We kindly inform you that, as long as the subject affiliation of our 300.000+ articles is in progress, you might get unsufficient or no results on your third level or second level search. In this case, please broaden your search criteria.
The article is the analysis the first among the author’s books of lyrics in Russian poetry. The deduction about the appropriateness and deep conformity to natural laws of the Russian transition to syllabotonic versification (against Gasparov’s competent opinion) is based on the prosodic analysis of Trediakovsky’s bilingual (Russian & French) syllabic texts.
More...
An article presents a subject of ball in literature. There is undertaken an effort to analyze two balls: Walpurgis Night from Faustus by Johan Wolfgang Goethe and Grand Devil’s Ball from The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. Author of the article shortly discusses genesis of the two balls, the sources of inspiration and symbolic significance. There is also stressed that both writers, Bulgakov and Goethe, by their work, wanted to settle accounts with cruelty: Goethe with cruelty of Middle Ages, Bulgakov with cruelty of Russia, from past time to Stalin’s Soviet Russia. Moreover, to illustrate the subject, author quoted unique fragments of Faustus, which were not included in the final version of the book.
More...
This article is devoted to the issue of female-writer status in Russian female prose of the beginning of the XX century. The following works are the subject of this analysis: Anna’s Notes (Записки Анны, 1910) of Nadezhda Sanzhar’, The Wrath of Dionysus (Гнев Диониса, 1910) of Evdokiia Nagrodskaia and Unlit Lamps (Лампады незажженные, 1914) of Anna Mar. None of these female authors managed to create a literary female hero, completely devoted to art. Female heroes of their prose, once deprived of the possibility of creative expression, achieving at last the right to perform the craft of art, soon, out of their own free will, they quite unexpectedly abandon their activity. The reason for this effect, called by the article’s author the process “from muteness to silence” is held in the unsettled conflict of the intellectual and sensory element, on which their world is built upon.
More...
This paper is about the correlation between language and power from political, economic, social and cultural point of view at the societal level in general and in the Moldavian society in particularly. Due to the original approach, the comprehension of which is facilitated by graphs, the author could prove the pertinence of the stretchiness between language and power at different levels: politics, economics, society, culture. The existing misbalance between the position of Roumanian language and Russian language in the Republic of Moldova, and the real status of Roumanian in Moldavian society, emphasizes the role of the linguists in the definition of linguistic policy in the state.
More...
This article is devoted to one of the most enigmatic details of Pushkin’s Grobovshchik (1831), namely, “a plump Amour with an inverted torch.” The author investigates its variable semantic structures, and a range of narrative potentials determined by such contexts as a) classical allegorical tradition, b) patterns of the anecdote genre, c) elegiac language, and d) some elements of funeral practice.
More...
The article analyzes an anecdote about a Soviet official visiting Poland after WWII as represented in Sergei Dovlatov’s cycle "Solo na undervude" (1980), andprovides the anecdote’s alternative version. Th is alternative version contains exactlythe same plot, yet varies on the plane of characters’ names, and in one detail in the ending. Despite these slight variations, both the Dovlatov version and the version the article’s author learned from the Polish intellectual and former political prisoner Adam Michnik, are centered on exactly the same theme: the theme of the opposition of a writer to the power of a totalitarian state.
More...
The author of the present paper focuses on the relationship between the individual and the power in a totalitarian state of absurd, created in Russian prose of Vladimir Nabokov. According to the author of the article, by describing totalitarian reality, the Russian writer deals with the problem of human oppression and asks about the reasons for this state of affairs. He shows areas of growing opposition and builds in the reader strength needed to rebel.
More...
This paper is devoted to infidelity motif (its function and place in the novel) in one of Russian-language works of V. Nabokov, The Defence. We believe that infidelity motif, each time appearing in a key strategic moments of a story, is a symbol of life deception by a character in favor of chess reality. The world that constantly takes away vital energy, comprehension and makes character a social cripple, subhuman. This motif fulfills supportive function, enriching aesthetic value of main motif (chess), around which whole novel is built. Nabokov masterfully joins both phenomena and silently imply that ideal art does not deny reality, but they tend to coexist in sui generis symbiosis.
More...
Authors focus on interpretation and analysis of Ulitskaya’s novel The Funeral Party. They emphasize the discrepancy between Russian and Slovak reception of the novel, which results from different diversification between artistic representation and reality, or more precisely, different criteria of author’s intention evaluation, selection of the main protagonists and their characteristics, or even expressive shift in translation. They note that the clash of two cultures, two civilisations (no matter how close they might be) can be in our unideologised present converted into some disharmony. However, it is a creative constructive dialogue of two cultures, both of which emerge from it somewhat richer, at least richer for a different view of the same phenomenon. A certain part is dedicated to translation problems as well as the problems of polycode text (connection between verbal text and visual code of the covers of the work).
