Authors:
S. Rolet
Year: 2018,
Volume: 3,
Number: 1
(14 downloads)
Abstract
Despite the exceptional fame of Maxim Gorky in France since the very beginning of
the 20th century, the French public did not discover The Lower Depths until October 1905,
later than other European countries. The competition between two translators, Eugène
Séménoff and Élie Halpérine-Kaminski, lead to a lawsuit, which delayed the staging of
the play for two years. Following the end of the trial, the play was immediately produced
by Lugné-Poë at L’Œuvre Theatre; the press had advertised the play as the pinnacle of the
theatrical season. The most noteworthy event was the performance on October 23, 1905
when Italian tragic actress Eleonora Duse played the part of Vassilissa in Italian, while
other actors played their parts in French.
Keywords: Maxim Gorky, The Lower Depths, Antoine, Lugné-Poë, Eleonora Duse, trial, J. Marchlewski, Eugène Séménoff, Élie Halpérine-Kaminski, Serge Persky
Authors:
M.-Ch. Autant-Mathieu
Year: 2018,
Volume: 3,
Number: 1
(11 downloads)
Abstract
Gorky started his literary career as a playwright at the Moscow Art Theatre. He
wrote his first plays for its troupe in competition with Chekhov whose plays were
performed there during the same period. Thus, two Moscow Art Theatre directors,
Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko dealts with two authors whom they valued
but whose approaches differed. My paper that forms part of a study concerning Gorky’s
collaboration with the Moscow Art Theatre, focuses on the way in which Stanislavsky
and Nemirovich-Danchenko revised and embellished the history of their relationship
with Gorky in their autobiographies both written in the Soviet period, My Life in Art
(1926) and My Life in the Russian theatre (1936) respectively. In real fact, the relationship
was problematic due to Gorky’s political opinions and the difficulties that the actors
encountered playing his characters. Since the middle of the 1920s, Gorky became a
defender of the Moscow Art Theatre and consequently, the two directors put their
political and aesthetic contradictions aside and sought to reconcile themselves with
Gorky who contributed to make the Art Moscow Theatre a model Soviet theatre. Besides,
the writer supported Stanislavsky in founding an opera-dramatic studio in 1935 and
writing and publishing “The Stanislavsky System.”
Keywords: Moscow Art Theatre, Chekhov, Stanislavsky, Nemirovich-Danchenko, My life in Art, My Life in the Russian Theatre, Soviet cultural politics, biased writing, The Lower Depths, Small people, Summerfolk, The Children of the Sun
Authors:
L. Heller
Year: 2018,
Volume: 3,
Number: 1
(11 downloads)
Abstract
This paper discusses a 1936 French film The Lower Depths based on the famous
Maxim Gorky’s play and directed by Jean Renoir. The script was initially written by
Evgeny Zamyatin and Jacques Companeez and then rewritten by Charles Spaak and
Renoir. The first part of the paper is dedicated to the problematic reception of this
film that was due to its blurred Russian-French outlook and to its seeming infidelity to
Gorky’s work. Further, the essay sheds light on the intricacy of the 1936 circumstances
surrounding the film production. It also discusses the role that the Albatros production
society whose technical crew was composed mostly of the Russian émigré specialists
played in the making of the film. Such a crew, together with the fact that the original
play and its screen adaptation were written by two émigré writers, endowed the film
with “universal Russianness” of a sort. The last part of the paper attempts to clarify the
complicated issue of the scenario by comparing its several script versions with the final
version. The paper raises new questions concerning respective roles played by different
authors of the adaptation in the production of The Lower Depths.
