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• The Surgeon and Surgery in the Cinematic Poetics of the Thaw

  Natalia Nyagolova

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  41

  The 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.

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

  Natalya Matveeva

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  301

  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.

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

  Dmitry Mazalevsky

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  425

  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.

• Female archetypes of Bunin’s images

  Ildikó Mária Rácz

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  354

  The system of ideas, Sophiology and philosophy of love of Vladimir Solovyov had a significant influence on the religious philosophy and formation of aesthetic views of the Russian Silver Age. Although the Nobel Prize-winning Russian writer in exile, Ivan Bunin, consciously distanced himself from the ideological and poetic tendencies of Russian Symbolism, the philosophical roots of Bunin’s prose after 1910 can be traced in Russian religious philosophy and Eastern religious teachings (Buddhism and Taoism). Bunin’s philosophy of love is also imbued with the dualistic vision that is fundamental to his philosophy of being, and the dichotomy of ‘heavenly’ and ‘earthly’ love is reflected in the ‘angelic’ and ‘demonic’ opposites of his female figures. Yet the former is the embodiment of the unattainable ideal of the Eternal Feminine, the latter, the Femme Fatale, the bearer of the earthly promise of carnal pleasures, of sexuality. The author’s female heroines also include the avatar of the Wise Woman (the embodiment of some ancient, archaic wisdom) or the Emanation of Isis (as the embodiment of cosmic energy, standing above the earthly laws of life and death). And like the symbols of yin and yang in Chinese philosophy, in the depths of each of Bunin’s female figures lurks something of its opposite.