Authors:
Alexey N. Belarev
(16 downloads)
Abstract
The author compares ethical concepts of a Russian physiologist and philosopher Alexey
A. Ukhtomsky and a French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Both use the word “face” as
a philosophical term. The paper examines the “face” as a key image in the work of both
authors which helped them understand the meaning of dialogue and social interaction. The
fact that the Russian word “litzo” (“face”) has two different meanings (a “person” and a
“human face”) was very important for Ukhtomsky. For the better understanding of Levinas,
it is necessary to take in account the interaction of Russian, Hebrew, and French languages
as part of the linguistic consciousness of this author. Both philosophers considered ethics to
be philosophia prima. The encounter with the face of the Other is the central event in the personality development for both Levinas and Ukhtomsky. For Levinas, the study of the face
was a way to transcend the limits of phenomenology because the face is not a “common”
phenomenon. For Ukhtomsky, the image of the face pointed at the problematic character
of sciences. It was part of his search for the non-theoretical knowledge, e. g. knowledge
that accounts not only for the universal but also for the individual and is capable of describing not only impersonal structures and objects but also individual and unique events.
Both thinkers thus were seeking to reconsider religious tradition in the context of contemporary science and philosophy. Ukhtomsky arrives at the idea of asymmetrical relationship
between the “I” and the “Other” independently of Levinas. Whereas Levinas describes the
experience of the encounter with the Other as a kind of epiphany, Ukhtomsky calls God “the
First and the Ultimate Interlocutor.” The encounter with the Other for both philosophers is,
namely, a mundane, everyday analogue of the Revelation.
Keywords: Emmanuel Levinas, Alexey Alexejevich Ukhtomsky, the face, the Other, ethics, interlocutor, Mikhail Bakhtin, phenomenology, anthropology, subject, dialogue
Authors:
Alexander B. Kudelin
(15 downloads)
Abstract
The present article offers an analysis of forms of prosaic speech, seeing them as an important means for producing the literary/historical narrative of “The Life of the Prophet” (Al-sīra al-Nabawiyya) by Ibn Ishāq (d.150 AH/767 AD) — Ibn Hishām (d. 218 AH/833 AD, or 213 AH/828 AD). The plot-organized narrative is created there through various forms of prosaic speech, both direct and indirect, which prove operative in Al-sīra in shaping formal accounts of events as much as in forming plot-centered storytelling. Apart from the simple instances of direct utterances authored by this or that character, the article considers several examples of complicated modes of prosaic forms appearing in the Ibn Ishāq – Ibn Hishām writing, when a certain direct utterance of the first speaker is reworked, through various combinations of direct and reported speech, resulting in a chain of coherent utterances of another speaker or narrator.
Keywords: Arabic studies, Ibn Ishāq, Ibn Hishām, Al-sīra al-Nabawiyya, Medieval studies, plotstructured narrative, forms of prosaic speech, direct speech, reported speech
Authors:
Ekaterina N. Vasilyeva
(20 downloads)
Abstract
The fate of The Spirit of Laws by Ch.-L. Montesquieu in Russia in the second half of
the 18th century is an example of ambiguous reception that the French enlightener and
his ideas received at that time prompting both imitation and polemics. The origin of
these controversies is in the unfavorable image of Russia that Montesquieu represented
as a country of despotism and slavery. The ideas developed in the treatise incited various
Russian authors to nourish their own thinking about the country, especially concerning such problems as liberty and equality. The article attempts to trace the emergence
of this debate in political literature, including the works by F.-H. Strube de Piermont,
Catherine II, and Prince M.M. Shcherbatov. Since the examined texts are interdependent, it allows me to speak of the literary polemics of a kind. It is argued that each author
develops her own writing strategy in accordance with her specific position in society and
intention. A comparative analysis shows the following tendencies. (1) The book by Strube de Piermont is a typical literary refutation intended to rehabilitate Russia’s reputation
compromised by the author of The Spirit of Laws. (2) Prince Shcherbatov uses Montesquieu’s statements about Russia as a reference point for his own deep and original study
of the phenomena and processes that existed in Russia. (3) The ambiguous position of
Catherine II as both a private person and a monarch is the most vulnerable of the three
and forces her to adapt her ideas to this peculiar role.