Keywords: Jean Renoir, Evgeni Zamyatin, Maxim Gorky, The Lower Depths, French cinema, Russian émigré culture, cultural transfer, screenplay writing, screen adaptation, scenario authorship
Authors:
L.A. Spiridonova
Year: 2018,
Volume: 3,
Number: 1
(12 downloads)
Abstract
In 1932, the Communist party ideologists called Maxim Gorky the founder of socialist
realism at the behest of Stalin. This tag has turned into an ideological cliché that
accompanies the writer’s image even in the present day and does not allow us to see him
as a talented artist who sought to create a new method in Russian literature. Believing
classical realism to be outdated already at the beginning of the 20th century, Gorky called
for such artistic format that would describe human life from the height of futuristic
ideals. Starting with the novella Mother (1906), he sought to implement the synthesis of
artistic consciousness with socialist ideals that he considered the means of harmonious
rearrangement of the new world. In The Tales about Italy and in the autobiographical
trilogy (Childhood, My Apprenticeship, and My Universities), Gorky’s dream of the
happier future life under socialism manifests itself through the synthesis of realism
and romanticism. In his late years, while advocating the method of “social realism” in
his essays, Gorky did not write a single fictional work that would incarnate dogmatic
principles that were developed already after his death.
Keywords: Gorky, Stalin, socialist realism, synthesis of realism and modernism
Authors:
O.A. Ovcharenko
Year: 2018,
Volume: 3,
Number: 1
(11 downloads)
Abstract
The essay focuses on the theoretical problem of M. Gorky’s artistic method claiming
that Gorky’s work combines elements of realism, Romanticism, and modernism. Already
at the beginning of his career, he realized that critical realism was in crisis as his opinions
about the work of such realist writers as Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky and others testify.
Gorky was deeply unsatisfied by either his predecessors or contemporaries as we can
tell based on the analysis of his critical views, and this feeling of dissatisfaction forced
him to look for the ways of modernizing realism during his whole lifetime. Bearing on
the concept of B.V. Mikhailovsky about the crisis of realism at the turn of the 19th and
20th centuries, author of this article discusses Gorky’s attempts to do something about
this and of these attempts interpretation in contemporary literary studies. At the same
time, the essay examines different definitions of Romanticism as suggested by Gorky as
well as his interest in modernism that found manifestation in his tales written from 1922
through 1924. The section entitled “Characterology” raises the question of Gorky being
unsatisfied with positive characters of critical realism and his attempts to make up for the
deficiency of the latter in the images of truth-searchers, tramps, and women.
Keywords: critical realism, crisis, Romanticism, modernism, artistic method
Authors:
S.M. Demkina
Year: 2018,
Volume: 3,
Number: 1
(12 downloads)
Abstract
This article examines the stage history of M. Gorky’s play The Lower Depths in Germany. The author discusses German stage history of Gorky’s work against the social background and in the context of major artistic tendencies of the 20 th century. Steady interest in Gorky as a playwright in Germany is due to the acute social importance and universality of the problems reflected in his dramas. Bearing on the archive materials of the Gorky Museum, the essay explores interpretations of Gorky’s cult drama The Lower Depths in the work of European stage directors, acclaimed reformers of theatrical art. A significant part of the “Gorky and German Theater” section of the Gorky Museum (IWL RAS) is devoted to The Lower Depths. Two series of photographs represent the first German staging of Nachtasyl (German translation of The Lower Depths). The performance of Max Reinhardt and Richard Vallentin in Berlin Kleines Theater on January 10–23, 1903, had great success and good takings. After the premiere, attention to the personality of Gorky in Europe increased; he became the most popular Sovietauthor. When Nazi came to power, they banned Gorky’s work in Germany: he reappeared on the German stage only after the World War II. In the late 1960s, on the wave of Gorky’s centenary (1968), world theatres ran a series of performances based on his plays. The 1970s were marked by a renewal of interest to Gorky the playwright. The Lower Depths was staged in Europe, the USA, and the UK. Both directors and critics perceived Gorky’s dramaturgy in the context of works of his contemporaries — Shaw, Ibsen, Hauptmann, Tolstoy, Chekhov.
