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World Model in the Novel “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” by A.I. Solzhenitsyn
7 p.Views:325The paper deals with the world model and ways of its creation in a novel “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” by A.I. Solzhenitsyn. In the process of world-modeling following basic categories are of a great importance: native-strange, light-darkness, principle of 3 levels. The space of camp is characterized by features of a strange world. Native world is narrowed to the boundaries of hut, bed and even to a hole in a mattress. World organization is also realized with the help of a system of prototypical images, e.g. a table, bread, sun, a stove, etc. Due to this concepts, which have hierarchic values, are formed. Solzhenitsyn achieves generalization following a peculiar way of depicting of a group of characters which can be conditionally called “convicts”. There we can see different social layers, nationalities, ages. It has metonymical nature: according to the principle “a part of the whole” the fate of the entire country is shown. In terms of sense complex “human-being – environment – their interaction” the world model in A.I. Solzhenitsyn’s novel has “human”, natural and social levels in its structure. The writer compresses time and space, satiates it with details, which are different in semiotic power of generalization, and as a result he receives solid world model.
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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:47The 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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B. Spinoza, N.V. Gogol, J. Baudrillard: On the Debate about Theocentrism and Anthropocentrism
13 p.Views:187Interest in the problem of man, in the structure of the world and in its foundations is brought together, with all the difference, Spinoza, Gogol, Baudrillard. In the lineup of authors, three main attitudes are revealed. Spinoza: all that exists is theocentric; one must strive to comprehend God and His "extensions" (not creatures!) in the form of the world and man. Gogol: comic-romantic criticism regarding intramural irrationality with the author's aspiration for an eschatological perspective. Baudrillard: immersion in the pan-social as the only being, although it has (starting from the Renaissance) an empty foundation. According to Spinoza, man, nature, the world, in general, everything in reality is an extension of God. Not "creation"! - it is a continuation, practically an integral part of God, some "doubles", although those with less "good." It turns out that God is not able to separate himself from what is around him, what is in the outside world and everything that is not He considers himself to be. Gogol, on the other hand, strove to portray man as really different in relation to God and at the same time capable of changing (the concept of “Dead Souls”). Isn’t the “apocalypse of our time” outlined by Baudrillard? Its unchanging Marxist-Freudian jargon is intended only to serve the immediate intention of reforming social reality. The Baudrillard concept is marked by post- and neo-romantic skepticism regarding the nature of man and society. The extra-Marxist (and non-Freudian) in Baudrillard - his bet on "reversibility", on the "gift" (in the terminology of Moos and his followers) of the "gift", ie installation on a "symbolic exchange" between communicants in all spheres of existence. Thus, Baudrillard comes to recognize the linkage "modern / postmodern" and to recognize the benefits of modernity. The transformation of “dead souls” is a path that Gogol also thought about realizing on different grounds and which opposes the complacency of Spinozist machines.
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Phraseology in Interdisciplinary Research - Svět v obrazech a ve frazeologii II / The world in pictures and in phraseology 2. Ladislav Janovec (ed.). Praha: Univerzita Karlova, 2021. 552 s. ISBN 978-80-7603-201-9
Views:131A critical review of the scientific anthology Svět v obrazech a ve frazeologii II [The world in pictures and in phraseology 2] published in 2021 in Prague (ed. L. Janovec) presents and introduction in its contents and structure to the presented approaches to phraseology research. Mostly pragmatical, cultural linguistic and communicative orientation of the anthology confirms the relevance of interdisciplinary approaches in linguistics. The papers are being considered in the context of actual trends in linguistics, including wide interdisciplinary parallels and critical analysis of certain tendencies.
