Authors:
A.V. Gladoshchuk
( 15 downloads)
Abstract
The poetics of Octavio Paz’s book The Violent Season (1958) is in great part defined
by its autobiographical canvas: the sequence of the 9 poems that compose the lyrical
series corresponds chronologically and geographically with Paz’s peregrinations
during 9 years (1948–1957). Thus, the book can be read as a solid poetical text
whose lyrical persona repeats Paz’s itinerary (Naples–Venice–Avignon–Paris–India–
Tokyo–Geneva–Mexico), crossing the boundaries of different cultural spaces (the
Mediterranean–the East–America) and the limits of his own self. The “plot” resembles
that of Apollinaire whose intertextual presence is suggested by the title and by the
epigraph. Similar to Apollinaire’s poems, the poetical conscience in The Violent Season
synthesizes individual and collective memories — the memory of humankind and
the memory of Mexican people in particular. This process reaches culmination in the
closing text of the book — the poem “Sunstone” whose very structure conveys the
idea of history sublimation. On the whole, the book scarcely reflects the poet’s life
biography; some poems have conventional space and time that have no reference to
specific geography or exact dates when they were written; the act of crossing cultural
boundaries is inconspicuous. The autobiographical itinerary is barely outlined; its
main function is to represent the archetypical “departure–and–return” scheme. The
book’s stylistic homogeneity is evidence of the poet’s maturity; namely, he perceives
heterogeneous manifestations of spiritual experience through the grid of universal
categories and structures. In accordance to his desire to conciliate “tradition” and
“adventure,” Paz appeals to Apollinaire, a poet whose aesthetics is the source of the
modern art and therefore may be considered “universal.”
Keywords: Octavio Paz, The Violent Season, Guillaume Apollinaire, intertext, poetical autobiography, poetry and history, universalism
Authors:
Yuri Y. Barabash
( 15 downloads)
Abstract
The essay employs the concept of the cultural border/bordering to the comparative
analysis of two significant literary texts, namely panoramic descriptions of Crocodile
Street by B. Schultz and Nevsky Prospect by Gogol. Here we are dealing with the type
of border that may be called spatial and chronological; the introductory part attempts
to justify the appropriateness of such approach. The core comparative analysis of the
essay touches upon structural, semantical, and poetological levels of these two by the
concept of the border and bordering. Pointing out overlapping moments as well as
differences sheds light on the problem of modernism in historical perspective and on
the processes of influence and heredity from premodernist elements to the modernist
poetics as such. Comparing Bruno Schultz with Gogol helps reveal the specificity of
the work of the former that is at once unique and typical of modernism. Reading Gogol
through Schultz reveals the importance of “Gogol’s lessons” for modernism, their
suggestive potential to influence and transform the means of artistic cognition.
Keywords: border/bordering, comparative analysis, modernism, mythologism, poetics, text, narrator
Authors:
Marsel R. Khamitov
( 15 downloads)
Abstract
A. N. Apukhtin’s story “Between Death and Life” (written shortly before the
author’s death) was not published during his lifetime and has been largely overlooked
by Russian scholars. However, it is interesting for its unusual “reincarnation” plot
requiring the use of nontrivial narrative techniques that allow reproducing posthumous
consciousness and the character’s subsequent rebirth within the Ich-Erzählung. This
article examines how such “reincarnation” narrative is constructed and how it reflects
the main plot of the story — emancipation of the narrator’s consciousness from the
material world, his “sortie” into atemporal space, and final rebirth. Methodologically,
the article bears on W. Schmid’s narrative classification. Whereas in the first chapters
the physical space expels the narrator’s consciousness transforming the Ich-Erzählung
into an objective narrative, in the following chapters, the narrator’s mnemonic efforts
allow him reach “revelation” and start a new life; such efforts are accompanied by the
increasing subjectivation of the narrative. The article examines Apukhtin’s experiments
against the background of the Russian 19-th century fantastic fiction, above all
V.F. Odoevsky’s story “The Living Dead” that is claimed to be structurally closer to
“Between Death and Life” than Leo Tolstoy’s story “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” often
considered as Apukhtin’s main source. Yet Apukhtin’s narrative techniques anticipating
20-th century literary experiments differ from the models elaborated within the Russian
fantastic tradition as they correspond to that “exotic” plot which Apukhtin chose for his
last story.
Keywords: A.N. Apukhtin’s fiction, fantastic plot, narrative experiments
Authors:
Olga A. Simonova
( 14 downloads)
Abstract
The article examines a poetic portrait of Korney Chukovsky. By introducing the
figure of the storyteller into several of his tales, the author launched a tradition of
representing himself as a fictional character. Readers perceived the protagonist of
his poems accompanied by his portrait as an integral authorial persona. Another
way of self-presentation was through identification with fairy tale characters. In
the hitherto unknown and unpublished comic poem by Chukovsky, he identifies
Korney (his first name) and Barmaley (a character of his fairy tale). Chukovsky’s
detachment from the name Korney and the creation of the homonymous character
is due to his incomplete appropriation of his pseudonym. Same tendency was typical
for Chukovsky’s perception by his contemporaries who developed a playful attitude
to the name “Korney” and saw it as independent from its bearer. The article examines
how Chukovsky’s contemporaries co-created his fictional image. Writing parodies on
his tales, contemporary poets represented Chukovsky as one of the characters of these
parodies. Due to the specific nature of the genre, parodies sharpened certain traits of
the poet’s character. Chukovsky’s biography also became a subject in contemporary
poetry. His remarkable height stood for his own greatness and featured him as a
contemporary of great people of the past. The potrayal of Chukovsky became a
recurring image in the 20th century literature as it made its way from one work to
another.