Keywords: theatre, Gorky, writer, literature, play, stage directors, stage
Authors:
M.A. Arias-Vikhil
Year: 2018,
Volume: 3,
Number: 1
(11 downloads)
Abstract
Russian actress and stage director Tatyana Pavlova successfully staged two of Maxim
Gorky’s plays in Italy from 1926 through 1928. Those were The Lower Depths, the
most famous play by Gorky, and Counterfeit Coin, a play he wrote in Sorrento; Tatyana
Pavlova’s troupe played it for the first time. These productions are interesting mainly as
attempts to follow the tradition of the Moscow Art Theater where The Lower Depths was
staged for the first time in 1902. Maxim Gorky who was in Italy at a time participated
in the staging of his play: he invited Tatyana Pavlova and her actors to his villa Galotti
in Posillipo and read them the text of the play aloud, as had done it at the Moscow Art
Theater. However, Pavlova’s performance did not simply reproduce the production
of the Moscow Art Theater that contemporaries found too naturalistic. Pavlova’s
performance impressed the audience with its mystical atmosphere instead. At the same
time, the elements of the “new drama” that Gorky introduced in his play in the fashion
of such early 20th century playwrights, as Chekhov, Ibsen, Strindberg, and Maeterlinck,
did not meet Italian public’s approval due to the popularity of Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s
“theatrical theatre” that reigned on the Italian stage at that time. Absence of dramatic
action, abundance of dialogues, no division of characters into main and secondary,
and overload with secondary, minor episodes hindered, in the opinion of critics,
the perception of the tragic content of The Lower Depths. The premiere of Pavlova’s
performance took place in December 1926, and in December 1927, the same Valle theater
in Rome hosted the tour of the Moscow Art Theater. This way Italian public was able to
see and compare two outstanding performances. This comparison revealed the specificity
of the “Russian soul,” its pessimism and fatalism, while the characters in Pavlova’s play
were distinguished by a sharp understanding of their existential situation.
Keywords: Gorky, Tatyana Pavlova, The Lower Depths, Italy, 1926, 1927, Vallee Theater, “new drama,” Italian theater criticism
Authors:
S.K. Rosovetsky
Year: 2018,
Volume: 3,
Number: 1
(12 downloads)
Abstract
The article examines the epic specificity of Ukrainian dumas. It does it by
demonstrating the originality of the verbal form of dumas, the musical elements of its
texts and their performers, blind musicians, and by discussing the place of the genre
among similar epic phenomena in the world literature. While S.N. Azbelev considers
dumas to be a pre-epic form correspondent to the hypothetical “lyrico-epic cantilena”
(A.N. Veselovskiy), B.N. Putilov relates them to the later, “post-classic” stage in the epos
development, or, namely, to “post-epos.” The essay claims that only the dumas about
Khmel’nichchina were composed “on hot tracks of historical events,” but even these
works brought their plotline to a more general level. One can trace the features of the
“classic” type of epos in the heroic “core” of dumas: their heroes, while shown as ordinary
people in the everyday life, nevertheless demonstrate epic hyperbolism as warriors.
Such are ataman Matyash the Old and Ivan Konovchenko, Vdovichenko. The captivity
dumas reveal certain hyperbolism as well. These dumas often use a “two-level” structure
that is usual for the “classic” epos; they feature traitors and contain signs indicating the
beginning of cyclization around certain characters. At the same time, they have no “epic
center” nor they have an “epic ruler” variant; they do not have such typical plots as unfair
incarceration of the epic hero by the epic ruler, or heroic courtship, or the fight between
father and son. The essay explains these gaps by the fact that the genre of dumas emerged
and their plot structure developed as complimentary to an older epic form, bylynas that
continued to circulate in the 16th century. The creators of the new genre did not have to
compose their dumas because songs on the same themes already circulated at that time
and belonged to the generic form of bylina. The author explains transition from bylina to
duma within Ukrainian epic tradition by historical changes, “social demand,” and cultural
types of the performers.