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The Motive of Passage as a Cultural Universal In I.S. Shmelev’s Novel “The Story of a Love”: Semantic and Functional Aspect
Views:137The article considers the motive of passage from the point of view of its role in the plot inI.S. Shmelev’s novel and from the point of view of mythopoetic meanings. It has been established that in the work “The Story of a Love” the symbolism of the passage motive is associated not only with the situation of the transition, but also with the Fall, which is interpreted by the writer as a stage of the movement towards insight. The passage motive organizes two spaces of storytelling: real and mental. Real space is divided into a space of purity and sin, the transition from one spatial locus to another also signifies the transition taking place in the soul of the protagonist from purity to sin and vice versa. The motives of the passage and temporary death are combined with the Christian motive of the transformation, allowing I.S. Shmelev to show the spiritual toss of the main character more clearly – as a transfer from life to death and its subsequent revival, as well as to assert the main motivein his work – the merger of the “mundane” and the “heavenly”, the world of objects, the material world and the “invisible" world of divine light.
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Zoomorphic Metaphors and Similes in the Modern Russian Prose
17 p.Views:274The 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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"React with Cobra's Speed to Everyday Life" On the Trap of Actuality - Andrzej Stasiuk's Beskidy and World Chronicles (2018)
11 p.Views:114The goal of the paper is to analyze and depict the essays written by Polish contemporary
author Andrzej Stasiuk in the wider context of writing strategies. The essays were collected
in Beskidy and World Chronicles (2018). The paper also deals with Stasiuk's "workshop
comments" about the art of writing and is concerned with author's attitude to changes in social,
cultural and political life. Stasiuk searches for harmony and calmness. What he writes
about is not topicalities but universal themes: nature, philosophy of living, everyday life.
All that he can see in mass media is very strange and outlandish for him, while he looks for
eternal values, describing chaos in modern world. -
On the meaning of disjunction and conjunction in Lermontov’s The Demon
Views:13The 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.
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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:102The 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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Teffi as a Person and Woman Writer: A View from Overseas
6 p.Views:200This 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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Women's Prose: Past, Present and Future
Views:142The very expression "women's prose" in Russian literary discourse is debatable, since even many female writers refuse to identify themselves as such. A woman writer has all the rights of a writer, but she also has the additional right to self-identify as a representative of "women's prose". Women's prose requires a double research point of view: looking at it as an integral part of fiction and identifying the specific features of works created by women writers. During the period of perestroika (the second half of the 1980s), women's activity in Russian prose became more active, and L. Petrushevskaya and T. Tolstaya came to the forefront of literary life. An important milestone in the awareness of the specifics of women's prose was the series "Women's Handwriting" by the publishing house "Vagrius". A characteristic trend in the development of modern Russian women's prose is the democratization of the artistic thinking and language, the attraction of high prose tothe mainstream, to mass nature and the feeling of accessibility. In this regard, the article examines the prose of V. Tokareva, O. Slavnikova, D. Rubina, M. Stepnova, N. Abgaryan, G. Yakhina and others.
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The Audience of Art: Myth and Reality
13 p.Views:142Interest 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.
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Global Culture: Discursive and Social Practices
10 p.Views:313The dynamics of modern society development is directly proportional to changes in its culture. In the discourse of global culture, there are many supporters of its real presence, and many opponents who claim that such a phenomenon does not exist in principle. The article considers various polar points of view. Arguments are presented that confirm the existence of a global culture formed as a result of multiple cultural contacts, including cultural tourism. Digitalization has become a new impetus for the development of global culture, which has large-scale ways to spread the achievements of world culture in General, and art in particular, to the population of the planet, regardless of location. Digital formats have proven their worth in specific social practices.
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“Step by Step” in Camp Prose: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s ”One day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” and Imre Kertesz’s “Fatelessness”
Views:110The paper is devoted to the disclosure of the concrete and abstract images of "step(ping) " and the reinvention of related other meanings (concepts like ’path’, ’fate’and ’happiness’)in the novel by A.I. Solzhenitsyn "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" and in the novel by Imre Kertesz "Fatelessness". In order to identify the similarities and differences concerning these fundamental text-forming components in these outstanding works of camp prose, it is necessary to turn to the study of trophes, i.e. creating new meanings on the basis of the combination of incompatible things and images. This allows us to approach the author's picture of the world in both cases.