Keywords: 20th century Russian poetry, biography, Chukovsky’s tales, poetic portrait, parody, author, storyteller, character, unknown poem by Chukovsky
Authors:
Claudia Pieralli
( 15 downloads)
Abstract
The present survey aims at presenting the corpus of verses composed by the victims
of рolitical repressions in the Soviet Union from the point of view of published
collections and main critical works, concerning, above all, Stalinian era’s texts. At the
same time, the study attempts to elaborate and theoretical and epistemic framework
within which we can reasonably approach the study of this literary phenomenon of
the 20th century Russian history of culture. We deal, first of all, with the possibility of
considering these literary texts in relation to the concept of Testimony, and second,
with the attempt to highlight specific structural and aesthetical interrelation between
the testimonial function and its literary transfiguration in the specific context of
poetical creation and expression process. Later, this corpus of texts is regarded as
material for the study of the status of poetical word as an aesthetic object which is able
to provide a historical (artistic — widely cultural) testimony of Soviet concentration
system. Following this assumption, I will outline the literary means and techniques by
which the testimonial function is carried out. Within this theoretical framework, the
corpus of poetical texts by Soviet political prisoners constitutes a specific whole in the
history of the 20th century Russian literature and should be considered as such in the
future studies of the subject.
Keywords: literary testimony, Gulag poetry, “lager” poetry
Authors:
Кazbek К. Sultanov
( 17 downloads)
Abstract
The article discusses correlation of ethnic, cultural, and axiological approaches as
a methodologically relevant problem in literary studies. The weakening interest in the
structural and semantic complexity of the literary work and devaluation of the assertion
criteria assign a peripheral role to the creative factor in art. As a result, the principle
of aesthetic selectivity and the literary approach to the functional role of ethnocultural realities remain in the shadows of axiological relativism. The essay intends
to restore the status of “artistic value” as a significant category in literary studies by
practicing axiological approach within the literary discourse; it also invites to pay
special attention to the semantic complementarity of “national specificity” and “artistic
value” respectively. A change of values affects and modifies the state of literature
and its self-awareness by opening a new horizon of self-expression and modelling a
certain worldview; it reveals productive struggle of established and emerging meanings,
traditionalist attitudes and promising artistic intentions. In contemporary literary
criticism oriented at the study of the literatures of the peoples of Russia, there is a
demand for the reconstruction and reevaluation of national literatures. Such criticism
seeks to overcome the existing gap between axiological and cultural aspects of textual
analysis.
Keywords: artistic value, ethnic dominant, axiological approach, axiological criteria, significance, reconstruction, reevaluation
Authors:
Alexander A. Panchenko
( 25 downloads)
Abstract
In 1923, the Russian ethnologist and archaeologist Vasily Smirnov published
an article entitled “A Devil is Born. (Contemporary Legend)”. The article dealt
with an unusual demonological legend that had appeared short time ago in Soviet
Russia. It told a story of a baby devil who was an offspring of one communist. In his
commentaries, Smirnov pointed at some parallels between European folk narratives,
legends about miraculous icons, the story about the burning bush in the Book of
Exodus, beliefs related to succubi and incubi, legends about the birth of antichrist,
and Christian eschatology in general. However, those observations require certain
corrections. In fact, the narrative about the baby devil is an international legend, and
its history can be the ground for general discussion about evolution and functions of
didactic stories in Christian culture.
Keywords: banthropology of blasphemy and sacrilege, popular demonology, baby devil, monstrous births, migratory legends
Authors:
Natalya I. Shubnikova-Guseva
( 17 downloads)
Abstract
For the first time, the paper discusses the drawings by Yesenin in his article “Mary’s
Keys” (1918) and on the margins of the autograph of the dramatic poem Pugachev
(1921) considering them as part of the commentary on these works. The figures of
letters in “Mary’s Keys” serve as a key to Yesenin’s understanding of the letters in
the Russian alphabet and their literary-historical context. Yesenin considers Russian
alphabet or any alphabet not only as a set of letters arranged in a particular order,
but also treats it in figurative sense, like the ABC of self-knowledge in the world.
The figurative meanings of Yesenin’s drawings in “Mary’s Keys” trace back to his
conversations with Andrey Bely, to the ideas of such futurist poets as A. Kruchenykh’s,
V. Khlebnikov’s and others, and to the ideas of K. Balmont’s. The drawings in the
margins of the Pugachev autograph, especially the picture “The Ears of Rye,” associate
the characters of the poem with the power of the earth, agricultural labor, the ear of
rye, and relate them to the works of G. I. Uspensky Peasant and Peasant Labor (1880)
and The Power of the Earth (1887). Yesenin singled out these series among the literary
heritage of Uspensky, as is evidenced in his review <”About Gleb Uspensky”>. The
essay therefore argues that Uspensky’s ideas influenced both ideology and figurative
language of the poem Pugachev.
Keywords: S. A. Yesenin, drawings, article “The Keys of Mary” (1918), alphabet, Pugachev (1921), < “About Gleb Uspensky”>, G. I. Uspensky
Authors:
Evgeny B. Belodubrovsky
( 15 downloads)
Abstract
No Abstract
Keywords: Nikolay Antsyferov, Viktor Manuilov, Anna Akhmatova, correspondence, memoir, review
Authors:
А.V. Svyatoslavsky
( 14 downloads)
Abstract
No Abstract
Keywords: ZOLOTAREV А.А. CAMPO, MY MEMORY, MEMOIR. FICTION
Authors:
A.S. Balakhovskaya, N.V. Zakharova
( 17 downloads)
Abstract
No Abstract
Keywords: СONFERENCE, ORIENTAL READINGS, RELIGIONS, CULTURE