Keywords: Montesquieu, Russia, despotism, slavery, polemic, Strube de Piermont, Catherine II, Shcherbatov
Authors:
Julietta L. Chavchanidze
(16 downloads)
Abstract
This essay examines the personality of Rahel Varnhagen, one of the brightest representatives of the German cultural milieu, owner of a literary salon that brought together
prominent authors, artists, philosophers, nobles, and the crème of burgher society in the
period between the end of the 18th Century and the 1830s. Rahel stood out among other
female owners of literary salons, due to her deep knowledge of contemporary aesthetic
trends, their specificity and perspectives, and in this respect, she was a perfect equal to
male intellectuals of the time. Her contacts spread beyond the salon as she corresponded with a great number of people both within and outside the country. Rahel’s letters,
collected by Varnhagen von Ense, and her diaries reveal outstanding literary gifts. On
the example of Rahel’s world and her environment, this article examines the transient
decades of European life that signaled the shift in the cultural sensibility as well as the
debunking of the Enlightenment social, philosophic, and aesthetic concepts by the generations of Romantics. The diversity of personalities that evoked Rahel’s interest shows
the ambiguity of public opinions and tastes reflected in literature. The atmosphere of
her salon helps us better understand individual literary figures that either represented
certain aesthetic trends or combined the traits of different trends in their work.
Keywords: salon, woman, culture, classics, Goethe, Jena Romanticism, epoch, letter
Authors:
Kirill A. Chekalov
(15 downloads)
Abstract
The essay examines the structure of a 32-volume series of Fantômas novels created by
Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain; it traces the origins and development of the serial
genre and generic novelties related to seriality. The latter include a relative autonomy
of each story in each volume and interconnection of the volumes via the figure of the
criminal “slipping away” from the hands of justice. The study compares poetological
techniques of the fabula development and points out specific features of the Belle époque
reality as represented through the introduction of recognizable “cultural signs,” variations of everyday incidents, and newspaper chronicle of criminal events. It also analyzes
the image of Fantômas and other recurrent characters of the series (such as Juve, Fandor, Hélène, Lady Maud Beltham, etc). The authors examine para-literary features that
can be traced in many other different forms such as TV series and graphic novels. They
include (1) mythologization of the main character as embodiment of Evil, or a “criminal
genius”; (2) confusion of the real and the fictional, verisimilar and extraordinary, horrible and comic based on the variations of literary and journalistic clichés; (3) repetition of
plot patterns, (4) attempts to guess and to meet reader’s expectations.
Keywords: serial, novel serial, editorial project, narrative clichés, recurrent characters, paraliterature
Authors:
Vera V. Kotelevskaya
(16 downloads)
Abstract
The childhood as the subject of psychology, philosophy, and art is object of intensive
study in the 20th century Austrian culture. Childhood is seen as the origin of personhood,
its “code” that calls for interpretation. Psychoanalysis of Freud and Rank, fiction of Rilke, Musil, Kafka, Bernhard, Bachmann, and Handke are the landmarks in the development of the Austrian modernist text on childhood. The study of the conceptualization
of childhood in the 20th century Austrian fiction being part of the modernist project of
the independent personality generating autonomous art is of scholarly relevance. Rainer
Maria Rilke imparts a confessional tone to the theme as he develops the neo-romantic
idea of childhood as the source of artistic personality. The child is conceptualized as the
other of the adult whereas art is conceived to compensate the loss of the former. Experience of self-research is undertaken by Rilke in the novel about a fictional Danish poet
Malte Laurids Brigge (Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge / “Die Aufzeichnungen des
Malte Laurids Brigge”, 1910). The author first describes the past of the character, or his
“lonely” childhood, and then turns to the historical past of the mankind and evangelical
parable from which the narrator draws exemplae as arguments for his juxtaposition of
the “mask” and the self. The fragmentariness or dissociation of the adult self becomes
partly overcome by means of return to the childhood, a period when the narrator already
gains experience of self-loss and self-discovery. Thus, for the modernist artist, the aesthetic project is inseparably interrelated with the “Sisyphean labor” of writing (Albert
Camus), loss of the transcendental principles of poetic “labor,” and total experience of
despair which, according to Kierkegaard, inspires self-reflection.
Keywords: Austrian literature, autobiographical fiction, modernism, childhood, artist novel, selfhood, Rilke, Kafka, Musil, Bernhard
Authors:
Eugenyia M. Butenina
(15 downloads)
Abstract
The paper discusses Chekhovian ethical discourse in American fiction and non-fiction
that forms part of an emerging literary canon of medical humanities in the USA. Besides
Chekhov’s “medical” stories, special attention is given to his book Sakhalin Island seen
as an object of “moral cartography.” The analysis of contemporary medical humanities
in the USA shows that Chekhov’s ethical heritage has entered this field at several levels.
One is teaching “medical” stories and Sakhalin Island as part of the future doctors’ ethical
education. The other is expanding the literary-medical context by including these texts in
comparative studies and anthologies. Finally, there is the overall level of developing the
method of literary “diagnostic” bearing on Chekhov’s ethical heritage that is important
for the study of both fiction and non-fiction authored by doctors-writers.
