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• Harms – Gogol – Dostoevsky (“Old Women” – “Vij” – “Crime and Punishment”)

  14 p.

  Sergey Shults

  Views:

  200

  In terms of historical poetics and intertextuality, parallels are drawn between "Old Woman"
  by D. Harms, "Vij" by N. Gogol and "Crime and Punishment" by F. Dostoevsky. As far as the
  three authors are concerned, their common features are revealed, together with the transformation
  of the motives of the ugly infernal old woman, which are depicted in the context of
  mythopoetics, historiosophy and social history by the three authors. Concerning the texts produced
  by their followers the term “post-text” is introduced, which is meant to include the dialogical
  connotations of literary evolution. The role of “vertex composition” (a term coined by
  V.M. Zhirmunsky) in works of Modernism/ Avant-garde is also touched upon.

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

  Natalya Matveeva

  Views:

  182

  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.