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Culture in Digital Format
12 p.Views:205The article analyzes the changes in traditional culture triggered by technologies and development of its new formats as a result, such as clip culture, screen culture, culture of computer games, etc. It touches upon the influence on culture of the personal computer and other numerous digital devices, in particular the Internet, artificial intelligence, computer graphics, and virtual reality. Traditional means of communication (books, photographs, audio and video recordings, digital TV, etc.) that are most influenced by digital technologies are also discussed. As traditional culture is losing its original features that emphasize the difference between different peoples, societies and their individual characteristics, all these processes are extensive, generating not only progressive, but negative trends. On the one hand modern culture has become accessible to everybody, on the other hand, it has lost the «romance» of personal communication. The article points out that nowadays the investigation of culture in digital format does not primarily mean analyzing its phenomena and artifacts in themselves. It is rather a matter of monitoring further transformations and contributing the unique features of traditional culture preservation, without diminishing the importance of digital technologies as a whole in society.
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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
Views:181This review contains a critical analysis of Angelika Molnar's new book, her monograph entitled Text, genre, word: Studies in the Russian literature of the 19th-21st 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.
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Global Culture: Discursive and Social Practices
10 p.Views:318The 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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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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Curator of Culture
Views:24In 2024 we celebrate the 80th birthday of Professor Zoltán Hajnády. The articles in this issue of Slavica have been written by his colleagues to express their respect for him and his work. In addition to the international significance of Zoltán Hajnády’s research on Tolstoy, which is the main focus of his articles, the laudation introducing the series of articles also mentions a broader aspect of his work on Russian–European relations and reveals his deep personality. A representative of humanistic values, a great educator and scientist, he works for the mediation and mutual enrichment of Russian–Russian and Hungarian cultures. For this endeavour, Hajnády was honoured with the Pushkin Medal in 2006.
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Lecturer, Researcher and Translator in One Person. In Honour of József Goretity's 60th Birthday
Views:122József Goretity has been working at the Institute of Slavonic Studies at the University of Debrecen since 1985 and has been the head of the institute since 2012. During this time he has been teaching courses on 19th and 20th century West-European and Russian literature focusing on the tradition of the novel and mythopoetics at the Department of Comparative Literature as well. In 1996 he was appointed head of the department. Between 1992 and 1999 he was a lecturer at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Miskolc. Besides his teaching activity, József Goretity’s work in the field of literary translation is also outstanding. He has brought such prominent Russian writers to Hungarian-speaking audiences as Narine Abgaryan, Sergey Dovlatov, Viktor Yerofeyev, Viktor Pelevin, Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, Yuri Polyakov, Grigoriy Ryazhskiy, Marina Stepanova, Alexandr Terekhov or Lyudmila Ulickaya. Besides literary texts he also translated literary and cultural studies into Hungarian, such as P. P. Apryshko’s influential monograph The History of Russian Philosophy. József Goretity’s most influential academic works are Idézet paródia és mítosz Fjodor Szologub két regényében and Töredékesség és teljességigény. Huszadik századi orosz prózai művek értelmezése. In 2014 he was awarded the Medal of Pushkin by the President of the Russian Federation. In 2019 he received the prestigous state award, the Golden Cross, for his achievement.
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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
Views:46The 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 19th 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.
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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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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:103The 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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«Chekhov’s Stage Set»: «The Cherry Orchard» in the Russian Poetry of the 20th – Early 21st Century
8 p.Views:201Chekhov’s text is one of the most significant constituents of the Russian poetry of the 20th – early 21st centuries. The one most frequently alluded to is the play by Chekhov – «The Cherry Orchard». The play written at the break of historical epochs turns out to be in tunes with the times of another turning-point. This fact conditions the allusion to the Chekhov’s text in a poem «The Young Poetry» by V. Kornilov. The main feature of the crucial time period in the poem is the category of freedom, unexpectedly granted during the historical turn and change. The key theme, which determines the historiosophical sense of the text, is a quotation from «The Cherry Orchard», a dialogue between Gaev and Fiers. I. Kabysh perceives the Chekhov’s play both mythopoetically and symbolically in such poems as «How Niveous-White Everything Is in Russia Today! » and «The Snow Started to Fall Without Delays». She introduces a different time into the text, models the reality after the events described in «The Cherry Orchard» and interpreted by the author of the poem in the lower clef (as in «crumbled estate»). The loss of the Garden, its disintegration, the loss of entity, is a gradual, step by step, process – into dachas, then into dust; that is the way the motif of vanishing space and culture appears.