Keywords: A. Chekhov, ethics, medical humanities, LitMed, J. McConkey, W. Percy
Authors:
Nina D. Lyakhovskaya
(15 downloads)
Abstract
This essay focuses on the genre of travelogue that was new to the African Francophone
literatures. The analysis of the novel In the Shadow of Imana: Travels in the Heart of Rwanda
(2000) by the Ivorian writer Véronique Tadjo is a standpoint of my polemics with the concept of travelogue and its distinctive features defined by Maiga Abubakarom Abdulvakhidu
in his PhD dissertation Africa in French and Russian Travelogues (A. Gide and N. Gumilev)
(2016). The author of the dissertation considers travelogues to be a “composite” form. One
part is documentary-biographical with the obligatory chronotope of the way, stops, and personal impressions of the travelers (Gide’s travel notes about his travels to Tunisia, Sahara,
Congo, lake Chad, Egyptian Diaries, etc.; Gumilev’s travel notes about Abyssinia, African Diaries, and letters). The second part is fictional (Gide’s prose poem “The Fruits of the Earth”
and his novel Immoralist; Gumilev’s tales and poems from his turn-of-the-century collections
such as The Tent, The Quiver, and The Fire). Tadjo’s book, in contrast to these travelogues,
represents a solid form that combines documentary and biographical prose (containing the
chronotope of the way and stops in the places of the tragic death of tutsi, the victims of the
hutu genocide in 1994) with fiction (mini-novellas with fictional characters). Maiga claims
that the latter is never neutral and is usually structured as a comparison of “one’s own”
and the “other” culture. Moreover, the representative of “one’s own” culture is usually also
the representative of the normal strand. In Maiga’s concept, however, an essential property
of travelogues such as personal motivation of the travelogue author is marginalized. This
property defines a motif that gives its solid form to the travelogue. In Tadjo’s travelogue,
this is compassion for the genocide victims in Rwanda and the author’s indignation with
the indifference of the international community and the UN. This humanistic motif features
psychologic aspects of the narrator as the author’s strongest stylistic achievement.
Keywords: travelogue, hybrid form, definitions of style, motivation, chronotope, documentary-biographical prose, fiction, short stories
Authors:
Marianna V. Kaplun
(18 downloads)
Abstract
The article examines a little known and understudied Stuttgart poem that belongs
to Johann Gottfried Gregory, Russian author of the German origin, author of the first
play for the Russian court theatre and a minister of the Lutheran Church in Moscow.
In 1667, while being on the diplomatic mission to Germany, Gregory leaves the autograph of the poem devoted to Russian life in the “album amicorum” of his friend, the
owner of the hotel in Stuttgart Johann Allgayr. The text of the poem in German was first
published by Nikolai Petrovich Likhachev in his book Friendly Aliens in the 18th century
Russia (1898). This article, for the first time, endeavors to reconstruct the history of the
poem and show the evolution of Gregory’s literary style in the first phase of his work
that remains obscure. The first part of the poem describes the life of the Russian people
and bears on the main “encyclopedic” work of the 17th century Russia, Description of the
Journey to Muscovy written by Gregory’s contemporary, a German traveler, geographer
and historian Adam Olearius. The second part of the poem is a praise to the Tsar Aleksey
Mikhailovich, a genre that will be found in all Gregory’s plays written for the Russian
theatre and will become integral part of the Russian court ceremonial in the last decades
of the 17th century. The poem was written under the influence of the 17th century Baroque
German poetry as represented in the work of Paul Fleming. Besides, Gregory’s Stuttgart
poem is an authentic document of its time that reflects major cultural, religious, and
historical events of the 17th century, the life of the German Quarter in Moscow, and the
foreigner’s vision of Muscovy under the reign of the Tsar Aleksey Mikhailovich.
Keywords: album-autograph, Russian diplomatic mission, Russian-German poetry of the 17th century, Russia court drama, royal authority, Baroque poetry, German Quarter
Authors:
Igor A. Vinogradov
(15 downloads)
Abstract
The essay examines Gogol’s heritage from a new and somewhat “unusual” perspective:
the writer is seen as one of the main Russian ideologists of the Slavic unity. Gogol’s views
are therefore placed in the context of different Slavophilic trends. The question that this
study addresses is only seemingly marginal; as the research has revealed, the polemics
between Gogol and the representatives of the Western branch of Slavophilism is central
to the work of the former. The essay analyzes Gogol’s views against the background of
various ideas about the unity of the Slavs of the “Moscow” and Polish Slavophilic groups,
in comparison with “Ukrainophile” views of Gogol’s countryman O.M. Bodiansky, and
in their relation to the initiatives of the Minister of Public Education S.S. Uvarov who
prescribed the study of the history and literature of the Slavic peoples at universities
in 1835. The essay focuses on the well-know “dissident case” (delo o volnodumstve)
that affected Gogol already as a student at Nezhinskaya gymnasium in the 1820s. It also
covers such subjects as: Gogol’s communication with Polish emigrants, participants
of the Polish uprising (1830–1831), when he was abroad in 1836–1837; Mickiewicz’s
Parisian lectures in Collège de France in 1840–1844; the history of the Ukrainian-Slavic
Society in 1846–1847; and the consequences of the publication of the book About the
Russian State by Giles Fletcher, British ambassador to Russia in the 16th century. It also
pays attention to the origins of the Polish ideological doctrine concerning the so-called
“turanism” of the Russians. Thus, the article discusses the reflection of various Slavic
interests and views in Gogol’s fiction and essays, and in his correspondence with friends
and acquaintances, up until the last years of his life. An extensive bibliography on the
subject is also provided.
