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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:344This 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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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:66This 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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Russian literary history for advanced readers, with plenty of textual illustrations: Lukyanova, I.: Once upon a time there was Russian literature: From Ancient Rus' to the XX century. Publishing House AST.2023. Moscow. Pp. 348. ISBN 978-5-17-154945-9
Views:320Lukyanova's book was published in 2023. The author is a journalist who studies Russian literature and its history, and reviews it in a rather unique way. The purpose of the review is to determine what genre Lukyanova's book can be classified as, and to find out what its uniqueness is manifested in.
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Nowe dwudziestolecie (1989–2009). Rozpoznania, hierarchie, perspektywy [The New Twenties (1989-2009): Recognitions, Hierarchies, Perspectives]. Ed. by Hanna Gosk. Warsaw: Dom Wydawniczy Elipsa, p. 530, ISBN 978-83-7151-873-7
Views:187The volume Nowe dwudziestolecie (1989-2009): Rozpoznania, hierarchie, perspektywy [The new twenties (1989-2009): Recognitions, hierarchies, perspectives] reflects on the twenty years of Polish literature and literary change between 1989 and 2009, and compares and contrasts this period with the twenty years between the two world wars. The two twenty-year periods are linked by the fact that their starting point is associated with a date of immense importance for Polish history: 1918 is the year when Poland was returned on the map of Europe, and 1989 is also the year of the change of regime in Poland. The period between the two world wars is also regarded as a separate period in Polish literary history, while the second twenty years covered in this volume are questionable as a literary unit, a question which the essays in this book seek to answer. The volume is divided into three large sections, the first focusing primarily on theory, the second on Polish characteristics and themes that characterised Polish literature after 1989, and the third large section on the genre characteristics that have characterised Polish literature since the fall of communism to this day but were also important between the two world wars.
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On the threshold of change: Annamária Vass: Down with Socialist realism – Long live postmodernism! Paradigm shift in Russian literature in the second half of the 1980s. Debrecen, Debrecen University Press, 2024, pp. 184. ISBN: 978-963-615-163-8
Views:277The review examines a new book by Hungarian researcher Annamária Vass on paradigm shift in Russian literature. The volume analyses in detail the literary and cultural changes that began in the mid-1980s, shedding light on how socialist realism was transformed into postmodernism. Annamária Vass focuses on understanding the characteristics of postmodernism and provides a fascinating historical overview of how socialist realism gradually lost its dominance. By analysing the works of Yevgeny Popov and Vasily Aksyonov demonstrate the specific characteristics of postmodern literature. The volume provides an excellent overview of this chaotic period of Russian literature.
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Camp prose: On the semantics and conceptual framework of the term
Views:412The paper analyzes camp prose as a unique literary phenomenon in 20th century Russian literature, shaped under the extreme conditions of Stalinists labor camps and repressions. The study looks into the effects of imprisonment on the linguistic personalities of both professional writers, such as V. Shalamov and A. Solzhenitsyn, and non-writers like E. Ginzburg and E. Kersnovskaya. The writings of these authors provide key points for analyzing the psychological, social, and individual transformations the authors experienced during incarceration. The use of metaphorical language in shaping their works is a major area of study. The authors succeed in delineating the unspeakable horrors of camp life by using metaphors as both stylistic elements and tools for reinterpretation. The study analyzes how these metaphors reflect the broader themes of dehumanization, endurance, and moral resilience. In addition, the analysis illustrates that camp prose goes beyond documentary testimony, becoming a means of linguistic resistance and creative survival. By exploring the lexical choices and narrative structures of these texts, the present study discusses methods in which authors build a new literary language and process in and of expressing trauma and memory. In doing this, it contributes to a deeper understanding of the interaction between personal experience, linguistic expression, and historical representation in Russian literature.
