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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:255This 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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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:270This 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.
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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
Views:345This review contains a critical analysis of Angelika Molnar's new book, her monograph entitled Text, genre, word: Studies in the Russian literature of the 19th-21st 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.
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Moscow Everyday Life in Soviet Film Comedies of the 1960s–1980s
Views:70The 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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«Doktor Zhivago» and Leonid Pasternak
Views:323In 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.
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From Gregory of Nyssa to Boris Akunin and Eugene Vodolazkin – and beyond : “the language, which I spake and fram’d”: Linguistic Presence: Collection of Academic Papers in Honour of Arpad Kovacs’s 80th Jubilee. Edited by A. Molnár and M. Hoványi. Budapest, ELTE Eötvös József Collegium, 2024, pp. 416. ISBN: 978-615-5897-67-2
Views:273This review discusses the Festschrift published in honour of Professor Árpád Kovács’s 80th birthday. Professor Kovács is an eminent Hungarian scholar whose research on Russian Literature (mainly on Dostoevsky’s oeuvre) and innovations in literary theory are well-known, respected and followed by the Slavic studies specialists throughout the world. The volume consists of 30 papers written by Professor Kovács’s friends, colleagues and admirers. In the high standard and innovative approach of each paper, the volume is undoubtedly worthy of Professor Kovács’s legacy and represents the unique approach to literary texts which he established during his career.
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Object – Body – Flashback in “The Seagull” by Michael Mayer
6 p.Views:382The article features the transformation mechanisms of Chekhov’s play “The Seagull” in its film adaptation of 2018 by Michael Mayer. The director’s concept activates the opposition “memory – forgetfulness” and this is based on composition-visual reminiscences, i.e. flashbacks. The world of objects and the body discourse in the film complies with that specific film story of nostalgia in which the past is not simply going back to the things the characters were through, but also as a new reading of Chekhov’s intertextuality in the context of Anglo-Saxon cinema culture as well as a stylized memory of the Russian classic writer and his times.
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The Theory of Metaphors in Contemporary Literary Studies
17 p.Views:365This article is designed as a brief overview of the methods of how metaphor is defined in contemporary scholarship. In the discussion of the similarities and differences of the basic Russian and Western poetic, philosophical and logical approaches to metaphors are compared to each other. Besides, Hungarian comprehensive syntheses and reconsiderations of metaphors are also touched upon. Finally, suggestions are made as to which aspects of literary studies and linguistics can be used in the analysis of the system of tropes in literature.
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Georgy Adamovich ‘The Beginning of the Story’, ‘From a Clogged Notebook’ - about the Turgenev’s Subtext
11 p.Views:344The 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. -
Word Skepticism and Word-magic in Afanasy Fet’s Poetry
Views:240This 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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Gender and Space in Literature and Cinema (Bogomil Rainov’s Roads to Nowhere and Metodi Andonov’s A White Room)
Views:331The 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.
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The Surgeon and Surgery in the Cinematic Poetics of the Thaw
Views:87The figure of the doctor occupies a distinctive place in Thaw cinema. This type of character embodies the moral maximalism of the Shestidesyatniki (the Sixties generation) and their new attitude toward health and the human body but also assumes the features of one of the era’s most pivotal heroes. The doctor is depicted as a laconic and decisive representative of the intelligentsia who opposes “the most harmful social elements” – bureaucrats and philistines. The hero also retains a certain degree of social isolation (an unstable personal life, reservedness, abruptness, and intransigence). Among all medical specialties, prominence on the screen is accorded to surgery, and the performance of complex operations frequently serves as the climax in many Thaw-era films. The paper examines the artistic projections of this particular medical sphere through the analysis of the films Heart beats Again (1956, dir. A. Room), My dear man (1958, dir. I. Kheifits), Colleagues (1962, dir. A. Sakharov), and Degree of risk (1968, dir. I. Averbakh). It accounts for the semantic and visual variations of the theme in war films of the period, as well as the specific representation of the surgeon in the cinema of the Union republics of the USSR (the Baltics and Central Asia). The text also makes an attempt to trace the main periods in the Thaw ideology – from films centered on re-education and “finding the right path,” through the pathos of “Rousseauian realism,” to the “Hamlet-type” surgeons in the cinema of the late 1960s.
