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The transition from the communist to the democratic political regime was followed by the emergence of fundamental, social, cultural, moral, economic, and literal changes. The influence of the communist era in literature can be seen long after the fall of the communist ideology, but in this area we find that fundamental changes occur with regards to the canons which formed the foundation of the communist literature. Most programmatic ideas which were the communist canons of literature are no longer valid, they no longer reflect in the established literary work. Why should a canon which was formed on the basis of an ideology that no longer exists be taken into account?Breaking tradition and inventing new canons, and new rules governing literary practice are desired. All these new rules of writing are a form of escapism, perhaps well justified, maybe due to the enslavement that we complain of having experienced in the communist regime. They express the way in which we can take revenge on a system where we had no freedom of expression.
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When read from the perspective of self-confessions, the interviews given by Stefan Agopian, who is a writer difficult to fit within one literary trend, generation or affiliation, reflect some poetics-related components and creative techniques, the relationship to literary criticism, the issue of printing and reprinting, the aesthetic pattern, that of the writer’s survival under dictatorship, the relevance of ethics in relationship to aesthetics, the functionality of the generational criterion in literature, as well as possible interpretative grids met in his novels. This paper advances, therefore, ananalysis towards both writing in itself and the novelist’s equally human and scriptural profile.
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The use of pseudonyms and pseudotranslations has always been very common, particularly in popular, as opposed to elite or canonised literature, or when introducing new literary forms. When one wishes to conceal one’s identity, the simplest way to do so is to adopt a pen name. In all probability, no reader will look up the copyright in the imprint. If one likes, the copyright will belong to the nom de plume, thus preventing even the interested reader from finding out who lurks behind the alias. But it is still possible to go further. In addition to a foreign sounding allonym one may provide the reader with an ‘original’ publisher, a publication date, a translator’s name (which might, or might not, be that of the author), a translation date in the imprint, a dedication, a motto referring to the author’s assumed culture, and, most frequently, a foreword or afterword, which is full of hints designed to confirm the author’s assumed identity. In most cases the identification process can be very difficult and time-consuming, and the results are in fact often unverifiable without the writer’s avowal (as happened recently in the case of Lili Csokonai). Thus, any literature, at any time, may unknowingly include certain assumed translations, and the fictitious translations are treated as if they were genuine ones. Since pseudotranslations usually occur in popular and/ or experimental genres, they tend to appear on the periphery of the literary system, a fact that of course helps to preserve the mystery.
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The various feminist projects converge on the idea that language (constructed in its largest sense, as the varied system of discourses through which the world becomes constructed) is the primary cultural agency through which the masculine dominates and represses the feminine. To effect a change at all, it is necessary to undermine language from within, or to mark the ways in which language reveals its own undermining. In much feminist thought, language is understood as a wholly phallogocentric and monolithic domain, which has no place for the "woman" who becomes in her difference and otherness the figure for all that remains repressed and silenced. I am analyzing two works by women writers that foreground the issues of marginality and textuality. They belong to different literary traditions: Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons to the American modernist, and Agáta Gordon's Kecskerúzs to the contemporary Hungarian literary context.
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The essay is dedicated to the study of the typological M. Bulgakov – V. Nabokov parallel on the basis of the novels “The Master and Margarita” and “The Gift”, these being two versions of Russian metanovel of the 20th century. Creative thinking of the two writers demonstrates affinity in the artistic method of fantastic, or mystic realism.
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The issue of periodisation in the literary writings of Skerlić, concerning the history of the old and the new literature, and the relation of the romanticism and the modernism.
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This paper intends to present the innovation of stream of consciousness techniques by Sasha Sokolov in School for idiots within the theory of post-structuralism, William James’ concept of “consciousness” and the aspects of fictionality. The main stress is laid on how radically Sasha Sokolov renewed a special end of the 19th—first half of the 20th century novel tradition marked by Lewis Carroll, Dujardin, Proust, James Joyce, Faulkner, Vaginov. This article undertakes to demonstrate that Sasha Sokolov in 1970 took with his new concept of the deviant personality and intertextualism a step towards the postmodern, thereby considerably contributing to wind up normative restrictions then reigning soviet belles-lettres. In the narrator’s free schizophrenic act of speech, fighting for freedom against the power of persons in control, where the distance between presentation and representation is apparently abolished, strained relations between speaking and writing are created. There is no author’s intention which could direct the reception. Past, present and future, imagination and “reality” (within the scope of fiction), life and death are perceived to be reciprocally exchangeable. But despite this discursive way of “showing” the ill boy’s inner world, a considerable composing attitude prevails in the text, which is established by the exact mythological and quotational structure, made up mainly by motifs borrowed from Hermetism, by allusions to poems of Pushkin, Hölderlin or Rilke and short stories by Gogol' and Poe.