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Interferences in the Field of Literature and Philosophy: Contact Points in the Poetry of Russian and Hungarian Authors: Dukkon Ágnes: A veszélyes szépség útjain. Eszmék, témák, kapcsolatok a klasszikus orosz irodalom világában, L'Harmattan Könyvkiadó – Uránia Ismeretterjesztő Társulat, Budapest, 2021, 340. p. ISBN: 978-963-414-702-2
Views:188The Hungarian literary scholar Ágnes Dukkon set herself a great task to complete in her new monograph by undertaking to offer a broad overview of the entire 19th century epoch of Russian literature through monitoring the transformation and evolution of the literary motive of dangerous beauty [ужасная красота]. While focusing on the concrete correspondences between a variety of literary worlds, the study presents interpretations of works by A.S. Pushkin, M.Y. Lermontov, F.I. Tyutchev, N.V. Gogol, I.S. Turgenev, F.M. Dostoyevsky, M.Y. Saltikov-Shchedrin, N.S. Leskov, and L.N. Tolstoy. At the same time, however, the author of this monograph never fails to keep in mind the conceptual context of the artistic texts by analyzing their relationship with the topical contemporary philosophical ideas of the age. For the Hungarian readers, the chapters incorporating the conclusions of research aimed at Russian–Hungarian connections, conducted with the methodology of historical poetics, comparative literary studies, intertextuality, and biographism, are of special interest. The scholarly findings of this renowned researcher would definitely deserve to be translated in the future into an international language.
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The Psychology of Literary Creativity in the Works of Mihail Arnaudov
Views:248Mihail Petrov Arnaudov (1878-1978), a Bulgarian scientist, was a famous European researcher with significant contributions to several fields of scholarship, i.e., folklore, the history of Bulgarian literature of the Renaissance, comparative literary history, the literature and culture of ancient India, the theory of literary science, the history of German and French literature of Romanticism, etc. This paper is devoted to his contribution to the study of the psychology of literary creativity. It analyses the prerequisites for Arnaudov’s formation as a psychologist of creativity, and provisionally identifies several main stages in his scientific and professional path, during which he conducted research and produced works in this interdisciplinary field. With the help of historical and psychological analysis, the general and specific features in the development of his views on the essence of the psychology of creativity and the meaning of its use in literary criticism and literary history are presented.
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Zoomorphic Metaphors and Similes in the Modern Russian Prose
17 p.Views:513The article represents the main circle of zoonymous images common in the modern Russian prose, they are classified into thematic groups of the “Animals” class, the most frequent vehicles of metaphors and similes are identified, the circle of tenors is outlined, distributed according to the relative frequency of use in literary texts. By means of comparison with the traditional images of the class in question, presented in the dictionary of metaphors and similes of the previous period of the Russian literature, and with the figurative uses of zoonyms in the Russian linguistic world image based on materials of linguocultural dictionaries, the main directions of evolution of zoomorphic tropes in modern Russian prose are determined. Some aspects of textual functioning of zoomorphic tropes are studied: individual preferences in choosing their groups, their conceptualizing role in the text. The results of the study make it possible to get an idea of one fairly significant fragment of the figurative world image of the modern Russian prose.
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From literature to ecocriticism: Siberian dams and their impact on the natural and human environment
Views:314Written with an ecocritical perspective, the present paper is devoted to the analysis of affinities and differences between two major works of Russian literature of the second half of the 20th century, Proshchanie s Materoy [Farewell to Matyora, 1976] by Rasputin (1937–2015) and Zona zatopleniya [The Flood Zone, 2015] by Senchin (b. 1971). Forty years later, these novels enter a dialogue, starting from some key themes and the common subject: the real flooding of several Siberian rural villages due to the construction of dams and hydroelectric power plants. The first part of the paper introduces and contextualizes the construction of what has been called “great dams”, outlining their main aims and characteristics, as well as the environmental consequences for neighbouring territories and populations. The second section focuses on the parallelisms between the two literary texts, examining, in particular, the image of nature and the peculiar “Siberian chronotope” which emerges from them. In both novels, in fact, the conflict between humans and nature plays a central role. The last part of the study provides a comparison between the contents and the main thematic issues of the narratives, taking into account the traumatic psychological impact of evacuation and resettlement on the characters. The rather marked stylistic differences between the works of the two authors make it possible to propose some final reflections on the profound relationships entertained by their literary works which go beyond a mere ‘remake’ or actualization.
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Folklore and Literature: Once Again about the Research Methodology
Views:350When using the methods of analysis applied in folkloristics in literary works, narrative models and character types formed in myths, fairy tales and rituals are distinguished. Different literary characters enter into one archetypal paradigm and display the same invariant functions, properties and attributes. In this regard, the research of common traditional elements of the structure and poetics of literary works and that of the interpretation of individual literary texts in terms of the interaction of "ready-made" and individual values and rules of construction is made possible.