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Non-blame and/or Forgiveness: Observations about L.N. Tolstoy’s Theology on the Background of the Philosophy of I. Kant and M.M. Bakhtin
10 p.Views:185The problem of correlation of non-blame and forgiveness in L. Tolstoy’s world is put in the context of Kant’s and Bakhtin’s philosophy. The author comes to the conclusion that for L. Tolstoy non-blame is above forgiveness.
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Linguistic Means of Constructing “Own” and “Other” in B. Akunin’s Novel "The Diamond Chariot"
Views:117The article discusses the ways of linguistic construction of the concepts of “own” and “other” in B. Akunin's novel The Diamond Chariot. The methodological basis of the study is cognitive discursive analysis. The protagonist of the novel arrives in Japan and meets with new realities, objects, places, social organization of life. In this process, we observe the contact of two cultures – the Japanese and European-Russian. Japanese appears in the novel in a wide layer of Japanese vocabulary, which is introduced into the text in a variety of ways (translation in the text, translation in a footnote, explanation, repetition with translation, the use of a foreign word in a typical context).The process of cognition of a foreign culture is accompanied by constant assessments through the prism of one's, previously learned experience. Evaluation is a structural characteristic of the construction of one's “own” and “others'” and reflects the dynamic nature of the process of acquaintance with a foreign culture. Other way stoembed foreign words in the text – using the structure of the concept – are also presented in the article. The experience of the meeting of two cultures also appears in the linguistic form in the communication of multilingual heroes of the novel among themselves, the characteristics of this discourse of strangers are described (interspersed in English, as well as interspersed in English and Japanese, written in Cyrillic).
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Object – Body – Flashback in “The Seagull” by Michael Mayer
6 p.Views:158The article features the transformation mechanisms of Chekhov’s play “The Seagull” in its film adaptation of 2018 by Michael Mayer. The director’s concept activates the opposition “memory – forgetfulness” and this is based on composition-visual reminiscences, i.e. flashbacks. The world of objects and the body discourse in the film complies with that specific film story of nostalgia in which the past is not simply going back to the things the characters were through, but also as a new reading of Chekhov’s intertextuality in the context of Anglo-Saxon cinema culture as well as a stylized memory of the Russian classic writer and his times.
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The chronotope of O. E. Mandelshtam’s Poems about the Unknown Soldier
Views:22The chronotope of O.E. Mandelstam’s Poems about the Unknown Soldier has at least three levels: (1) the level of internal time-space as immanent to the subject, the author-hero; this is the level of subjective refraction of events in individual consciousness/thinking; (2) the level of external time-space: the historical and natural beginning of world life (historical and physical cosmos) in their correlation; here worldly life is presented as if outside any of its perception from the outside, “by itself”; and (3) the mythical-symbolic dimension shining through the other two; the events here are interpreted in their parabolical content, including in the aspect of the philosophy of culture and intertextuality as a kind of “new mythology”.
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Bugs, Burrow, Inquisitor: Dostoevskian Intertexts in Eyeless in Gaza
Views:93The present article is devoted to the discussion of intertextual connections between Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza (1936) and three works by Dostoevsky: Notes from the Underground(1864), Crime and Punishment (1869) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880, Grand Inquisitor scene). As is well-known, the Dostoevskian novel of ideas was a major inspiring force for Aldous Huxley’s art: Huxley’s rewriting of the Grand Inquisitor episode in Brave New World (1932) is probably the best-known case in point. Nonetheless, insufficient critical attention has been devoted to the actual intertextual connections between the two novelists’ output. As I have demonstrated earlier, on closer inspectionPoint Counter Point (1928) turns out to be a rewriting of Devils (1872), which, however, alsoproves to be a low point in Huxley’s assessment of Dostoevsky – a companion piece to his incidental vicious critique included in his 1929 essay on Baudelaire, in which Huxley also targets spiritual quest. Let me argue that Eyeless in Gaza can be read as a sequel to that polemic, in which a change of Huxley’s attitude to Dostoevsky is clearly notable: the novel provides a much more subtle and even respectful critique of Dostoevsky by implying the universal relevance of the Dostoevskian underground to the understanding of the modern human condition and by re-embracing spiritual quest.
