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Novel-Commentary as a Method of Rethinking the Past and a Form of Authorial Reflection (on the Basis of E. Popov’s „The Real Story of the 'Green Musicians’”)
Views:492The article shows how the genre of the novel-commentary by E. Popov «The Real Story of the Green Musicians” allows the author to evaluate his short story, “The Green Musicians”, written 20 years earlier, on the one hand,and to characterize the entire Soviet epoch, on the other. The pretext commented on, serves as a typical text of the Soviet era, written under the influence of that period: the short story is an excellent example of the review of the Soviet times, while the commentary functions as an independent artistic element of the novel. Also, the article offers a classification of a complex and interconnected system of post-textual notes, which are conditionally divided into several levels. Each level of the commentaries serves Popov’s goal of expressing his attitude towards the Soviet nomenclature, which is the underlying theme of his work.
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The transformation of the camp theme in Sergei Lebedev’s novel “Oblivion”
Views:294Sergei Lebedev’s novel Oblivion offers an original reworking of the tradition of Russian camp prose. Its central themes are the legacy of Stalinist terror, the intergenerational transmission of trauma, and the necessity of a conscious resistance to their consequences. This paper explores how Lebedev, drawing on the concept of post-memory, intertwines personal family history with questions of collective memory, highlighting the destructive effects of silencing the past and the absence of accountability for historical crimes. At the core of this interpretation is an analysis of the narrator’s journey through space, time, and self-discovery, structured around the mythological motif of descent (katabasis). The funeral ritual plays a key role in the novel’s initiation structure: the symbolic burial and mourning of victims who vanished without a trace becomes an act of memory restoration, offering the possibility of reconciliation and a new beginning. Lebedev critically engages with contemporary Russian memory politics, stressing the moral imperative to uncover and give voice to the traumatic past.
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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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Aglaya Returns Home, The Mystery of The Apocryph of Aglaia. Ed. by Elena Kozmina. INTMEDIA, Yekaterinburg 2020, 231 pp. ISBN 978-5-6040560-8-0
Views:281This collection of studies is a unique example of a collective monograph written by Russian, Polish and Hungarian scholars on a contemporary Polish literary work. The novel by Jerzy Sosnowski entitled Aglaia’s Apocrypha is an ideal subject of analysis because of its complicated narrative structure, multilevel composition and genre complexity. The authors of the studies describe the connections between the storytellers and the author, define the context of the novel both in high and popularculture. Some of them represent the best traditions of Russian poetics of prose. Jerzy Sosnowski began his career as a literary critic and literary historian, he was an influential interpreter and promoter of the new tendencies in the Polish literature of the eighties.When he became a prosewriter, he followed the new aesthetic trend of Polish postmodernism. Jerzy Sosnowski as the author of a novel written about an erotic cyborg, its/her admirer and the operator was a forerunner of posthumanism.
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Language Registers’ Variety and its Implementation in the Commentary Novel The True History of “The Green Musicians”
Views:431The 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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Ivan Goncharov’s Novel “A Common Story” and the Problem of “Petersburg Text”
Views:538The article raises the question about the nature of the “Petersburg text” in the novel “A Common Story”, about its correlation with the general body of the “Petersburg text” of Russian literature and about its individual meanings in Goncharov’s prose. Various levels of the “Petersburg text” are considered: the expression of the category of the “inner state” of the hero, as well as culture and nature. It is concluded that Goncharov’s novel does not fully fit into the mainstream of the “Petersburg text” of Russian literature, but adopts the basic principles of its construction, and also has great potential for the semantic increments of the individual local Petersburg dictionary, which is determined by Goncharov’s irony and symbolization.
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Between Mystery and Riddle: From Narrative Strategy to Literary Genre
9 p.Views:384In the paper a difference is made between the mysterious and the enigmatic as fundamentally
different narrative and genre strategies. The first is typical of the so-called novelmystery
or the novel-myth, charcterized by the concept of impossible rational comprehension
of the mystery explained by the plot. The second represents a vast field of criminal literature,
where the plot is dependent on a riddle that has a pre-given answer. The differences between
these two types of novels are manifested at all the main levels of poetics, especially in the
specific traits of the subject-oriented organization. However, the paper shows that the general
strategy of the mysterious is also implemented through different moods in different criminal
genres such as classic detective stories, the police novel, the “adventurous investigation”, and
the “victim-centered investigation”. Thus, we can conclude that the mystery and the riddle
can reassemble genre constructive strategies not minus then narrative. -
Specificity of the Organization of Text Space in the Novel of E. Vodolazkin «Soloviev and Larionov»
9 p.Views:336The article analyzes the specificity of the organization of the text space in the novel, the relationship of its title and main characters is clarified. The main motives of the story that unite the heroes and motivate the interweaving of their destinies are highlighted: the railway, the sea, the horse and the rider, childhood, life and death. It is proved that the text of the novel is built as a search for an answer to the question about the secrets of the life of General Larionov.
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The Function of the „Author’s Mask” in “The Soul of a Patriot or Various Epistles to Ferfichkin” by Yevgeni Popov
Views:351Playing with the author’s figure is not a new device in Postmodernism. One may refer to “Either/Or” by Søren Kierkegaard or “The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin” by Alexander Pushkin, or “The Fiery Angel” by Valery Bryusov. At the same time the foreword of “The soul of a patriot or Various epistles to Ferfichkin” proves that in Postmodernism this game is taken to the next level. The author who abandoned their fictional space and renounced theirauthorial role during Modernism returns and re-takes their formal place. However, he does not do it seriously but hiding behind the mask of the author – says Malmgren, introducing the term of the author’s maskinto literary discourse. In this analysis I state that Popov, using the author’s mask, turns the traditional interpretationof the author’s role inside out. I conclude that, on the one hand, the author’s mask ridicules the concept by which the author’s biography is the key to his work. On the other hand, it makes fun of Vinogradov’s view, according to which there is always an abstract author hiding in the text who carries its real meaning. I come to the conclusion, that Popov uses this narrative technique to emphasise that it is impossible to look at a literary work as an arsenal of ultimate truths and statements.