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A Witness of the Era: A New Biography of Slovak Writer Pavol Strauss (1912–1994): Ivan A. Petranský: Pavol Strauss a jeho 20. storočie [Pavol Strauss and his 20th century]. Bratislava, Marenčin PT, 2025, 572 p. ISBN: 978-80-5569-1379-6
Views:70Petranský’s book Pavol Strauss a jeho 20. storočie [Pavol Strauss and his 20th century] is a comprehensive biography of the eminent Slovak poet Pavol Strauss (1912–1994), an essayist and aphorist who had been associated with Catholic literary circles since 1946. Pavol Strauss came from a Jewish, intellectual family. From his childhood, he showed an aptitude for literature and music. In the 1930s, he completed his medical studies at a German university in Prague, where he also made his literary debut with two volumes of poetry in German. Before the World War II, he returned to Slovakia, where he began working as a doctor. In the early 1940s, he was baptised into the Catholic faith, which may have saved him from the Holocaust, and in the mid-1940s he began writing in Slovak. He chose to become a Slovak writer, combining literature with his work as a surgeon in hospitals.
In the late 1940s, he was persecuted by the security services. He was subject to a ban on publication in Slovakia for almost the rest of his life. He published sporadically in Slovak Catholic publications and in Rome. Despite the repression, he continued to write and became increasingly respected within literary circles. In the 1970s and 1980s, he also became involved in the Catholic samizdat movement.
Petranský’s biography draws on numerous previously unknown sources, including material from family archives, the security services’ archives, and the Vatican archives. Petranský paints a highly detailed picture of the era of totalitarianism and the situation of a man living by moral principles that remained unshaken by the tragic events of the time. The portrait of the life of this poet and essayist, whose work was only recognised after his death, is also a portrait of Slovakia’s post-war history. Strauss began his life as a citizen of Austria–Hungary and ended it as a citizen of independent Slovakia. He witnessed great historical changes and bore witness to them in his work. Today, he ranks among the most outstanding Slovak writers associated with the Catholic movement. -
The Theory of Metaphors in Contemporary Literary Studies
17 p.Views:361This 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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Litvins as a Medieval Baltic-Slavic Ethnic Group in Kastuś Tarasaŭ's Novel “The Pursuit of Grunwald”
Views:79Ethnically 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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Lecturer, Researcher and Translator in One Person. In Honour of József Goretity's 60th Birthday
Views:348József Goretity has been working at the Institute of Slavonic Studies at the University of Debrecen since 1985 and has been the head of the institute since 2012. During this time he has been teaching courses on 19th and 20th century West-European and Russian literature focusing on the tradition of the novel and mythopoetics at the Department of Comparative Literature as well. In 1996 he was appointed head of the department. Between 1992 and 1999 he was a lecturer at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Miskolc. Besides his teaching activity, József Goretity’s work in the field of literary translation is also outstanding. He has brought such prominent Russian writers to Hungarian-speaking audiences as Narine Abgaryan, Sergey Dovlatov, Viktor Yerofeyev, Viktor Pelevin, Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, Yuri Polyakov, Grigoriy Ryazhskiy, Marina Stepanova, Alexandr Terekhov or Lyudmila Ulickaya. Besides literary texts he also translated literary and cultural studies into Hungarian, such as P. P. Apryshko’s influential monograph The History of Russian Philosophy. József Goretity’s most influential academic works are Idézet paródia és mítosz Fjodor Szologub két regényében and Töredékesség és teljességigény. Huszadik századi orosz prózai művek értelmezése. In 2014 he was awarded the Medal of Pushkin by the President of the Russian Federation. In 2019 he received the prestigous state award, the Golden Cross, for his achievement.
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Fragmentation in Byron’s “The Giaour” as a model for Lermontov’s “A Hero Of Our Time”
Views:251Lermontov never hid his enthusiasm for Western literature and especially for Byron’s poetry. The similarity between the two poets’ personalities and certain character types and motifs in their works has already been established in the literature in the 19th century. This paper aspires to prove that there can also be a connection between the narrative poem The Giaour and the novel A Hero of Our Time from the perspective of literary fragmentation, especially omissions and gaps found in narration, structure and chronology in the two texts.
