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• The Emigré Writers of the Empire : Other Coasts of Russian Literature and Culture: Ideas, Poetics, Contexts. Collective Monograph. Eds. Elżbieta Tyszkowska-Kasprzak, Ilona Motiejunaite and Alfija Smirnova in cooperation with Maria Gej. Scriptum, Wroclaw ‒ Krakow 2021, p. 494 ISBN 978-83-66812-37-6

  Lajos Pálfalvi

  Views:

  119

  This volume of studies on Russian émigré literature was published during the last year before the war in a form of scholarly cooperation between Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, and Czech scholars unthinkable today. The theme of joint research makes the work even more interesting, because Poles have a very different understanding of the mission of émigré writers than Russians. In the first chapter of the monograph, entitled The History of Emigration, we find interesting biographical portraits of prominent figures such as Alexander Herzen and Gleb Struve. In the next part we read mainly about ideological problems and ethnic stereotypes. The third chapter focuses on the problems of poetics, and the last on heterotypes. The aspects of the analyses also touch upon the poetics of space and imagology.

• The Heritage of Tolstoy’s Artistic Detail in the Poetics of Chekhov (Defamiliarization and „Randomness”)

  Dominika Zoltán

  Views:

  176

  One 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.

• Angelika Molnár: Reception and Analysis of the Text. Selected works. Moscow, Azbukovnik, 2023, 447 pp. ISBN 978-5-91172-236-4

  Géza S. Horváth

  Views:

  75

  The review examines a new book by Hungarian researcher Angelika Molnár on classical Russian literature of the 19th century. Molnár's book analyses the works of Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Chekhov in the context of the overlaps with the literature of the 21st century (Ulitskaya, Akunin, etc.). The main emphasis is placed on describing the principles of textual formation through the prism of discursive poetics. The history of Hungarian reinterpretation of Russian classics is widely represented in the book. The interpretations of the works reveal unusual correlations between the works and show the specificity of the writers' poetics in a new way.

• Angelika Molnar: Text, Genre, Word: Studies in Russian literature of the 19th–21st centuries. Moscow, Azbukovnik 2022, 424 pp. ISBN 978-5-91172-221-0

  Irina Belyaeva

  Views:

  212

  This review contains a critical analysis of Angelika Molnar's new book, her monograph entitled Text, genre, word: Studies in the Russian literature of the 19^th-21^st centuries is devoted to various texts of different eras from Pushkin’s to Sorokin’s, however, the focus of the study is Molnár's favorite Russian writer, Goncharov, whose work, unfortunately, rarely attracts the attention of Western researchers. In Molnár's book, the main, clearly indicated methodological principle is discursive poetics, which works well when studying intertexts within the framework of both large and small literary and historical series. Therefore, Russian literature is considered by the researcher as a single text in which the "old" is updated by the "new". The review emphasizes the significance of the monograph, which first of all offers an up-to-date interpretationof Russian classics in the context of modernity. The book will be of interest both to a professional researcher of Russian literature and to everyone who is interested in Russian culture and the Russian worldview.

• «Doktor Zhivago» and Leonid Pasternak

  Natalya Ivanova

  Views:

  137

  In this article, we analyze the transformation of values in the literature and art of the first half of the 20th century through the creative strategies of two closely linked people: the poet Boris Pasternak and his father, the painter Leonid Pasternak. An academician of painting, Leonid Pasternak renewed the traditions of realism, being in close contact with Leo Tolstoy while working on the illustrations for Tolstoy’s novel “The Resurrection”. Having made a creative journey from the movement of “peredvizhniki” (“the Itinerants”) toward Impressionism, he did not accept the newest trends, as opposed to his son who had undergone a long period of fascination with Futurism, as well as the influence of Modernism. This conflict of aesthetics lost its poignancy with the passing of the years and with the geographical distance (Pasternak the father having emigrated in the beginning of the 20s). Thus, Boris Pasternak returned to the poetics of the classical Russian prose in his novel “Doctor Zhivago.” But the Christian values on which the conceptual basis of the novel rests, remained unknown to the father, who had passed away just before his son began working on the novel. The result was the novel itself with its covert subtextual influence and the polemics of the son and the father, the poet and the artist.

• Object – Body – Flashback in “The Seagull” by Michael Mayer

  6 p.

  Natalia Niagolova

  Views:

  189

  The 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.

