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2016 became anniversary for the “Problems of Literary Criticism” – the scientific collection is 50. It is half-century of the interesting and dramatic Ukrainian Philological science, which was realized in the field of a radical break of the past social structure, the bifurcation point of which was the year 1991. Accordingly, the time of the publication of scientific collection split exactly in half: 25 Soviet years and 25 years of independent Ukraine.
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Classified catalogue of articles” that from 1966 to 2015 were published in the scientific journal “Problems of Literary Criticism” (up to 1991 “Questions of Russian Literature”).
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It is a matter of common knowledge that European scholarship of the Early Modern period was grounded in compilations. Mikhail Lomonosov’s studies in rhetoric is an example of such practice. It is established that he relied on such sources as De eloquentia sacra et humana (1617) by Nicolas Caussin, (Novus) candidatus Rhetoricae (1659) by François Pomey, and Ausführliche Redekunst (1736) by Johann Christoph Gottsched. This article by Andrei Kostin provides a detailed analysis of the second version of Lomonosov’s Kratkoe rukovodstvo kkrasnorechiiu (1748) vis-à-vis two popular manuals on rhetoric: Palaestra oratoria (1659) by Jacob Masen, and Commentariorum rhetoricorum libri VI (1606) by Gerhard Johann Vossius.
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This article is an overview of the history of Russian illustrated journals for children. It covers the period from the 1860s to the beginning of 20th century, and addresses the problem of how the journal Rodnik (Spring) competed with Tropinka (Path). These journals strived to attract the most famous writers, poets, andgraphic artists, yet did not survive competition with inexpensive children’s books: Tropinka came to an end in 1912, while Rodnik ceased production four years later.
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This is the first publication of a previously unknown version of Osip Mandel’shtam’s poem “Ia vernulsia v moi gorod, znakomyi do slez...” (1930, 1932), which survived in the archive of the famous Russian scholar Arkady Dolinin (1883–1968) (currently located in the Manuscript Division of the National Library of Russia). It has come to us in the spisok (copy) made by an unknown person, who almost certainly met Mandel’shtam in the period between late December 1930 and early January 1931. Although the name of the copyist cannot be established, the text as such is remarkable in the way it differs from the final version.
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В. Н. Топоров. Знак и текст в пространствеи времени. Публикация М. Д. Дынина и Т. В. Цивьян
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Exile existential accents are not considered to be a completely focused object. There are factors in history of cultures which are easier for understanding, proceeding from the current reality: the presence of certain culture in other cultural structure when the creative person faces an indispensability of self-identification (as motivated in the philosophical platform of Julia Kristeva, i. e. in the essay “Strangers to Ourselves” (1988). In the culture study aspect anyone of conventionally homogeneous cultures (or using the expression by Sorokin – “socio-cultural bodies”) in the context of its development inevitably faces, or will face in future, with a situation where the homogeneity ceases to be obvious.In particular, the experience of integral culture collapse of the Russian Empire, at first glance, gives very significant examples related to the so-called allotropy factor (the literary lexicon virtually lacks the concept, although it is appropriate to use this ancient scientific term containing commonly known Greek roots αλλος – other, τρόπος – feature). We mean the various forms which presented the existence of representatives of individual national cultures of Russia after the October Revolution generating the emergence of various known today diasporas – such as the Armenian, Russian, Ukrainian and others. In this synchronic time span the formation of the various “post-imperial” Diasporas (the first wave of emigration) is of great interest. Their main point becomes a creation of the corresponding ideological clamp. In this respect it is interesting to trace typological samples on the most revealing examples.The given article examines the work of two poets-emigrés: Boris Poplavsky (Russian diaspora) and Eugeniy Malaniuk (Ukrainian diaspora). It is a question of typologically polar transformations of biographical experience in the Diaspora ideology outlook.
