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In the article the literary criticism model of V.V. Rozanov is examined. The forming stages models are distinguished related to the problems of “understanding” and “letter”. An accent is put on the intersubjectivity of literary criticism and problems of reception.
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Czarist tycoons, revolutionary artists, and Soviet squatters all feature in Russian scholar Dmitry Oparin’s new book.
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V. Nabokov in his novel Lolita incarnates his own and quite original concept of love. But its philosophical sources should be sought in the Russian concept of Eros of the beginning of the 20th century, as it was expressed in the works of V. Solovyov, V. Rozanov, N. Berdiayev, P. Florensky, S. Troitsky, A. Zhurakovsky and others.
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The article, a part of a book under preparation, gives a detailed analysis of the motifs in the „povest´” Sobachie serdtse (1925) that could be read on different levels: satyrical, fantastic, allegorical or philososphical. The ambivalent character of the professor, his duality of divine and demonic elements implies the author’s main message: the revolution is a bloody chirurgical operation, an unnatural interference into the history, where Man, imaging himself to be in charge of good end evil, creates on a utopian „scientific” dream the new society that is, in reality, totalitarian.
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Specifying motifs occurring in the texture of the entire oeuvre of Nabokov the paper aims at re-evaluating Nabokov’s early poetry via the analysis of the poem Lilith. By determining the lyrical persona Pushkin identified in this case with Nabokov, one may perceive the poem as the description of the journey in the other world reminiscent of Dante’s way through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise and accomplished by Pushkin, whose fragmentary Rusalka can be looked upon as the subtext of Nabokov’s poem. Nabokov several times claims his spiritual kinship with the most famous Russian poet, regarding him as his own ancestor and views his poetical heritage as the genuine embodiment of pure poetry. Considering the background to the poem—originally the pornographically biased theme was suggested by the émigré poet Khodasevich—the reader is undoubtedly presented the problem of amor ascendens and amor descendens represented in the description of the scene of the encounter with the Rusalka, Lilith, whose depiction is penetrated with profound eroticism. Nevertheless, the author’s intention rather appears to be directed towards conveying the spiritual concept of sexuality, especially if we take into account Nabokov’s never-ending polemic with Freud’ s theory of human civilization. The figure of the Rusalka traditionally represented in Russian folk legends and originating in the beliefs about mermaids and water nymphs is closely related to other Nabokov heroines, most typically to Lolita.
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The critical reception of the novel “Lolita” today. Nabokov’s novels and contemporary Russian prose trends: symbolism, avant-garde. Nabokov and western literature. Love, passion, cult of the female in Russian art in the early 20th century. The novel’s child heroine. The novel’s problems of form: the role of the narrator and the writer in the text of the novel. The English and Russian versions of the novel.
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The motif of metanoia as found in Vjacheslav Ivanov’s book Po Zvezdam, and concept underlying it are discussed in the article. I have attempted to emphasize a peculiarity of the motif structure of Ivanov’s collection of essays, namely the relative “independence” of motifs from the ideas they express. This peculiarity is well exemplified by the motif of metanoia. Derived from Nietzsche, assimilated, and signified by the Gospel term, the concept constituting the core of the motif is transformed gradually by Ivanov into its opposite. The article is a part of the dissertation currently being prepared.
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The article is devoted to the names of characters in Vladimir Nabokov’s last Russian language novel The Gift. It focuses not only on technical level of the name-build and function, but also on the relation and interference of in the larger context of the whole novel. The name of the main hero, Fëdor Konstantinovic Godunov-Cerdyncev, for example, is described on multiple levels: on etymological (i.e. the Greek origin of Fëdor’s name meaning ‘God’s gift’), on phonetical level there is an interference with names like Konceev and Cernyševskij. The article attempts to analyse and interpret the name Cernyševskij, referring to five different heroes, followed by an overview of the names (and nicknames) of Nikolaj Gavrilovic Cernyševskij. Some occasional names (as for example Stockschmeiser and Egda Stoboy) are also an opportunity to demonstrate not only the highly sophisticated technical level, but also the poetical one of Nabokov’s prose when constructing a name. Phonetical interference of different names, transformation (or even transliteration) are viewed in the large context of the novel as a whole. The article demonstrates that names are multilevel, sophisticated elements of Nabokov’s prose technique, bearing a methonimical character of pars pro toto.
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The purpose of the article is to analyse the unusual, colourful world of Leskov’s novel taking the presence and influence of the various subcultural circles in 19th century Russia into consideration. In comparison with the main stream of the Russian literature, the work of Leskov shows many interesting non-typical elements. One of these is his deep interest in the Apocrypha and legends inherited from the Russian medieval culture. The other is his enthusiasm about Russian icon painting, and its weaving into the plots of his novels, among these into the Zapeěatlěnnyj angel. What is followed in this paper is the penetration of certain motifs into the inner structure of the novel: concrete and symbolic meaning of the icon of Archangel Mikhael. The author of this paper tries to find answers to such questions as Leskov’s position concerning the schismatic groups (raskolniki) and the official Russian Church: why had to convert the morally and culturally higher raskolniki to the majority religion (to the bolshinstvo)? Why does a differentiated society seem to be dangerous for Russian thought?