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The Cultural Heritage of the Ancient Russian City of Yelets
Views:138This article provides scholarly evidence the small historical city of Yelets as a potential cultural heritage site in the context of its socio-cultural significance for the state, society and the local community. The paper overviews the results of a comprehensive sociological study of the issues of the cultural heritage of this ancient Russian city. The issues of the cultural heritage of Yelets is considered from the perspective of internal and external identification processes which transformed it and make it lose its unique urban identity. For the analysis of cultural heritage, the types of identity of the city are identified: historical and cultural, visual and spatial, socio-psychological and communicative spatial. The main factors of the identification processes of the city are analyzed, such as urban identity, history, culture, social interaction and language.
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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
Views:82This 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.
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Chekhov in New York: the Functions of Frame in Louis Malle's "Vanya on 42nd Street" (1994)
10 p.Views:162This paper focuses on Luis Malle’s creative adaptation of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya”. The frame location of "Vanya on 42nd street" is not only documentary evidence and a sign of admiration for the actors' ensemble, creating the spirit of live improvisation in the unfinished theatrical production by Andre Gregory. It is argued that the film is far from being another spectacular 're-citing' of Chekhov's ‘transcultural capital’. A set of framing elements foregrounds Chekhov's art in general and the way he represents Vanya’s stoic endurance in particular as resonating with the living experience of a person of any culture in whatever language (Russian, English, Bengali, theatrical, cinematic, etc.) holds general validity. Among leitmotifs which interconnect the frame and the drama performance within the film there are also those of kinship, unselfish friendship and true involvement in life as an ongoing rehearsal and improvisation on an inescapable life project that is never successful.
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Linguistic Means of Constructing “Own” and “Other” in B. Akunin’s Novel "The Diamond Chariot"
Views:121The 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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European Cultures in Leo Tolstoy’s Interpretation: Ambiguous and Unambiguous (on the Basis of the Sketch “Sevastopol in May” and the Novel “War and Peace”)
Views:115The article examines the embodiment of the interactions of Russian culture with French and German cultures in the course of global historical eventsin Tolstoy’s works. The review includes the Crimean War of 1853-1856 and the Patriotic War of 1812. The author analyzes the use of foreign language inclusions by the heroes of Tolstoyʼs works and the authorʼs assessment of them. Special attention is paid to the analysis of the ideas and images of European cultures, which help to express the worldview of the writer.
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Turgenev Today: On the Problem of Perception
17 p.Views:186The 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. -
The Hungarian reception of Dostoevsky until the 1920s in the context of European and Hungarian Modernism
Views:15This paper deals with the questions Dostoevsky’s reception in Hungary in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The author investigates the growing interest in Dostoevsky in the context of the new trends of art and literature and gives a detailed survey of the most characteristic reactions (i.e. reviews, studies, introductions to books) about the new translations and editions of Dostoevsky’s works. Among the most relevant questions addressed arestereotypes about Russian culture and people, living in Hungary duringthe past centuries, the various interpretations of Crime and Punishment, and some comparative aspects in the analyses of this novel.
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The Features of Theatre Activity in Hungary: The Legal and Financial Basis (II)
12 p.Views:136Hungarian theatre system is the main object of the following article. The first part of article contains the general questions connected with the existing model of theatrical activity. Then there is the analytical review of the modern Hungarian legislation of area of culture and special attention is paid to the structure and content of Law XCIX / 2008 “On support and rules of employment in organizations of performing arts”. In the following part of the article all models which exist and develop in the country nowadays of direct and indirect financial support of theatrical organizations are considered. Since Hungarian and Russian theatre systems have some similar characteristics, the final part is devoted to possible partial adoption of Hungarian experience with a view to develop the institutions for the additional funding of Russian theatres.