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In The Idiot the drama of the breakthrough can be depicted. A breakthrough towards drama, towards the Kierkegaardian absolute. That is why researchers term it as a dramatic novel. Those who try to break through live in drama. The two genre archetypes of Miškin’s figure are Don Quijote and Hamlet, the heroes of the Urroman and the modern drama, the religious prefigurations are Iurodivii and Christ. This is how Prince Miškin “of a perfect beauty” is born, who—standing between novel and drama—explodes genre boundaries starting an enterprise being neither characteristic of drama nor of the novel, namely wanting to create a community. Still, he remains alone. Since his being is about the wish to address, to create a community, his loneliness is not caused by a withdrawal springing from his character but rather a “recoiling” withdrawal. Prince Miškin does not die of loneliness, yet it makes him dumb. According to the genre particularities of the breakthrough, in our analysis we have chosen the climactic dramatic scenes instead of the linearly developing plot. Such scenes are the Chinese vase, the dialogue of Miškin and Rogožin and Miškin and Rogožin at Nastasia’s deathbed, which scenes all close with the epileptic attacks of the prince. The “plot” itself is moved forward by two trinities, which are also distinguished by signs: the knife, the icon, the picture and the book, which gain a symbolic content. These trinities are the Aglaia-Miškin-the Jepantšins and the Nastasia-Miškin-Rogožin one. In our essay we will show, that the novelistic element consists of the community born in the St. Petersburg of the developing middle-classes after Peter and the dramatic element is the second community, which is connected to the times before Peter and to Moscow.
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The paper, as its title—Hamlet and Don Quixote in the intertextual poetic world of Turgenev’s novel, Rudin—suggests, attempts at elucidating the Hamlet and Don Quixote problematics from a poetic point of view. This approach refuses to rely on the analysis of Turgenev’s interpretation of the figures of Hamlet and Don Quixote as presented in the writer’s essay Hamlet and Don Quixote. Instead, it proposes a close reading of the Rudin-Hamlet and Rudin-Don Quixote intertexts evolving in the Turgenevian novel under scrutiny, with special attention to the common aspects of their poetic formulation. These poetic analogues lead to a parallel intertextual portraying of Hamlet and Don Quixote as semantically attached to the figure of Rudin. The interpretation of the Hamlet-intertext places at center stage the Mouse-trap scene in its relation to the descriptions of the appearance of the Ghost at the beginning of the play and Hamlets’s revenge at its end, with the semantic implications of their motifs of word and deed. The analysis gets to the conclusion of a semantic kinship between Rudin-Hamlet and Rudin-Quixote formed in the two entwined intertexts with a dominance of the motif of the freedom of artistic creation. The theoretical dimension of the reading touches upon the problematics of mirroring, reflecting and—in a broader sense—representation.
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We often come across thematic and formal equivalences in small narrative works of Chekhov and Kosztolányi on women’s fate. Connecting situations and actions especially characterizes these works, as well as the presentation of equivalent episodes on the basis of a similar pattern of selection. The first part of the thesis mentions novellas by Chekhov and Kosztolányi in which examples of the fore-mentioned method of editing are present and where the starting and ending points of the work emphasize this practice. A similar way of thinking can be found in the background of those novellas of Chekhov and Kosztolányi, in which equivalence appears not as an analogy, but as an opposition. The second part of the thesis discusses two novellas, one by Chekhov, the other by Kosztolányi, of remarkable content and poetic similarity. Chekhov’s Душечка (1899) and Kosztolányi’s Erzsébet (1929) are both stories that can be modelled as lines of equivalency based on the same paradigm: the wholeness of the heroine, the unity of her individuality can only be realized through another person and the efforts made towards that goal are almost comical, yet their presentation is not altogether ironic in any of the cases—the author’s perspective moves rather towards understanding and immersing. Both Chekhov and Kosztolányi set a seemingly unambiguous human deficiency to be multi-dimensional through the situational similarity and contrast in the equivalent episodes.