• Interferences in the Field of Literature and Philosophy: Contact Points in the Poetry of Russian and Hungarian Authors: Dukkon Ágnes: A veszélyes szépség útjain. Eszmék, témák, kapcsolatok a klasszikus orosz irodalom világában, L'Harmattan Könyvkiadó – Uránia Ismeretterjesztő Társulat, Budapest, 2021, 340. p. ISBN: 978-963-414-702-2

  Ildikó Regéczi

  Views:

  61

  The Hungarian literary scholar Ágnes Dukkon set herself a great task to complete in her new monograph by undertaking to offer a broad overview of the entire 19^th century epoch of Russian literature through monitoring the transformation and evolution of the literary motive of dangerous beauty [ужасная красота]. While focusing on the concrete correspondences between a variety of literary worlds, the study presents interpretations of works by A.S. Pushkin, M.Y. Lermontov, F.I. Tyutchev, N.V. Gogol, I.S. Turgenev, F.M. Dostoyevsky, M.Y. Saltikov-Shchedrin, N.S. Leskov, and L.N. Tolstoy. At the same time, however, the author of this monograph never fails to keep in mind the conceptual context of the artistic texts by analyzing their relationship with the topical contemporary philosophical ideas of the age. For the Hungarian readers, the chapters incorporating the conclusions of research aimed at Russian–Hungarian connections, conducted with the methodology of historical poetics, comparative literary studies, intertextuality, and biographism, are of special interest. The scholarly findings of this renowned researcher would definitely deserve to be translated in the future into an international language.

• The Theory of Metaphors in Contemporary Literary Studies

  17 p.

  Angelika Molnár

  Views:

  183

  This article is designed as a brief overview of the methods of how metaphor is defined in contemporary scholarship. In the discussion of the similarities and differences of the basic Russian and Western poetic, philosophical and logical approaches to metaphors are compared to each other. Besides, Hungarian comprehensive syntheses and reconsiderations of metaphors are also touched upon. Finally, suggestions are made as to which aspects of literary studies and linguistics can be used in the analysis of the system of tropes in literature.

• Folklore and Literature: Once Again about the Research Methodology

  Marina Larionova

  Views:

  126

  When using the methods of analysis applied in folkloristics in literary works, narrative models and character types formed in myths, fairy tales and rituals are distinguished. Different literary characters enter into one archetypal paradigm and display the same invariant functions, properties and attributes. In this regard, the research of common traditional elements of the structure and poetics of literary works and that of the interpretation of individual literary texts in terms of the interaction of "ready-made" and individual values and rules of construction is made possible.

• 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:

  126

  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.

• Georgy Adamovich ‘The Beginning of the Story’, ‘From a Clogged Notebook’ - about the Turgenev’s Subtext

  11 p.

  Ludmila Sproge

  Views:

  192

  The discourse of ‘Ich-Erzählung’ creates visibility, or an autobiographical narrative,
  where the author narrates the more famous classical texts on the theme of ‘love as strong as
  death’. The narration of stories is based on the principle of the repeatability of individual
  thematic units built on similarities and contrasts. The text that is being created does not translate into an autonomous story about Maria Leopoldovna, but it exposes the technique of reminiscence poetics. Quotes and auto-quotes form or create a peculiar language of the major art,
  where the names of Turgenev and Tolstoy are markers of the story. Turgenev’s subtext is
  connected with the way meaning is constructed in the story, which is told about love that has
  never come true but is remembered all one’s my life.

• Between Mystery and Riddle: From Narrative Strategy to Literary Genre

  9 p.

  Olga Fedunina

  Views:

  174

  In the paper a difference is made between the mysterious and the enigmatic as fundamentally
  different narrative and genre strategies. The first is typical of the so-called novelmystery
  or the novel-myth, charcterized by the concept of impossible rational comprehension
  of the mystery explained by the plot. The second represents a vast field of criminal literature,
  where the plot is dependent on a riddle that has a pre-given answer. The differences between
  these two types of novels are manifested at all the main levels of poetics, especially in the
  specific traits of the subject-oriented organization. However, the paper shows that the general
  strategy of the mysterious is also implemented through different moods in different criminal
  genres such as classic detective stories, the police novel, the “adventurous investigation”, and
  the “victim-centered investigation”. Thus, we can conclude that the mystery and the riddle
  can reassemble genre constructive strategies not minus then narrative.

• Comedy against a tearful background: The interference of catharsis in L.S. Petrushevskaya’s play Colombina’s Apartment

  Aleksandr Kubasov

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  84

  The paperraises the question of catharsis in modern dramaturgy as a complex and ambiguous aesthetic reaction of the reader. The concept of “interference of catharsis” is introduced, meaning the combination of two of its types, laughter and tears, due to which a synergistic effect occurs that enhances both reactions. The introduced definition is tested based on the analysis of Petrushevskaya’s one-act play Colombina’s Apartment, which is recognized as an example of a philosophical farce. It is noted that in modern drama, the place of pure tearful and laughter catharsis has been taken by their reduced derivatives. Irony replaces open laughter, and feelings of bitterness or regret replace tears. The analyzed play is recognized as an example of modern metadrama. Petrushevskayauses not only the traditional characters of the commedia dell'arte (Harlequin, Pierrot, and Columbine) ata new time and in a new setting, but also the poetics of puppet theater, as well as the realities of Soviet children's theater. Laughter, which operates throughout the entire play, is removed at the end by the bitterly ironic aesthetic reaction of the readers, which is caused by compassion for the funny characters. Superimposed on one another, they create what is called the interference of catharsis.

