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• The Function of the „Author’s Mask” in “The Soul of a Patriot or Various Epistles to Ferfichkin” by Yevgeni Popov

  Annamária Vass

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  124

  Playing with the author’s figure is not a new device in Postmodernism. One may refer to “Either/Or” by Søren Kierkegaard or “The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin” by Alexander Pushkin, or “The Fiery Angel” by Valery Bryusov. At the same time the foreword of “The soul of a patriot or Various epistles to Ferfichkin” proves that in Postmodernism this game is taken to the next level. The author who abandoned their fictional space and renounced theirauthorial role during Modernism returns and re-takes their formal place. However, he does not do it seriously but hiding behind the mask of the author – says Malmgren, introducing the term of the author’s maskinto literary discourse. In this analysis I state that Popov, using the author’s mask, turns the traditional interpretationof the author’s role inside out.  I conclude that, on the one hand, the author’s mask ridicules the concept by which the author’s biography is the key to his work. On the other hand, it makes fun of Vinogradov’s view, according to which there is always an abstract author hiding in the text who carries its real meaning. I come to the conclusion, that Popov uses this narrative technique to emphasise that it is impossible to look at a literary work as an arsenal of ultimate truths and statements. 

• Novel-Commentary as a Method of Rethinking the Past and a Form of Authorial Reflection (on the Basis of E. Popov’s „The Real Story of the 'Green Musicians’”)

  Dmitry Mazalevsky

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  255

  The article shows how the genre of the novel-commentary by E. Popov «The Real Story of the Green Musicians” allows the author to evaluate his short story, “The Green Musicians”, written 20 years earlier, on the one hand,and to characterize the entire Soviet epoch, on the other. The pretext commented on, serves as a typical text of the Soviet era, written under the influence of that period: the short story is an excellent example of the review of the Soviet times, while the commentary functions as an independent artistic element of the novel. Also, the article offers a classification of a complex and interconnected system of post-textual notes, which are conditionally divided into several levels. Each level of the commentaries serves Popov’s goal of expressing his attitude towards the Soviet nomenclature, which is the underlying theme of his work.

• B. Spinoza, N.V. Gogol, J. Baudrillard: On the Debate about Theocentrism and Anthropocentrism

  13 p.

  Sergey Shults

  Views:

  194

  Interest 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.

• Metaphoricity in the novel Pelagia and Black Monk by Boris Akunin

  Angelika Molnár

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  21

  The paper discusses the tropological game in Boris Akunin's detective novel Pelagia and the Black Monk. The author focuses on the transformation of the main images in this contemporary work. Various periphrases and similes are then studied, as well as the destruction and renewal of redundant tropes, and the generation of new metaphors, particularly those related to color, nature, and zoomorphic images (e.g. the color black, rays). The figurative order of the text of the novel offers such potential correlations that expand the plan of interpretation of the novel in a new and unexpected direction, testifying to a truly postmodern rewriting of lingual, literal, and poetical clichés. A key role in this process is played also by details (see Z. Hajnády).

• 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

  Elżbieta Tyszkowska-Kasprzak

  Views:

  106

  The 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 20^th to early 21^st 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.

• Aglaya Returns Home, The Mystery of The Apocryph of Aglaia. Ed. by Elena Kozmina. INTMEDIA, Yekaterinburg 2020, 231 pp. ISBN 978-5-6040560-8-0

  Lajos Pálfalvi

  Views:

  104

  This collection of studies is a unique example of a collective monograph written by Russian, Polish and Hungarian scholars on a contemporary Polish literary work. The novel by Jerzy Sosnowski entitled Aglaia’s Apocrypha is an ideal subject of analysis because of its complicated narrative structure, multilevel composition and genre complexity. The authors of the studies describe the connections between the storytellers and the author, define the context of the novel both in high and popularculture. Some of them represent the best traditions of Russian poetics of prose. Jerzy Sosnowski began his career as a literary critic and literary historian, he was an influential interpreter and promoter of the new tendencies in the Polish literature of the eighties.When he became a prosewriter, he followed the new aesthetic trend of Polish postmodernism. Jerzy Sosnowski as the author of a novel written about an erotic cyborg, its/her admirer and the operator was a forerunner of posthumanism.

• The Generational Narrative in Criticism of New Realism

  Zsuzsanna Kalafatics

  Views:

  145

  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.