Keywords: duma, epos, cantilena, bylina, hyperbolism
Authors:
T.A. Agapkina
Year: 2018,
Volume: 3,
Number: 1
(11 downloads)
Abstract
The paper examines Slavic etiological legends on the Flight to Egypt plot. These
legends feature trees and bushes growing on the way of Maria’s and Joseph’s flight to
Egypt. Some of these plants helped Christ and his parents escape while others betrayed
them to the Herod’s army. Virgin Mary endowed the plants with “positive” or “negative”
qualities respectively, as either a reward or a sign of damnation. The author analyzes
folk legends that were familiar to Eastern, Western, and Southern Slavs; points out
which plants were mentioned in the legends and describes the circle of plant symbols;
enlists themes, types and motifs of these legends and compares them to other apocryphal
legends that had the same source, namely the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. The Gospel of
Pseudo-Matthew seemed to be influential mainly in Western Slavia where the main core
of etiological legends was recorded.
Keywords: trees, apocrypha, etiological legends, symbolism, ethnobotany, Slavs
Authors:
A.L. Nalepin
Year: 2018,
Volume: 3,
Number: 1
(13 downloads)
Abstract
The article opens up a new research series entitled “Significance of the Folklore
Materials, stored in the Department of Manuscripts at IWL RAS and in other archives,
both in Russia and abroad” and offers philological interpretation of the samples of
Russian folklore culture, hitherto unknown to the broad academic community. These
samples belong to the tradition fundamental for the development of Russian civilization
and the meanings of national mentality. Folk culture / folklore play important role in
this development, as do folklore studies that examine folklore sources, their ideological
constants and aesthetics concepts. The study, focusing on the analysis of the newly
acquired folklore heritage, attempts to evaluate the significance of these materials and
ensure their harmonious entry into the already existing folklore system. The presented
research will undoubtedly enrich both Russian folklore studies and literary criticism.
Keywords: Evgeny P. Ivanov, Russian folklore, ethnology, folklore studies, folk culture, buffoons, ethnographic theater, archives
Authors:
A.I. Dormidontova
Year: 2018,
Volume: 3,
Number: 1
(15 downloads)
Abstract
This is an overview of а new collection received by the K.G. Paustovsky Moscow
Literary Museum-Center in 2017, the year of the 125th anniversary of his birth. The
collection consists of 366 items. Among them are manuscripts, biographical documents,
letters, books with autographs, photographs, posters, booklets, and drawings. These
items are of considerable interest for the study of the writer’s methods, his biography as
well as for understanding the circle of his contacts. The overview incorporates a number
of authentic documents.
Keywords: Konstantin Paustovsky, manuscripts, biography, history of literary works, correspondence, inscriptions, K.G. Paustovsky Moscow Literary Museum-Center
Authors:
I.K. Staf
Year: 2018,
Volume: 3,
Number: 2
(11 downloads)
Abstract
The French reception of Bakhtin’s book on Rabelais excludes the author of
Gargantua and Pantagruel. However, by analyzing Rabelais’s text as a reflection of
national culture and ignoring the author’s role in the development and transformation
of the novel’s cultural, generic, and linguistics codes, we inevitably distort the text
of the novel. This article argues that novel (especially its first two books) is closely
connected to the discussions about the status and meaning of vernacular language that
were relevant for the time and that generated a wide range of non-humorous works
in France of the first half of the 16th century (by Jean Lemaire de Belges, Geoffroy
Tory, etc.). The comic in Rabelais’s originates from French variant of humanist ideas.
Famous prologs by Alcofribas Nasier represent a merely authorial play with canons
and methods of the medieval literature and a parody of the medieval understanding of
words and books that had little to do with the spirit of popular carnival. At the same
time, the author consistently marks poetic canons of the late Middle Ages as archaic.