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This article is devoted to a classic of the 16th century North Russian hagiography — The Life of Alexander Oshevensky, which is preserved as a large number of various copies and editions. The 19th-century materials recently found in the Russian archives enabled researchers to raise a question of the late period in the literary history of this Life. Three editions of this piece of writing created in the 1820's and 1830's by Tikhvin Monastery's Archimandrite Hilarion (Kirillov), Alexander Svirsky Monastery's Archimandrite Barsanuphius (Morev) and Archbishop of Olonets Ignatius (Semyonov) are in the focus of this paper. The new editions were written with the intention to be published to glorify of St. Alexander across Russia, though respective petitions to the Most Holy Synod were not approved. This article detects sources of these editions and shows the pattern of processing of the initial texts. As the text analysis has shown, the 19th-century editions primarily developed the topoi of book learning and relationships between St. Alexander and his family. The Life used to be revised stylistically and compositionally, as well as supplemented with historical information. The published material is of interest for the research in poetics and topics of the Lieves of the Saints and their perception by the church writers of the 19th century.
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Prayer in Alexander Pushkin's lyric poetry appears in its natural ecclesiological context. In his prayerful poems devoted to a woman the motif of turning Love into Divinity in the light of Christian understanding of Beauty plays the most important role. Pushkin's personal prayers are very close to the patristic idea. In his poem Akathist to Ekaterina Nikolaevna Karamzina Pushkin embodied the prayer-praising; in his poem I loved you — and love it may yet be Deep in my soul... he embodied the prayer-blessing; in his sonnet Madonna the reader can find benediction and in the poem To the Beauty (1832) one can feel the state of religious reverence. The heroine of these poems is considered to be a divine creature, a sacral image. In Pushkin's lyric poetry these profound evangelical ideas are renewed. The hymnologic genre and Christian divine service in his poems become obvious. The artistic embodiment of a prayer becomes possible with the help of an iconic word and image. A prayerful word in Pushkin's poems contributes to idealization of the form that evolves from emotional and sensual state to spiritual and ascetical world-view, from the artistic and figurative word to the iconic clarity.
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The article deals with the Christian code of Alexander Pushkin’s Journey to Arzrum, which is a style forming factor for the whole story, featuring a large thematic diversity. The genre of this book is similar to Old Russian pilgrimage stories. It includes an ethnographic sketch, a battle, Oriental and situational impressions of moving in space. All these are balanced with the biblical names and allusions, as well as the existential experience of the sacred. According to Pushkin, the Gospel is the foundation for real politics and an effective means of annexation of the Caucasus to the Russian Empire. Journey to Arzrum had an impact on the image of the war created by Leo Tolstoy in his War and Peace, as well as on the creation of such pilgrimage stories of the 20th century as A Journey to Armenia by Osip Mandelshtam and A Journey to Mount Athos by Boris Zaytsev.
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The article considers the circumstances of the creation of a monument to the writer's mother Maria Fyodorovna Dostoevskaya. Mikhail Andreevich, father of the brothers Dostoevsky, asked Mikhail and Fyodor to compose the text for the monument. In March and April of 1837 the brothers worked out the idea and conception of the monument, wrote the text of the first and fourth epigraphs, chose evangelic verses and an epitaph of N.M. Karamzin. This was their first collective act of creative work embodied in stone. The monument is not only a symbol of love and sorrow for their mother’s death but also hope for her salvation and future resurrection. The brothers’ words and those chosen from the Gospel as well as the Karamzin’s ones have one more meaning. These convey a sense of beingness and an Easter idea of individual creative work. It is necessary to renew the tomb of Maria Fyodorovna Dostoevskaya and bring the monument back to Lazarevskoye cemetery in Moscow.
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Literary heritage of Mikhail Mikhailovich Dostoevsky(1820-1864) is not very abundant and appeals to experts only. His personality is of much more importance for national and world culture. He was a friend and soul mate of his genius brother (almost coeval). Their relations were an essential element of the biography and spiritual identity of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Mikhail was the first and for many years the only interlocutor of F.M. Dostoevsky. His role as an addressee in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s letters cannot be underestimated either. Fyodor Dostoevsky regarded his brother not only as a friend but as a business partner too. Their most successful joint enterprise was publishing of the magazine “Time” (“Vremya”) (1861–1863), whose initiator and owner became Mikhail Dostoevsky. After Мikhail’s death Fyodor took charge of his family that had both direct and indirect impact on his own lifestyle. The year 2014 was the 150th anniversary of Mikhail Dostoevsky’s death. In this regard, the State Literature Museum organized an exposition titled “I loved my brother infinitely...” in the F.M. Dostoevsky Museum-Apartment. It was the first exposition dedicated to the personality of Mikhail Dostoevsky and his literary heritage. A lot of exhibit items had never been exposed before.