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The author researches the esthetic reception of Herzen’s creative work in Germany including new discovered press, archives and correspondence of his contemporaries. Starting from the first publications in Germany of Herzen’s lyric-philosophical prose and translation of the novel Kto Vinovat? (1850, 1851) the progressive reader immediately sensed the affinity between Herzen and the artistic tradition of the German Enlightenment, the Weltanschauung of Goethe, the imagery of Heine on the one hand and the originality of the spiritual experience of the writer. Herzen’s works subsequently made an organic contribution to the German literary stream—„enriching” it with new esthetic potential. The article analyzes the dialogue in the German criticism, which conservative school did not accept the uncompromising nature of Herzen’s poetic world. It examines the role of literary mediators: translators, publishers, journalists, who sensed, more acutely than others, Herzen’s innovative significance for Germany and Europe (e.g., M. Meysenbug, V. Wolfson, U. Rodenberg), the influence of his esthetic on the creative activity of these and others literary figures. The Herzen’s poetics of intellect was extensively broadening the spiritual horizons of German literature and preparing the way for a new rise of „intellectual prose” in the 20th century.
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Both Blok and Wagner are artists of the “crisis”, and their aesthetics coincide in many points (Gesamtkunstwerk, Künstlermensch). In their arts neomythologism is realized in a myth concentrated in a symbol on the one hand, or in a music-drama swollen into a tetralogy on the other. The Wagnerian “Leitmotif’ plays an important composing role in the analyzed Blok-poems. Through a considerable part of the Blok-cycle the thematically also very musical “Harps and Violins” marches the duality of attraction of passion and suppression of passion, and in the end it is dissolved in the indelible memory of first love. Here, too, like in the drama “The Song of the Fate” the main role is played by the violins that symbolize passion. Considering Wagner-reminiscencies the essay emphasizes on the drama mentioned above and the poem “Retribution”. Both go back to the figure of Siegfried, who is a symbolically important hero to Blok. Retribution is the idea that connects Wagner and Ibsen — but Ibsen is also remarkable for the harp-motive (“The Master Builder”). The Wagnerian dragon from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra appears in Blok’s poem, too, and the idea common to all four authors: the motives of the child and of the new beginning is also apparent. The metaphysical music concept of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is the key to the theoretical writings of the two analyzed authors. According to Wagner divine music that expresses the essence of phenomena combined with drama is able to come to life. It is new in Blok’s music concept that the life-changing, irresistible force of nature is also called “music” by him.
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The essay examines the works from the point of view of repetitions. Its assumption is that the repetitions of themes, motifs and structures create a consistent system in Platonov’s prose. The comparative analysis reveals the logic of repetitions and also the formation and change of Platonov’s way of thinking, the essence of which is the gradual supersending of the utopian attitude and outlook on life. The basis of the comparison of the two works is the characters’ identical situations (being orphaned or unfathered), identical missions (the utopian desire to create public welfare and happiness), and the identical scenes where the plots develop (the wilderness). However the functional divergence of these elements is also demonstrated in the two works. The conclusion is that Dsan is one of the standard works of the writer’s so called post-utopian period.
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Being an important means of creating comic effect, phraseologisms are widely used in Ilf and Petrov’s dilogy, among others, aiming at characterizing its protagonist Ostap Bender’s speech. Phraseologisms in Ostap Bender’s speech can be classified into four groups: 1) phraseologisms with an amount of slight rudeness and irony, 2) phraseologisms connected to criminal vocabulary, 3) phraseologisms used as certain maxims and manifestations of witticism and raillery, 4) key phraseologisms. The largest among these is Group 3. The specific features of phraseologisms belonging to Group 3 can be demonstrated by two examples. In both cases, phraseologisms form a chain whose links are interrelated in a certain way, which creates an interesting effect. The recurrence of the phraseologisms сермяжна ' правда in various contexts and the deposition of synonyms on component сермяжная leads not only to a parodic reinterpretation of the phraseologism itself but also to an ironic revaluation of Ostap Bender’s personality who prononunces this phraseologism for the first time. The phraseologism валяться на дороге, being a neologism created by Ostap Bender (very much characteristic of his figure), is subject to emphatic dephraseologization in his speech. However, the deliberate revelation of its first meaning enhances and underlines its figurative meaning, in which the somewhat cynic confidence in one’s own exclusivity, so characteristic of the protagonist, is reflected. The uses of chains of phraseologisms in the analyzed cases are highly characteristic of Ostap Bender’s way of speaking.
