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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

  Nárcisz Gajdos

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  278

  The 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.

• The Generational Narrative in Criticism of New Realism

  Zsuzsanna Kalafatics

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  424

  At 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.

• «Doktor Zhivago» and Leonid Pasternak

  Natalya Ivanova

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  323

  In 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.

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

  Natalia Nyagolova

  Views:

  87

  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.