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In the 1850s the elder brother of Fyodor М. Dostoevsky, Mikhail Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1820 1864), began his own business founding a tobacco factory and a shop in Saint Petersburg. The businessman M.M. Dostoevsky introduced an innovative bonus system for bulk purchasers in the form of the so called “surprises”. Russian periodicals and newspapers mentioned this innovation. This article is a collection of newspaper materials (comments, advertisements and others) dedicated to the tobacco products of M.M. Dostoevsky’s factory. Some of them were published for the first time in the Bulletin of museum life of the State Literature Museum «Zveno 2008» (Shipova Т. N. Obliterate facts. Мoscow, 2009). The present enriched edition contains newspaper articles discovered by Shipova T.N. in the years that followed.
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While studying the reception of Dostoevsky’s activity in his lifetime critical reviews O. Zakharova raised a question of attribution of the obituaries and death notices of Mikhail Dostoevsky published in Russian newspapers in July 1864. A number of traits such as personal drama of the character, inner modesty and dignity of the style made the obituary an extraordinary phenomenon of this genre in Russian periodicals of the 1860s. The article asserts that some materials and the obituary notice published in the “Illustrated Newspaper” belonged to Fyodor Dostoevsky. It is evidenced by the facts of Mikhail Dostoevsky’s disease and death, by unknown or little-known details of his life, death, editorial activity, by the role of Fyodor Dostoevsky in organizing the funeral, and by semantic and stylistic similarities in the narration of his brother’s last days in the obituaries published in the “Illustrated Newspaper” (July 16, 1864) and “Epoch” (August 20, 1864), in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s letters to his brother Andrei Dostoevsky (July 29, 1864) and to his friend A.E. Vrangel (March 31- April 14, 1865). The fact that the editor of the “Illustrated Newspaper” V.R. Zotov took part in the funeral ceremony for Mikhail Dostoevsky made the publication of the obituary possible. The funeral was conducted on Monday and the newspaper used to be released on Thursdays. Thus, the text could be handed over during the funeral service and Fyodor Dostoevsky could bring the obituary to the editorial office on Tuesday or Wednesday.
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The article is dedicated to one of the major problems existing in textual studies of epistolary heritage of Fyodor Dostoevsky and his addressees - the problem of attribution of anonymous or unknown persons F.M. Dostoevsky used to correspond with. This issue remains essential nowadays despite the fact that F.M. Dostoevsky’s personality and activity are well studied. In the article, the author poses the problems any researcher has to face while trying to attribute the letters. However, by the example of certain letters it is shown that in spite of such difficulties it turns out to be possible sometimes to reveal anonymous, unknown addressees of the writer.
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Dostoevskaya became a gatherer and a keeper of the writer’s private archive and of other papers referred to his name. She took care of this collection for their descendants’ good and kept enlarging it till the day she died. Along with this, the Dostoevsky archive that has come down to us contains manuscripts revised by his widow. This refers to Dostoevsky’s letters to her. The article analyses certain corrections made by Anna Dostoevskaya in the letters of Fyodor Dostoevsky addressed to her. The article aims at specifying the initial text of Dostoevsky’s letters written to his wife in 1873, by means of reading the crossed out words and lines in the text, and defining the prospects of future textual studies of the manuscripts. Transcribing process was realized by using traditional (visual) methods of text reading and analysis. The purpose of the article is to explore the reasons that had encouraged the writer’s widow to serve as an editor and a censor of Dostoevsky’s letters. The archive materials were used when preparing the article, among others the papers unknown to the academic community (copies of the letters of Dostoevsky to his wife and her remarks to those letters).