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

  14 p.

  Sergey Shults

  Views:

  205

  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.

• Word Skepticism and Word-magic in Afanasy Fet’s Poetry

  Zoltán Hajnády

  Views:

  133

  This paper is devoted to Afanasy Fet’s philosophy of art. In Fet’s poetry, the virtuosic use of words is combined with linguistic skepticism, involving a feeling of verbal inexpressibility and the apotheosis of silence. The topic of his poetry is the inexpressible and unspeakable, which, paradoxically, becomes expressible and describable through impressionistic imagery, metaphoric nomination, musical effects, and metalinguistic means. Fet’s poems are highly polysemic, and the semantic implications of his texts are inexhaustible.

• The story Сhildhood as the beginning of Leo Tolstoy’s linguopoetic search

  Dmitry Romanov

  Views:

  76

  The paper discusses the most prominent linguistic and poetic techniques in Leo Tolstoy’s story Childhood. Linguistic poetics is understood in a broad sense: with the inclusion of not only linguistic units themselves, but also compositional characteristics, stable plot moves, details of subject expressiveness, and effects on the reader. The evolution of the studied techniques in Tolstoy’s further work is traced.

• Turgenev Today: On the Problem of Perception

  17 p.

  Irina Belyaeva

  Views:

  212

  The article deals with the question of how Turgenev’s work is perceived by the modern
  reader. There are identified aspects related to the complexity of understanding the writer’s
  texts, which are largely due to stereotypes that have developed in the culture of perception,
  and are also features of his poetics. There are different ways of new interpretations of Turgenev’s
  famous texts – those of the novels “Fathers and Sons” and “The Noble Nest”. In “Fathers
  and Sons” the idea of reconciliation with contradictions is emphasized, and ‘The Noble’s
  Nest” is considered a successful social project in literature. The article briefly highlights
  the main stages of Turgenev’s popularizing Russian culture in the West.

• Gender and Space in Literature and Cinema (Bogomil Rainov’s Roads to Nowhere and Metodi Andonov’s A White Room)

  Natalya Nyagolova

  Views:

  122

  The article discusses the structural link between the gender model and the fictional space in Bogomil Rainov’s short story Roads to Nowhere (1966) and its film adaptation—Metodi Andovov’s A White Room (1968). The transformations of the original text are traced via several semantic oppositions (masculine-feminine, rational-emotional, order-chaos) and the influence of two aesthetic paradigms—noir and the existentialist “new wave”. These transformations are interpreted in the socio-cultural context of the Bulgarian “thaw” with its quest for the marginal, regional, personal alternatives within the socialist system.

• Boldino as a carnival topos in the film “Guard Me, My Talisman” (1986) (Preliminary Notes)

  Natalia Nyagolova

  Views:

  72

  The paper attempts to interpret the Boldino topos in the film directed by Roman Balayan “Guard Me, My Talisman” (1986). It discusses the main tendencies in the reception of the Pushkin myth in Soviet culture in the period from the 1960s to the 1980s – the neoromantic attitude to Pushkin’s personality and works in the texts of the “sixtiers”, the transformations of the myth in documentary cinema, and dissident literature over the next two decades. It examines the elements of cinema poetics of the time of “stagnation” and the cinema of Perestroika in the artistic structure of the film. The carnival character of the Boldino topos in the film is traced on several levels: the resemanticization of the “Paradise” topos, the discreditation of the social hierarchy and eclecticism of poetic texts, functions of the carnival dress-up, and deviance as an ostensible feature of the characters.

• Ekphrasis - Chameleon of Literary studies “Theory and History of Ekphrasis: Results and Prospects of Study” Siedlce, 2018

  9 p.

  Nóra Troitsky

  Views:

  303

  This article aims to highlight the various methods in which ekphrasis can be analysed and new interpretations of the phenomenon in the monograph “The Theory and History of Ekphrasis: Results and Prospects of the Study” published for the 15th year anniversary of the previous work “Ekphrasis in Russian Literature” (2002). The articles touch upon the history of the study of ekphrasis, its typology, the dynamics of its functions as well as the poetics of description in the history of literature, theory and classification, including the theme of narratology, and works containing analysis from autobiographical points of view. The novelty of the monograph is that it also includes contemporary fiction which provides an excellent opportunity to redefine and reinterpret the phenomenon.