Such combination of archaism with the intention to write a popular book can be traced
in the typographical features of the first parts of the novel that allows us to rethink the
term “national culture” in the light of Roger Chartier’s concept of appropriation. This
reading demonstrates that Gargantua and Pantagruel is a masterly literary play that
rejects not only “official” culture but also the entire Medieval culture with its poetic
norms, values and rules for the sake of the incipient ideals of national humanism.
Keywords: culture of folk humor, Rabelais, Bakhtin, archaization, appropriation, Renaissance humanism, vernacular language
Authors:
N. Langbour
Year: 2018,
Volume: 3,
Number: 2
(11 downloads)
Abstract
In his reflections on painting, Diderot as a theoretician of fine arts explains that the
painter must respect the unity of time and place for the paintings to be thematically
and aesthetically solid. However, the unities present a problem for Diderot when he
attempts to describe specific paintings in his accounts of painting exhibitions. Indeed,
the writing requires conveying the instantaneous and unmediated perception of the
work of art in discreet words. Moreover, the description of paintings suggests their
fragmentation into different scenes that seems to dilate time and place out of the
scene described. Diderot invents several descriptive methods that allow him solve this
problem.
Keywords: Diderot, art critic, literary translation of painting, unity of time and place
Authors:
Haltrin-Khalturina E.V.
Year: 2018,
Volume: 3,
Number: 2
(12 downloads)
Abstract
This article seeks to trace the connection between two kinds of the Romantic sublime
envisaged in Book 8 of Wordsworth’s great autobiographical poem The Prelude, or
Growth of a Poet’s Mind (1805, 1850). Our focus is primarily on the 1850 text. I read
Book 8 against passages from Wordsworth’s fragmentary essay “The Sublime and
the Beautiful” (c. 1811/1812), attempting to grasp how the components of the natural
sublime, highlighted by Wordsworth, — power, duration, individual form — got
modified in Book 8 to produce the sensation of the human sublime. My interpretation
posits a new pattern of emphasis on aesthetical issues encapsulated in the title of
the Book 8 “Love of Nature Leading to Love of Man”: unlike the Burkean sublime,
arousing fear and awe, the Wordsworthian sublime is capable of inspiring heartfelt
adoration akin to love, when, in the course of The Prelude, an ordinary human being
appears “ennobled outwardly before <the poet’s> sight”.
Keywords: British Romanticism, William Wordsworth, natural sublime, human sublime, the fanciful pastoral, the imaginative sublime, images of shepherds, ‘spots of time’, ‘love of man’
Authors:
Anna V. Dobryashkina
Year: 2018,
Volume: 3,
Number: 2
(11 downloads)
Abstract
The article examines the role of children and juvenile literature of the Third Reich
in the development of Nazi identity. In German culture of the 1930s, the image of
childhood developed during the period of the Weimar Republic underwent dramatic
changes. As the Third Reich was proclaimed “the Youth Reich” (das jugendliche
Reich), childhood lost its autonomy and merged with “youth,” the key concept of the
Nazi era. Youth, in turn, was more than age category; it implied a certain worldview,
or a specific life position that all age groups of Nazi society had to adhere to. Children
and adolescents aged 10-18 years old joined the Hitler Youth, the largest organization
in the world, and became carriers of the new ideology. Literature for children and
adolescents of the Third Reich significantly expanded its boundaries: now it included
literary works written for adults, and also those written before 1933. “Expanded
borders,” therefore, implied multiple cases of intersection between children and adult
literature, interpenetration and coexistence of these literatures within the cultural
ambience of the Nazi period. Despite the fact that the entire system of education and
upbringing fostered indoctrination while literature was one but not the only one factor
in the development of the new identity in this multilevel system, it was literature that
legitimized children’s refusal to follow their personal interests and encouraged their
engagement in the propagated ideological system.
Keywords: German literature, children and juvenile literature, the Third Reich, Hitler’s Youth, Nazism, indoctrination