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In the Bible, light has always been a symbol of holiness, goodness, knowledge, wisdom, grace, hope, and God’s revelation. By contrast, darkness has been associated with evil, sin, and despair. J. R. R. Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic, and claimed in a letter that The Lord of the Rings was “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work.” He explained that the Christianity to be found in it was “absorbed into the story and the symbolism.” Not much scholarly attention has been paid to light as a biblical symbol in Tolkien’s mythology. Accordingly, I argue that the light in Tolkien’s works is presented as biblical light, and serves the story in much the same way as light serves to communicate and symbolize the revelation of God in the Bible. Three focal points are addressed: first, the creation of light and the distinction of the holy light of the Two Trees from the natural light of the sun and moon; second, the ways that light, darkness, and fire are used as symbols, and their effects on various characters; and third, the fantasy characters who are associated with the holy light. The comparisons of Tolkien with the biblical presentation of light will show that Tolkien’s Christian faith and worldview permeates Middle-earth.
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This study aims at analyzing Hemingway’s selected novels and short stories in order to identify possible shared masochistic symptoms. The overriding questions concerning this paper will center on the multiple ways in which Hemingway’s sexual fluidity contributes to formation of masochistic behavior in his writings and also the degree to which masochistic properties contributed to the aesthetic and literary values of his fiction. This paper concentrates on the specific elements of masochism which pertain to the texts most, including symbiosis/separation dichotomy (closely related to the theme of humiliation), fetishism, pain, violence and death. The author wishes to unveil the oft-hidden submissive and feminine characteristics of the masculine characters which are not few in Hemingway’s writings.
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To the modern reader, the Nineteenth Century England has always been the reminiscent of unrelenting ideals regarding social codes of conduct. Although such ideals have been widely criticized, they were passed off as unquestionably natural and necessary to be carried out during the Victorian era. Yet Oscar Wilde, the renowned dramatist of the time, was one of the authors who dared to put to challenge the accepted prescribed gender roles exposing their constructed essence using his insurmountable wit. The current article aims at analysing the apparently transgressive gender roles in Oscar Wilde’s play; An Ideal Husband, with the aid of Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, a theory which disavows the concept of an inherent gender identity in favour of the idea that gendered behaviours are the consequence of performing certain discursively assigned acts.
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This article presents an account of lyrical descriptions of the motif of feminine beauty in Spanish and Croatian oral tradition, paying special attention to Petrarchist poems with the carpe diem motif. Feminine beauty, taken literally and symbolically as natural beauty that permeates our ecological niche, is treated here as having ecological power to explain the unexplainable (unsayable) in Nature and in Humankind. Thanks to its cultural and artistic manifestations, it stands in opposition to a purely scientific approach to Nature, taken as a Machine. The paper presents a comparison of symbols of beauty in oral and written Croatian and Spanish literature, paying special attention to the thematic level as well as the discursive and metadiscursive level. The thematic and discursive aspect of poetry is based on the theory of the “formulaic nature” of the literary phenomenon, proposed by Paul Zumthor. Some poems in both the oral and the written tradition adopt contemporary esthetic ideals, laying emphasis on the ideal of artificial (made-up) beauty. The presence of the motif of artificial beauty may be explained by the fact that oral and written literature underwent fruitful encounters and are inextricably intertwined. Examples from Croatian and Hispanic oral tradition are provided; specifically from the coastal region around Dubrovnik (Luka on the island of Šipan) and from the Castilian, Sephardic tradition of the ballad “La bella en misa”. The argumentation is accompanied by a general and more specific interpretation of Petrarchist poetry compared for the first time in the context of the two oral poetry traditions. Many examples from the Hispanic tradition as reflected in the ballad “La bella en misa” find its counterpart in a single example of poetic discourse of the famous epic song and ballad singer, Ms. Kate Murat from the Dubrovnik region. Similar dual structures in both the traditional and artistic natural description of feminine beauty are recognized, according to Paul Zumthor’s terminology. We highlight the formulaic nature of the description of feminine beauty in Petrarchist and in traditional poetry, which gave it a mythical status of representativeness, disregarding for the moment the individuality of each individual poet as well as the individual impact of the epic and ballad singer. It is obvious why the motif of feminine beauty has attracted the attention of “everyday life philosophers”, i.e. of traditional singers, who, in these cases, come from urban, bourgeois surroundings. The fragility of the world we live in, which is echoed in floral and mineral or climatic metaphors in traditional and in Petrarchist poetry, may have its origin in the interdependence of the Humankind and landscape and traditional poems, and warrants laying stress on the (multicultural) esthetic qualities of the analyzed poetic texts.
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