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• On the meaning of disjunction and conjunction in Lermontov’s The Demon

  Katalin Kroó

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  202

  The paper analyzes Lermontov’s verse narrative (poema) The Demon by focusing on some clear-cut binaries, representing and suggesting, as their primary meaning, dichotomic pairs related to the system of literary characters (the Angel or Tamara vs. the Demon), evaluative concepts (e.g. good vs. evil), and notions comprising ideological views (the celestial, the earthly world, or the netherworld). The interpretation takes a distance from these definitions, examining the poetic modes of neutralizing and removing the dichotomies in the text by weakening the semantic motivation for setting and interpreting the binaries; the emergence of mono-dualistic antinomy, and the creation of equivalences of motifs and constructs of reverse symmetry with the transformation of their reference. Resulting from these strategies for meaning generation in Lermontov’s text, a shift from an axiological conceptualization of the world to the literary model of the human existential experience of the soul can be traced.

• “... 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

  Ferenc Váradi

  Views:

  143

  The 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.

• The Audience of Art: Myth and Reality

  13 p.

  Alexandr Ushkarev

  Views:

  258

  Interest in the audience arose while art became public and since then it has not weaken, rather it has become more and more special. For more than a century the audience of art has been the subject of systematic scientific research. Why then is the problem of the relationship between art and its audience becoming once again a topical issue? The consequences of the civilizational shifts in the last decade have clearly shown: the things that have for a long time been considered true suddenly turn out to be illusive or banal in the changing world. In the modern market paradigm of the artistic culture development, the problem of the relationship between art and its audience acquires a new sound. A theater, a museum or a concert organization needs not the social and cultural portrait of the spectator, but an understanding of the causes and characteristics of its consumer behavior in the wider context of cultural life. And the first step to overcome the communication barriers between art and its potential consumers should be the abandonment of stereotypes and outdated research approaches.