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• The relationship between Excellent People by Chekhov and the ideological position and artistic attitude in the late short stories of Leo Tolstoy

  Ildikó Regéczi

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  13

  In Chekhov and His Prose (first published in 1965), the author, Thomas G. Winner contends that the subject matters of a few of Chekhov’s short stories written in the 1880s (such as «Хорошие люди» [Excellent People]) were created in the spirit of Leo Tolstoy, yet the one called «Несчастье» [Misfortune], written also in 1886, already marked the beginning of a series of texts that can be interpreted directly as “a light parody” of Anna Karenina (1873–1877) as well. The basic question posed here concerns whether there is really a significant difference that can be observed between the above two works and whether they reveal this sharp difference in the reception of Tolstoyan ideas that Winner's monograph suggests. The paper seeks to answer this query on the basis of the interpretation of Excellent People and the textual representation of the issue of goodness. In this analysis, particular attention is given to the way in which Tolstoy's ideas are represented and to the author's poetic choices that bring the text close to Tolstoy's late short stories.

• 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

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  103

  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.