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From the Classic Novel to the Crime Novel: A Genre Paradigm Shift in Artistic Reception
Views:202The 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.
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Gogol’s Vij and L.N. Tolstoy’s War and Peace in V.V. Mayakovsky’s Poem War and Peace
Views:522Representing 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.
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Belarusian Literature of the Last Thirty Years From the Perspective of Siarhiej Kavalou’s Book: Сяргей Кавалëў: Беларуская літаратура перыяду трансфармацыі. Абрысы замглëнага краявіду [Siarhiej Kavaloŭ: Belarusian literature of the transformation period: Outlines of a hazy landscape]. Lublin, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, 2025, 270 p. ISBN: 978-83-227-9916-1
Views:68This text is a review of a book by the renowned scholar of Belarusian literature Siarhiej Kavaloŭ, devoted to the history of Belarusian literature from 1985 to 2020. The author explores the dramatic fate of the literary generation known as the ‘Tutèjšyâ' [Locals], who initiated a process of linguistic and artistic renewal after 1985. He traces the development of the literary scene following independence, highlighting key artistic events, and emerging figures in Belarusian literature. He also presents the political and social circumstances accompanying this process, right up to its stalling following the elections rigged by Lukashenko in 2020. Kavaloŭ writes about Belarusian poetry, prose, and drama. He analyses the work of the most important literary critics and literary historians. The book was published in 2025 at the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin in Belarusian.
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Musical Ekphrasis in I.S.Turgenev's Novel Rudin
Views:445Turgenev-scholars often use the word "musicality" or "musical code" in the analysis of the writer's fictional prose, since Turgenev often refers to music in dialogues, in descriptions of the characteristics of the heroes. This article focuses on a musical piece, which occurs in the third chapter in Turgenev’s Rudin,F. Schubert’s famous “Erlkönig” Lied. This musical scene of the short novel evokes the mysterious atmosphere of Goethe’s ballad. Schubert’s “Erlkönig” thematizes some of the parallel motifs that appear in the novel such as travel, the motive of finding a path, and the problem of intransmissibility. My aim is to examine how these motifs are manifested in Turgenev’s novel. On the one hand, this research examines the purpose of the musical ekphrasis and how it might foreshadow his fate. This mimetic musical ekphrasis allows us to interpret the novel from different aspects. On the other hand, this intertextual element can be perceived as “mise en abyme” (L. Dällenbach), proceeding from the fact that the function of a diminutive mirror provides a key to a deeper understanding of the text.
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European Cultures in Leo Tolstoy’s Interpretation: Ambiguous and Unambiguous (on the Basis of the Sketch “Sevastopol in May” and the Novel “War and Peace”)
Views:322The article examines the embodiment of the interactions of Russian culture with French and German cultures in the course of global historical eventsin Tolstoy’s works. The review includes the Crimean War of 1853-1856 and the Patriotic War of 1812. The author analyzes the use of foreign language inclusions by the heroes of Tolstoyʼs works and the authorʼs assessment of them. Special attention is paid to the analysis of the ideas and images of European cultures, which help to express the worldview of the writer.
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Litvins as a Medieval Baltic-Slavic Ethnic Group in Kastuś Tarasaŭ's Novel “The Pursuit of Grunwald”
Views:84Ethnically colored characters based on stereotypical representations of different peoples occupy an important place in the fiction of any nation. At the same time, works of art may depict not only representatives of modern nations, but also those of ethnic groups that have now disappeared, and sometimes even those that never existed at all. A special literary discipline, imagology, is concerned with the study of this issue. In contemporary Belarusian literature, the Litvin ethnotype occupies an important place, as it is a relevant component of certain types of modern Belarusian identity. Its presence is particularly noticeable in works on historical themes. One such text, significant for the national literary tradition, is Kastuś Tarasaŭ's novel The Pursuit of Grunwald (1986), thematically devoted to the Battle of Grunwald in 1410 between the combined forces of Poland and Lithuania and the knights of the Teutonic Order. In this work, the imago of the Litvin occupies a fairly clearly defined position as the self-image, serving to describe his own people and his homeland in the past, in relation to which characters of all other nationalities are positioned as hetero-images. In Kastuś Tarasaŭ's work, Lithuanians are a Slavic-speaking ethnic group of mixed Baltic-Krivich origin, diversified in terms of religion (Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and pagans), whose representatives make up the military and political elite of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The author attributes the following characteristics to them: brave, harsh, cruel, stubborn, persistent, fierce, reckless, short-sighted, and unreasonable. These traits do not fully correlate with the current stereotypical perceptions of modern Belarusians about themselves, which had developed by the end of the 20th century.
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The Generational Narrative in Criticism of New Realism
Views:425At the end of the 20th century, New Realism emerged in contrast to postmodern literature. The representatives of this school defined themselves in their manifestoes and critical writings as a generation with the same aesthetic and ideological principles. The anthology of New Russian Criticism, edited by Roman Senchin, is a demonstration of this common action. The present study aims to present how and what elements of this generational consciousness and cultural identity are created, i.e. how thinking about literature has changed.
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Moscow Everyday Life in Soviet Film Comedies of the 1960s–1980s
Views:77The 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.