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In the works of Nabokov there is a combination of scryptography of symbols that the writer uses in an ambivalent way—playing with them (in the high, psychologic sense of the play also as ritual) and exploiting them as polygenetic symbols with different referent sources (Jewish Bible, Egypt, New Testament, antiquity, Dante, Cabala, alchemy, freemasonry). The article shows in a parallel investigation of the Russian and the English texts of the short story how the fantastique way from a museum in France to the native town of the hero, to Russia, due to the broad variety of intertextual allusions, motives and invariants of Nabokov’s oeuvre can be understood as a ritual transition through the “underworld” to an “other world”.
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The author of this paper analyzes the inner world of certain Puškin’s poems (motifs, topoi, characters) taking Byron’s influence and the poet’s reflections on history into consideration. Puškin inherited the structure of genre, the literary character of rebellious hero and the other “obligatory” elements of romantic epical poem (exotic surroundings, nocturnal scenes, extreme emotions etc.) from Byron. A closer influence of the English pattern can be observed only in the early poems of Puškin (The Prisoner of the Caucasus, The Fountain at Bakhchisarai). But the tricks, motifs and necessary “accessories” he employs become the vehicles of increasingly meaningful thoughts which allow the genre to rise to such a level that it could keep its canonised place in the Russian literature even after the vanishing of romanticism. From the mid-1820s the historic events of the period, the repression of the Dekabrist uprising and also the new direction in Puškin’s interest are reflected in his works. Among them the epical poem Poltava is considered by the experts the example of overcoming Byron’s previous influence. What is followed in this paper is the treatment of the different tragic connections between power and individual by Puškin.
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The article is devoted to the connection of names with images of these heroes in the novel «Fathers and sons». The idea of the article is that the name of the hero is a motive of the same image and the plot of the novel only comments on the meaning of this name. In the process of analysis the second plane of Turgenev’s well-known images is being opened. The connection of one word and the whole text is shown in this novel.
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The hook containing monk Parfenyj’s pilgrimages was one of Dostojevskyj’s favorites and it had also a strong influence on him especially on his style. The spirituality and religiosity of the pilgrim Makar Dolgorukyj in the novel Podrostok is just as uncommon and unusual as that of Parfenyj’s in the eyes of his contemporaries. The characters understand Makar as a representation of the great gulf that exists between the common people and their religion. In our paper we show that the mother, Sophia Andrejevna represents the other side of the same idea manifesting itself in close attachment to the Church and to its rites. In our opinion Makar and Sophia on the hasis of their similarity are living icons formed from love. We also point out that Versilov’s unexpected destruction of the icons after Makar’s death symbolizes an earlier period in his life when he destroyed Makar and Sophia’s marriage disregarding it as a sacrament. The tragical schism of the old believers has its impact in the novel, shown as a gap that cannot he filled as seen in Makar’s fate and his loss of belief.
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To the autobiographical character of Remizov’s prose several works were consacred in the literary history. However, they do not specify the “subjectivism” of the text exactly. In the article, we attempted to reveal it introducing the term “autobiographic hero”. Objectification of the character of the autobiographic hero takes place in the short story of Remizov as a spirit (дух) in pagan’s sense connected to the low culture, or as an internal voice (внутренний голос) of the text which is shaped in quasi-personal narration. In Remizov’s meta-narration, the presence of the author practically is not perceptible. Due to it, some principles of Remizov’s poetics could be approached to the principles set forth in R. Barthes work “La mort l ’auteur”.
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The study discusses expressionism not only as a school of art but as a stylistic reflection of a subjective attitude towards life and a world concept also; as a reflection of the atmosphere of the age. According to Russian literary studies of 90s the expressionist work of art is examined by a new, a philosophical aspect in view: this way expressionism is related to existentialism and personalism. The artistic world concept—which is a reflection of the tragical atmosphere of the beginning of the 2 0 th century—is connected with the collapse of humanist scale of values, with moral and existential doubts of the individual. In the arts this crisis appears as a collapse of aesthetic norms. V. Majakovskij’s drama “V. Majakovskij. Tragedy” is examined on the one hand as a tipical expressionist work of art, and on the other hand as a part of contemporary Russian art (related to futurism in literature and neoprimitivism in painting). The characteristic features of expressionist drama are discussed by a philosophical aspect in view. In the centre of interest is the research of particular consciousness of the lyric entity/ of the hero of the tragedy
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This article is part of a doctoral thesis on the reception of Oriental art in early 20th century Russian poetry and fine arts. Analysing the poem that was originally published in the collection “Pillar of Fire” (1921), and comparing it to the poet’s views on fine arts in general the author traces oriental influences on Gumilev’s mature poetry. In her view “Persian Miniature” represents an. aesthetic framework that, through the medium of painting, places a work of art both as a representation and as a tangible physical reality in front of us. This double presence gives full justice to the artist’s life experience turned immortal in art, serving a profane and a sacred function at the same time. The abstraction of the artist’s passions in the painting awakens similarly gentle passions in the observer who also enters into a sensual relationship with the picture . This latter characteristic of the poem makes it into an example of the Acmeist cult of objects.
