Search

Search Results

• A work of fiction as a path to a biography: The problem of reconstruction of the personality psychology of the young L. N. Tolstoy

  Lia Bushkanets

  Views:

  12

  A new museum of Leo Tolstoy is being created in Kazan, dedicated to the author’s adolescence and youth. Despite the fact that the basic facts of the Tolstoy’s life in Kazan have been restored by biographers, the inner life of the young Tolstoy and the features of his psychology are difficult to reconstruct due to the almost complete lack of sources. Since Tolstoy’s work is autobiographical, and he especially often relied on his own psychological experience in the draft versions of his works, the paper makes an attempt to reconstruct some features of the personality psychology of the young Tolstoy on the basis of the first complete draft edition of the novel War and Peace. The heroes of the novel, especially at the beginning, are at the age of youth, and Tolstoy, showing mental processes, recalls his youth. We can claim that Tolstoy, in his youth and adolescence, experienced the joy of life, suffered from ambition and awkwardness, found salvation in philosophical hobbies and daydreaming, in acting out certain situations, etc.

• The Heritage of Tolstoy’s Artistic Detail in the Poetics of Chekhov (Defamiliarization and „Randomness”)

  Dominika Zoltán

  Views:

  123

  One type of the “random Chekhovian detail ”can be referred to as a special cognitive phenomenon arising during the perception of the background and foreground within the depicted perception of the hero. In this paper, I suggest that this technique works if we perceive Chekhov’s laconicity against the detailed descriptions of the inner world of Tolstoy’s characters in the process of their estrangement. In the first part using the example of “War and Peace” I examine the “random” details concerning various features of Tolstoy's defamiliarization and show their transformation in Chekhov’s poetics. The examples from Chekhov’s early short stories “Grisha” and “Polinka” demonstrate an intermediate level of this transformation. In the second part I turn to the story “The Lady with the Dog” and consider the transformation of Tolstoy's technique through parallels with the novels “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina”. The situation of Gurov and Tolstoy’s characters (Natasha, Prince Andrei, Levin) is similar with regard to the fact that they retain true love in their hearts and get  into an everyday social situation, where they are exposed to the the automatism and lies of everyday life with special intensity.

• Georgy Adamovich ‘The Beginning of the Story’, ‘From a Clogged Notebook’ - about the Turgenev’s Subtext

  11 p.

  Ludmila Sproge

  Views:

  163

  The 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.

• Non-blame and/or Forgiveness: Observations about L.N. Tolstoy’s Theology on the Background of the Philosophy of I. Kant and M.M. Bakhtin

  10 p.

  Sergey Shults

  Views:

  185

  The problem of correlation of non-blame and forgiveness in L. Tolstoy’s world is put in the context of Kant’s and Bakhtin’s philosophy. The author comes to the conclusion that for L. Tolstoy non-blame is above forgiveness.

• Angelika Molnar: Text, Genre, Word: Studies in Russian literature of the 19th–21st centuries. Moscow, Azbukovnik 2022, 424 pp. ISBN 978-5-91172-221-0

  Irina Belyaeva

  Views:

  181

  This review contains a critical analysis of Angelika Molnar's new book, her monograph entitled Text, genre, word: Studies in the Russian literature of the 19^th-21^st centuries is devoted to various texts of different eras from Pushkin’s to Sorokin’s, however, the focus of the study is Molnár's favorite Russian writer, Goncharov, whose work, unfortunately, rarely attracts the attention of Western researchers. In Molnár's book, the main, clearly indicated methodological principle is discursive poetics, which works well when studying intertexts within the framework of both large and small literary and historical series. Therefore, Russian literature is considered by the researcher as a single text in which the "old" is updated by the "new". The review emphasizes the significance of the monograph, which first of all offers an up-to-date interpretationof Russian classics in the context of modernity. The book will be of interest both to a professional researcher of Russian literature and to everyone who is interested in Russian culture and the Russian worldview.

• Gogol’s Vij and L.N. Tolstoy’s War and Peace in V.V. Mayakovsky’s Poem War and Peace

  Sergei Shul’ts

  Views:

  275

  Representing himself in his poem War and Peace in the form of a fictional "absolute unit" - the new Vij - Mayakovsky demonstrates the infernality of a new type, in comparison with Gogol's one. Mayakovsky's ideacontrasts with Tolstoy's pacifism and the idea of "eternal peace" (the novel War and Peace). Unlike Tolstoy, refusing to notice and recognize the real diversity in the manifestations of man and the human principle, Mayakovsky reduces all people, their thoughts and concerns to their personal ideas.