Keywords: Gogol, biography, literary work, ideology, slavophilia, interpretation, hermeneutics, heritage
Authors:
Alexander V. Markov
(16 downloads)
Abstract
This article explores why N. Nedobrovo mentioned Il Sodoma (Giovanni-Antonio
Bazzi) among the artists of da Vinci School in her poem that was of particular importance
to Anna Akhmatova. The referenced studies by Merezhkovsky, Freud, and Muratov,
explain the convergence of Sodoma’s art with the work of Leonardo da Vinci. The
author argues, however, that the real reason of this convergence was the joke narrative
of Vasari about Il Sodoma that was reinterpreted by the 20th century authors in the spirit
of “Romantic irony.” Placing “Romantic irony” in the context of the conversation about
painting as the mirror of the world influenced Nedobrovo and Akhmatova and shaped
their understanding of existence in terms of the “looking-glass.” Thus, the theme of the
mirror in Akhmatova’s poetry, dominant in her poetic world, not only can be explained
by autobiographical motives but also related to the mirror topoi in painting and Vasari’s
story about Sodoma as the artist who was both serious and entertaining and building
his own self-image on self-parody. This allows us attenuate the Doppelgänger motif in
Akhmatova’s poetry.
Keywords: Akhmatova, Nedobrovo, leonardeschi, images of painting in poetry, poetic space
Authors:
Ekaterina A. Esenina
(17 downloads)
Abstract
Anastasia Tsvetayeva’s literary work can be largely defined as autobiographical. Her
first pen probe, “Royal reflections,” is a philosophical essay where the author represents
herself as a “theomachist” and the debunker of all moral values. Later, Tsvetaeva ventured
into the genre of autobiographical novel, yet her novel may be called “autobiographical”
only with some reservations. On the one hand, this work reflects real facts of the author’s
life. On the other, the narrator, at some points, deliberately departs from truth, obscures
and alters the facts, pursuing specific aims. The elements of autobiographical mythmaking may be found in the Memoirs of Anastasia Tsvetayeva that would be worthwhile to
compare with the autobiographical prose of her elder sister Marina.
Keywords: autobiography, memoirs, Anastasia Tsvetayeva, Marina Tsvetaeva, mythmaking, biography, autobiographical novel
Authors:
Elena A. Papkova
(15 downloads)
Abstract
The essay discusses the role that the allied powers — United States, France, Britain,
and Japan — played in the development and in the collapse of the Admiral A.V. Kolchak’s
anti-Bolshevik Russian government between 1918 and 1920. The discussion is based
on the material of the hitherto unknown newspaper publications by Vsevolod Ivanov
issued in 1919 by a military newspaper Vpered (Forward) and his literary works. The
latter include his classic story about the Civil War entitled “The Armored Train 14-69”
(1921), the homonymous plays (1927), and the screenplay (1963). For the first time,
the article closely examines Ivanov’s cooperation with the newspaper Forward. The
newspaper’s editor, Colonel V.G. Yanchevetsky, supported the government in major
political questions. Ivanov’s articles “Bonds of friendship” (1919. September 26) and “‘Go’
and ‘Captain’” (1919. October 16) represent polar views on the role that the allies of the
Russian government played in the Civil War. The first article underlines the importance
of friendly relations with the allies that emerged during the First World War and that
developed during the years of struggle against the “Bolshevik-German armies.” Ivanov’s
second article, a response to the events in Vladivostok in the Fall 1919 — particularly, to
the secret support of the anti-government conspiracy of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and
Bolsheviks on behalf of the allied forces — calls for the necessity to concentrate Russia’s
forces and to strengthen Russia’s place in the international arena. The present article shows
how Ivanov’s position about the allies developed under the 1919 Siberian circumstances,
was reflected in his literary work. For example, it analyzes a plot line associated with the
treacherous behavior of the Japanese lieutenant Tanako Muzzi that first appeared in the
“The Armored Train 14-69” and then got developed in the homonymous play.
Keywords: “The Armored Train 14-69” by Vsevolod Ivanov, new materials, military newspaper Forward, political articles, the role of the “allies” in the Civil War