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Women's Prose: Past, Present and Future
Views:144The 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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Russia and Hungary: A dialogue of cultures in the space of literary texts: Book Review: Through "Alien" to "Own": Dialogue of Russian and Hungarian Cultures: Monograph / Edited by M.A. Lappo, V.V. Marosha. NGPU Publishing House, pp. 240. ISBN 978-00226-049-2, Novosibirsk, 2023
Views:23This monograph presents the results of a joint interdisciplinary project of Russian and Hungarian philologists to study the facts of interaction between Russian and Hungarian cultures in the space of literary texts. It examines various manifestations of the interaction of cultures: from the study of cases of direct influence to intertextual forms of assimilation and interpretation of elements of a foreign culture, current trends in translation reception. The volume includes papers by a wide range of authors whose texts made up the material of the study (from F.M. Dostoevsky and S. Veresh to E. Vodolazkin and Y. Berg).
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Ivan Goncharov’s Novel “A Common Story” and the Problem of “Petersburg Text”
Views:263The article raises the question about the nature of the “Petersburg text” in the novel “A Common Story”, about its correlation with the general body of the “Petersburg text” of Russian literature and about its individual meanings in Goncharov’s prose. Various levels of the “Petersburg text” are considered: the expression of the category of the “inner state” of the hero, as well as culture and nature. It is concluded that Goncharov’s novel does not fully fit into the mainstream of the “Petersburg text” of Russian literature, but adopts the basic principles of its construction, and also has great potential for the semantic increments of the individual local Petersburg dictionary, which is determined by Goncharov’s irony and symbolization.
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Scientists in Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s Novels
Views:105This study focuses on a characteristic type of hero in Ulitskaya’s works and analyses the image of the scientist heroes and their poetic functions in three of the author’s novels (The Kukotsky Enigma, The Big Green Tent and Jacob’s Ladder). These heroes represent a special kind of syncretic thinking. Firstly, in their conversations and debatesthe genre code of the Socratic dialogue is activated, as Mikhail Bakhtin described it in connection with the development of the polyphonic novel. Secondly, these heroes, who always appear in pairs, invoke the duo of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, as well as certain characteristics of “Quixotism”, which has a central role in the critique of the role that intellectuals have played in Russian culture. It is against the above background that the role of 20th-century intellectuals gains a new interpretation in Ulitskaya’s three novels.
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The Features of Theatrical Life in Hungary: The Legal and Financial Basis
18 p.Views:101The present study is concerned with the Hungarian theatre system. In the first part general
questions connected with the existing model of theatrical activity are treated. This is
followed by an analytical review of modern Hungarian cultural legislation, in which special
attention is paid to the structure and content of Law XCIX / 2008 “On the support and rules
of employment in organizations of performing arts”. Then all the existing present-day models
of direct and indirect financial support of theatrical organizations are considered. Since the
Hungarian and Russian theatre systems have some similar characteristics, the final part is
devoted to possible partial adoption of Hungarian experience with a view to developing the
institutions for the additional funding of Russian theatres. -
Object – Body – Flashback in “The Seagull” by Michael Mayer
6 p.Views:165The 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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On the Mystery of Interpretation: Studia Humanitatis. Ars Hermeneutica. Metodologie A Theurgie Hermeneutické Interpretace IX. Kolektiv autorů. red.: Jan Vorel. Ostravská univerzita: Ostrava 2022., 148 p., ISBN: 978-80-7599-333-5
Views:39The aim of this review is to introduce the ninth volume of the publication series Studia Humanitatis, Ars Hermeneutica, published by the Department of Slavonic Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Ostrava in the Czech Republic. The monograph is an output of proceedingsfrom conferences which are regularly organized by this department. Attention to the art of interpretation and the related need to situate works of art in a complex web of cultural and historical connections is an important part of the effort to understand the deep context of artistic creation as such and the possibility for recipients to gain the most accurate understanding of the message conveyed by a work of art. The monograph highlights a number of aspects of artisticcreation: it notes the circumstances of the creation of the artwork, the ability of the interpreter to place the artwork in the context of the historical conditions in which it is created, and the theoretical concepts that can be used for its interpretation.