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The Search for a Social Ideal as a Cultural Tradition of Russian Thought
Views:155This 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.
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The Heritage of Tolstoy’s Artistic Detail in the Poetics of Chekhov (Defamiliarization and „Randomness”)
Views:123One type of the “random Chekhovian detail ”can be referred to as a special cognitive phenomenon arising during the perception of the background and foreground within the depicted perception of the hero. In this paper, I suggest that this technique works if we perceive Chekhov’s laconicity against the detailed descriptions of the inner world of Tolstoy’s characters in the process of their estrangement. In the first part using the example of “War and Peace” I examine the “random” details concerning various features of Tolstoy's defamiliarization and show their transformation in Chekhov’s poetics. The examples from Chekhov’s early short stories “Grisha” and “Polinka” demonstrate an intermediate level of this transformation. In the second part I turn to the story “The Lady with the Dog” and consider the transformation of Tolstoy's technique through parallels with the novels “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina”. The situation of Gurov and Tolstoy’s characters (Natasha, Prince Andrei, Levin) is similar with regard to the fact that they retain true love in their hearts and get into an everyday social situation, where they are exposed to the the automatism and lies of everyday life with special intensity.
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Culture and Normative Sociable Systems in a Period of Crisis: Issues of Theory and Practice
Views:100This article is devoted to the analysis of topical questions of the development of culture and normative sociable systems in a period of crisis. People faced new concept of reality in the third decade of 21st century. In the era of a brittle, anxious, nonlinear, incomprehensible world the question of responsibility for the state of culture and normative sociable systems is most acute. As representatives of culture, education and science, researchers can create the space of clean, healthy, favorable opportunities for the development in the post crisis period.
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From the Classic Novel to the Crime Novel: A Genre Paradigm Shift in Artistic Reception
Views:67The article deals with the cases of classical works completion, in which their genre nature undergoes a change. The texts are transferred from the sphere of high literature to the low one, as the continuing of the plot with the criminal line becomes the main method. The material for the analysis is “The very same Tatiana” by A. and S. Litvinovs, as well as the novel “Death Comes to Pemberley” by P.D. James. I show that one of the most relevant genres in this change of genre paradigm is “by victim investigation”, which allows to retain some recognizable items of the classic primary source.
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Theoretical Foundations of the Study of Cultural Industries in the Light of Modern Humanitarianism
Views:109The paper defines new perspectives of the study of cultural industries by the humanities. Cultural, philosophical and socioeconomic theories of the last century, which have entered our active academic life, are considered as the basic points of departure. The author considers the problem of humans and those cultural changes which contribute to the harmonization of ontological, axiological and aesthetic bases of their existence in modern society.
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Slovak Verbs of Aquamotion (in Contrast with Other Slavic Languages)
17 p.Views:184This paper studies the semantics and distribution of Slovak verbs with the meaning of aquamotion in contrast with other contemporary Slavic languages. As pointed out in previous studies in lexical typology, the lexicalization pattern of the semantic field of aquamotion differs in many languages of the world and there are subtle but significant differences even between closely-related languages such as Slavic. As far as the Slovak language is concerned, there still does not exist a detailed study of aquamotion verbs and their lexicalization patterns. This paper applies the theoretical framework of lexical typology and analyses the lexicalization patterns of the following three semantic zones: the semantic zone of swimming and flowing (plávať, plaviťsa), the semantic zone of liquid motion (tiecť, prúdiť, liaťsa), and the semantic zone of diving and immersing (ponáraťsa, potápaťsa, topiťsa). This paper aims to reveal which semantic parameters are relevant for the lexicalization of the semantic field in question, and to demonstrate the distribution of the Slovak verbs describing aquamotion. In addition to that, our analysis deals with some contrastive aspects to point out similarities and differences between Slovak and other Slavic languages such as Russian, Polish, Serbian and Vojvodina Ruthenian.