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This article raises the question of the Old Russian sources of Alexander Pushkin’s novel The Captain’s Daughter and presents an attempt to identify the traditions of Ermolay-Erazmus’s The Tale of Peter and Fevronia in it. The main purpose of the research was to identify the parallelism between Pushkin’s novel and The Tale at the imaginative, narrative and thematic levels. Therefore, it was based on application of the comparative method. The main characters of both the books are compared in succession: Prince Peter and Peter Grinyov first, and then Fevronia and Masha Mironova. The results of the analysis lead to the conclusion that the male images reflect the spiritual evolution from being self-willed to obtaining Christian humility, and the key moment of the characters’ spiritual evolution is the meeting with wise virgins, etc. As far as the female images are concerned, the key parallel between them is the praise of their wisdom at the end of both stories. Thus, the material of the research enables us to speak about the traditions of The Tale of Peter and Fevronia being preserved in Pushkin’s last novel.
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Pushkin's overcoming of death is represented by two aspects of his work: stoical Christian acceptance of death and identification of immortality of a soul with creative heritage. A special role in understanding of this issue is given to the Kamennoostrovsky cycle of poems. Choosing the semantic counter-poles of the cycle, Pushkin opposes absolute spiritual death (Italian Imitation) against redemptional death which introduces people to Eternal life (Temporal power). Poet’s final contemplation of his past ideals in the poem From Pindemonti shows the alteration of the ideological emphasis in his artistic consciousness: An antique vector is transformed into pure aesthetics, whereas his fear of death is relieved by Christian values. These ideas reach their apotheosis in the poem Exegi Monumentum (I have erected a monument to myself), which accomplishes Pushkin’s spiritual quest of his final years, though it is not a part of his Kamennoostrovsky cycle of poems. It has been pointed out that Pushkin's bequest/manifesto themes and motifs first appeared in his Lyceum works and can be traced throughout all his creative periods.
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The article studies the function of Russian folk speech and its evangelical implication in Nikolai Gogol's poetics. Folk proverbs and parables is the key source of national identity in Gogol’s aesthetics, which should inspire all Russian poets. The paper asserts that the proverbial method of generalization is one of the most significant principles of typification in Gogol's novel Dead Souls. The author expresses the essence of this or that phenomenon, a situation or a human type using imaginative pictures and traits of characters. The more generalized form they take, the more they resemble the traditional folk and poetic formulas. The article also reveals the hidden message of a Russian proverb Russians are good at thinking in hindsight (“Russkiy chelovek zadnim umom krepok”). This characteristic of the Russian mind is the one with which Gogol connects the great destiny of Russia. At the end of his first volume the author resorts to the allegorical form of a parable that plays a key role in the perception of the novel. Transforming into the generalized symbol, its characters accumulate the most significant generic features and qualities of Dead Souls’ characters. The grotesque images of Kifa Mokiyevich and Mokiy Kifovich help to look at the characters of the novel from every possible side, not from one side only that shows them as small-minded and worthles people. Gogol’s characters do not possess definitely disgusting and ugly qualities, which should be eliminated for the sake of people's improvement. Sobakevich's powerful physique and pragmatism, Plushkin's thrift, Manilov's meditativeness and cordiality, as well as Nozdryov's valor and energy are not bad qualities at all and do not deserve condemnation. However, all of them as Gogol used to say are carried to extremes and take perverse and exaggerated forms.
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The article examines literary and aesthetic views of a wellknown theologian and church historian Alexander Ivantsov-Platonov. The study traces crucial milestones of his scientific and creative biography which can not be always found in reference books. His work About positive and negative attitude towards life in Russian literature published in a Slavophil periodical Russkaya Beseda is the main subject of this study. The ideas stated in this article develop Slavophiles’ aesthetic programme. On the one hand, Ivantsov-Platonovs's conception of positive and negative literary directions repeats some of Konstantin Aksakovs' ideas. On the other hand, however, the church publicist develops the Slavophiles’ theory with new concepts of Russian literature. This article studies the problem of correlation between Christian values and secular art as it was seen by Ivantsov-Platonov. It also analyzes his attitude to Dostoevsky's creative works. All Ivantsov-Platonov's contemporaries describe him as a soft man, tolerant to opposite views and opinions, and always ready to help “his neighbours”. The author of the article comes to a conclusion that Ivantsov-Platonov predicted the way Russian literature would develop. The works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky proved that he was right in his vision.
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