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Turgenev Today: On the Problem of Perception
17 p.Views:401The article deals with the question of how Turgenev’s work is perceived by the modern
reader. There are identified aspects related to the complexity of understanding the writer’s
texts, which are largely due to stereotypes that have developed in the culture of perception,
and are also features of his poetics. There are different ways of new interpretations of Turgenev’s
famous texts – those of the novels “Fathers and Sons” and “The Noble Nest”. In “Fathers
and Sons” the idea of reconciliation with contradictions is emphasized, and ‘The Noble’s
Nest” is considered a successful social project in literature. The article briefly highlights
the main stages of Turgenev’s popularizing Russian culture in the West. -
The Image of Europe in Nikolay Karamzin’s “Letters of a Russian Traveller”
Views:72“Russia or Europe?” Nikolay Mikhailovich Karamzin undertook a journey to Western Europe and, whilst travelling, wrote travel letters describing his impressions. In Russian literature, even before Karamzin, there were works of travel literature written for the purposes of pilgrimage or trade, but in the 18th century the emphasis shifted to enlightenment and to the description of the national characters of the peoples of Western Europe. How does the Russian traveller perceive Western Europeans, how does he describe representatives of Western nations, and what does he pay attention to upon arriving in a foreign city? This article seeks to answer these questions.
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The Generational Narrative in Criticism of New Realism
Views:423At 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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Angelika Molnár: Reception and Analysis of the Text. Selected works. Moscow, Azbukovnik, 2023, 447 pp. ISBN 978-5-91172-236-4
Views:333The review examines a new book by Hungarian researcher Angelika Molnár on classical Russian literature of the 19th century. Molnár's book analyses the works of Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Chekhov in the context of the overlaps with the literature of the 21st century (Ulitskaya, Akunin, etc.). The main emphasis is placed on describing the principles of textual formation through the prism of discursive poetics. The history of Hungarian reinterpretation of Russian classics is widely represented in the book. The interpretations of the works reveal unusual correlations between the works and show the specificity of the writers' poetics in a new way.
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Teffi as a Person and Woman Writer: A View from Overseas
6 p.Views:375This review describes the conceptual and content side of the book by an American specialist Edith Haber on the life and work of Teffi (1872-1952). This is the only monograph on Teffi in the world. In the review a subtle combination of historical method and literary criticism is noted. The biography of an outstanding person and a talented woman writer is reconstructed against a well-known historical background – three Russian revolutions, two world wars and the first wave of Russian emigration. Special attention is paid to the E. Haber`s analysis of evolution in Teffi`s writing. The characters and plots were changed, the author’s tone and part were altered. The book is praised for its uniqueness and the author – for her high professionalism.
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“... studying travelogues often becomes a journey...”: A. Y. Sorochan: Travel writing as literature. Monograph. Tver, “Alpha Press”, 2024, pp. 254. ISBN: 978‐5‐98721‐073‐4
Views:311The present review analyzes the monograph of A. Y. Sorochan, published in 2024. The author is a philologist, a professor at Tver State University who specializes in the history and theory of literature. He defended his doctoral dissertation titled “Motivation in the Russian Historical Novel of the 1830s–1840s”, which focuses on a unique combination of historical and literary approaches. This monograph is thematically close to Sorochan's dissertation and consists of three parts: in the first the author speaks generally about travel literature; the second section is devoted to works of Russian literature; and the third section contains reviews of books on travel literature. In this critical article, the specificity of historical and imagological approaches in Sorochan's work on travel literature is analyzed.
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Ivan Goncharov’s Novel “A Common Story” and the Problem of “Petersburg Text”
Views:533The 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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Hero of Contemporary Russian Prose: Anna Skotnicka, Szczelina. Bohater współczesnej prozy rosyjskiej i jego światy, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, Kraków 2020, 335 s. ISBN: 978-83-233-4771-2
Views:276The text contains a review of the monograph by the Polish literary critic Anna Skotniсka A fissure: A hero of contemporary Russian prose and his worlds. The author considers incompleteness, absence, and insufficiency as a property of the existence of the character of the works of Russian writers of the late 20th to early 21st centuries. The sources of this problem, according to Skotnicka, can be seen in the state of disintegration of the social, psychological and mental image of the world in a changing reality, especially historical changes: the collapse of the Soviet Union, as well as political, cultural and social transformations. With these phenomena, the Polish literary critic also connects the concept of chaos, which is characteristic of the postmodern perception of the world as disunited, incomprehensible, alien in relation to people. Skotniсka considers these problems based on the works of Mikhail Kuraev, Svetlana Aleksievich, Roman Senchin, Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Vladimir Makanin, and Mikhail Shishkin. The author refers to the current achievements of the humanities, especially philosophy. The work is innovative and stimulates reflection on the state of the modern human.
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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:330The 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.