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The article is intended to analyse the temporal and spatial structure unfolding in the book “My Sister — Life”. The temporal structure of the book is built on the succession of the four seasons. The seasons — and at times the months as well — have well defined meanings in Pasternak’s poetic system. The temporal structure of the book follows the cyclical order of the calendar year, and the events of a “love story” represent a linear progress in time. Furthermore, in the artistic composition of the book another type of chronology can be revealed, which can be described with the Bergsonian category of internal time, durée. What is crucial and vital for the lyrical hero is the internal correspondence of experiences and phenomena, which interrupts the linear progress of the narrative, as opposed to the external, rational and linear order of things. The spatial structure of the book can be analysed with the help of the voyage motif. Parallel with travelling in the external world a voyage takes place in the internal realm of the lyrical hero’s creative memory. The category of time and space are inseparable, interwoven in the course of the voyage and the unfolding of memories. In other words, events that can originally be characterised in temporal terms occur and evolve in the external space, which can be regarded as a poetical reinterpretation of an archaic, mythological space-time model.
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Julio Jurenito, the first and the best novel of famous master of surviving Ilia Ehrenburg is a desperate cry, an extract of total despare after the First World War. Its central figure, the Mephisto-like Master, the spirit of negation denies all ideals and achievements of humanity and mankind: faith, hope and love, science, law and arts, logically proving their falsity. The novel’s overtly scatchy and journalistic form with loosly connected chapters destroy the traditional structure of the novel which seems to be rather a textbook of the destruction, having some parallels among the post-Nietzschean European intellectuals. The novel is also a profane Gospel, a history of life and death of the Master who is at the same time the Great Provocator - Julio Jurenito’s simultaneously divine and satanic (Jesus-like and AntiChrist- like) character is a very close predecessor of Bulgakov’s Woland. Jurenito refuses to acknowledge the linear time of Christianity and that of the historical evolution, and only the cyclical time, the eternal biological recurrence is a certainty in his philosophy: the eternal repetition of the seasons is the same as the threefold repetition of peace, war and revolution in history that does not depende of the will of the mankind. Ehrenburg endows Jurenito with constuctivist ideas in order to prove in his avant-garde roman de voyage that “our world is the worst among the existing worlds”. He uses also the elements of different genres: satirical, philosophical, encyclopaedic, evangelical, anecdotic and those of picaresque novel. Only these many layers of cultural tradition used in his novel reverse the general negation in Julio Jurenito: its form and its extensive base of cultural reminiscences deny the denying.
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In Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita” some of the characters are able to pass from the profane world i.e. their everyday Moscow reality into the sacred (supernatural) one and vice-versa. Of course only a few ‘chosen’ characters are able to step into the other world, only those who somehow have served it, or deserve it. Passage is only possible in special times and on special places which share the features of the archetypal image of the centre of the world. Several objects, parts of the human abode, such as mirrors, fireplaces, windows gain importance as being kinds of a ‘threshold’ passing through which characters can get into the sacred world. They represent the boundary between the two worlds, but at the same time they serve as a passageway between them. Bulgakov chooses these thresholds making use of popular belief and literary tradition, thus making more expressive the fictive world of the novel. The article is a survey of the mirrors or mirroring surfaces (as water for example), fireplaces, windows and French windows stepping or getting through which does not only mean a simple changing of place but also marks the getting into a completely different world, ruled by other rules than those valid in the world of the atheistic Muscovites of the novel.
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Sasha Sokolov’s novel Между собакой и волком (Between Dog and Wolf)sustains a chain of stories and micro-stories built on interfering genre-aware language games, on all levels, from prosody to semantics. Thus a reader is seriously challenged by processuality and overt relativeness of the text meanings. She meets deep genre-mixing, multidimensional characters, settings and plot, ontologic and epistemic instability, alternating repetitions, shifting narrative instances and intertextual references. Sokolov avoids stable limits between fictional components of the world he has created. Instead of realistic approach, he submits a disturbing but fascinating out of focus worldview, as the title of the novel early suggests.
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