis of word formation of new terminology and the use of specialized vocabulary in the context of the environment. The paper examines the specifics of how the term prirodopol'zovanie “use of natural resources” functions in Russian-language texts representing different functional styles such as scientific, official-administrative, and journalistic texts.
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Women's Prose: Past, Present and Future
Views:393The very expression "women's prose" in Russian literary discourse is debatable, since even many female writers refuse to identify themselves as such. A woman writer has all the rights of a writer, but she also has the additional right to self-identify as a representative of "women's prose". Women's prose requires a double research point of view: looking at it as an integral part of fiction and identifying the specific features of works created by women writers. During the period of perestroika (the second half of the 1980s), women's activity in Russian prose became more active, and L. Petrushevskaya and T. Tolstaya came to the forefront of literary life. An important milestone in the awareness of the specifics of women's prose was the series "Women's Handwriting" by the publishing house "Vagrius". A characteristic trend in the development of modern Russian women's prose is the democratization of the artistic thinking and language, the attraction of high prose tothe mainstream, to mass nature and the feeling of accessibility. In this regard, the article examines the prose of V. Tokareva, O. Slavnikova, D. Rubina, M. Stepnova, N. Abgaryan, G. Yakhina and others.
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Moscow Everyday Life in Soviet Film Comedies of the 1960s–1980s
Views:73The paper addresses the representation of everyday life in Soviet film comedies of the 1960s–1980s. The object of analysis is a corpus of nine films: Vzroslye deti [Adult children] (1961), Legkaya zhizn [Easy life] (1964), Daite zhalobnuyu knigu [Give me a book for complaints] (1965), Uroki literatury [Literature lessons] (1968), Ironiya sudby, ili S legkim parom! [The irony of fate, or Enjoy your bath!] (1975), Mimino (1977), Po semeynym obstoyatelstvam [Due to family circumstances] (1977), Sluzhebny roman [Office romance] (1977), and Samaya obayatelnaya i privlekatelnaya [The most charming and attractive] (1985). The research methodology combines two complementary approaches: Michel de Certeau’s sociology of everyday life and Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenological poetics of space. De Certeau’s concept of tactics and strategies helps describe the mechanisms by which the Soviet urban citizen adapted themselves to systemic structures, while Bachelard’s ideas on poetics enable the reading of interiors, material objects, and living spaces as symbolic images rooted in memory and imagination. The article demonstrates that the Soviet film comedy of this period was not a degraded genre but a distinct aesthetic form linked to Italian Neorealism that developed its own language for representing the everyday. In the analyzed films, Moscow appears not as a neutral topographical backdrop but as a meaning-making space that captures the profound transformations of late Soviet society: the conflict of generations, the crisis of public and private spheres, and the paradoxes of urban space unification. Film comedy is treated both as an archive of social tactics and as a text-space where the social and the symbolic are inseparably intertwined.
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Chekhov in New York: the Functions of Frame in Louis Malle's "Vanya on 42nd Street" (1994)
10 p.Views:335This paper focuses on Luis Malle’s creative adaptation of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya”. The frame location of "Vanya on 42nd street" is not only documentary evidence and a sign of admiration for the actors' ensemble, creating the spirit of live improvisation in the unfinished theatrical production by Andre Gregory. It is argued that the film is far from being another spectacular 're-citing' of Chekhov's ‘transcultural capital’. A set of framing elements foregrounds Chekhov's art in general and the way he represents Vanya’s stoic endurance in particular as resonating with the living experience of a person of any culture in whatever language (Russian, English, Bengali, theatrical, cinematic, etc.) holds general validity. Among leitmotifs which interconnect the frame and the drama performance within the film there are also those of kinship, unselfish friendship and true involvement in life as an ongoing rehearsal and improvisation on an inescapable life project that is never successful.
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Artefact Metaphors and Similes in Modern Russian Prose
Views:371The article deals with comparative constructions (metaphors and similes) that include images of artefacts. The analysis involves the works of modern Russian prose writers such as A. Ilichevsky, E. Vodolazkin, O. Slavnikova, M. Shishkin, A. Volos, D. Bykov, D. Rubina, D. Glukhovsky, A. Makushinsky, S. Sokolov, V. Pelevin and others. It is concluded that modern Russian prose is characterized by the intensive use of artefact images as part of comparative constructions. The most common are metaphors and similes including the names of household items, fabrics, as well as machines, mechanisms, and their parts. These figurative means characterize, first of all, a person, parts of the human body, appearance, and people’s actions. Artefact comparative tropes giving a figurative description of various objects of nature are also widespread. Both traditional and new tropes including the names of artefacts in modern prose are discussed, in particular, the use of computer terms and names of new realities that have appeared relatively recently. A feature of modern prose texts is the regular use by writers of concretization and detailed transformation of images of comparison involving definitions of different types. Artefact metaphors and similes often act as key signs of the text and play a conceptualizing role in it.
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The first steps in the study of the Bulgarian language in Hungary
Views:338The article analyzes the handwritten notes from a book in the ELTE library (BOL/ Или-002), which preserves the testimonies of the activities of the first Hungarian Slavist, prof. Oszkár Asbóth (1852–1920). The only copy of the Collection of At. Iliev (1889) contains unique information about the beginning of academic Bulgarian studies in Hungary and restores lost traces of professional and personal contacts between Hungarian and Bulgarian scholars.
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Gender and Space in Literature and Cinema (Bogomil Rainov’s Roads to Nowhere and Metodi Andonov’s A White Room)
Views:332The 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.