More...
In 2018 the Decree of the Ministry of Labour and Social Protection of the Russian Federation abolished the profession of a stenographer due to the absence of demand. Researchers of the creative work of Fyodor Dostoevsky cherish the memory of two female stenographers — the writer’s collaborator Anna Dostoevskaya and Ceciliya Poshemanskaya, a modest stenographer from Leningrad that managed to fi nd the key to the shorthand system of the former. In the 1950s-1970s Poshemanskaya disclosed to the public the diary of Anna Dostoevskaya of 1867, the rough copies of “A Writer’s Diary” and “The Brothers Karamazov” and some more pages written shorthand by the writer’s assistant. Th e information on Poshemanskaya and her long-term, broad scale work in the memory of Dostoevsky is scarce. This article gives a brief description of the main stages of her creative career of the stenographer from Leningrad. Some additional details on life and work of Poshemanskaya are available in the documents kept in the fund of historianregistrar Sarra V. Zhitomirskaya (10239-fund). Principally, in the letters of Poshemanskaya to Vera M. Fyodorova and Sarra V. Zhitomirskaya, employees of the Manuscript Department of the V. I. Lenin State Library. The fragments of Poshemanskaya’s letters and her two letters to Vera M. Fyodorova published in the article’s supplement throw light upon the methods of the stenographer’s work and assign the objective to use her experience while decoding shorthand notes from the Dostoevsky archive as well as other historic stenographs.
More...
It is important to stress that Tolstoy’s and Conrad’s texts are to be understood to include not only literary, and thus verbal, texts but also elements of other media, such as music, theatre and visual arts. It should be noted that for Conrad music was also one of the arts that he greatly appreciated. Though Conrad’s main concern was to make us “see,” he was also concerned with making us “hear.” The use of music to accompany sexual desire, frustration and violence is a technique often used by the writer. Likewise, music had an enormous infl uence on Tolstoy. He was fascinated with its power, just as with the power of sexuality, beauty and war. His favourite composer was Chopin, but he also appreciated Mozart, Haydn, Weber, and Beethoven. In The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories Tolstoy expresses his complex and controversial views on marriage and sexuality, focussing on his protagonist Pozdnyshev and his wife, who performs Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata with a spirited violinist Trukhachevskii. The obsessive nature of Pozdnyshev’s jealousy is nowhere more obvious than in the sexual power he ascribes to music, and particularly to the initial part of the presto of Beethoven’s sonata.
More...
Note Leaves or Diary Leaves by Nicholas Roerich it’s a collection of essays, which covered a wide range of issues, from the important events of his time to the cosmic origin of the culture. This is one of the unfairly little-known highly artistic samples of literature, these notes are synthetic in nature, including philosophy and ethics. Most of these essays were published during the life of the artist and the philosopher in American, Indian, Latin American and Manchurian press in context of Roerich’s socio-cultural activities, primarily the establishment of The Treaty on the Protection of Artistic and Scientific Institutions and Historic Monuments or Roerich Pact. The essays in fact given the world view in past, present and future.
More...
Victor Pelevin is known as an author whose distinctive feature is a surrealist structure of his novels and numerous references to philosophy and the novel T discussed in this article is a collage of previous literary devices applied by the Russian writer in his previous works. Researchers investigating translation find even the title of the novel interesting due to the possibility of its multiple interpretations since T might be a reference to: count Tolstoy, theory, a tilde and an axe or a text, it also resembles the cross. The article focuses on selected aspects of the T novel translation which among others include translating proper names without which analysing any postmodernist novel is virtually impossible, and also presents possibilities of translating word plays and playing with an intertext.
More...
The purpose of the article is to analyze autobiographical story of Bulat Okudzhava Girl of my dreams (1985). The work is based on the writer’s mother’s memories who came back from the concentration camp in 1974. The main role in the story is the motive of the lack of acknowledgement, alienation of victimized (mother) and those who stayed free (son). The story of a woman, who was changed by the state to such extent that she was not recognized by her closest person, works as a mean to reveal and arraign the transformative power of the state. The lack of acknowledgement becomes a parable about the traumatic experience of terror, pervasive allegory of the subjective experience of repression.
More...
Memories form labor camps involve not only documentary testimonies, poetry and prose, but also visual and verbal and visual representations. The article tries to overview sketches, drawings, verbal and graphic hybrids, which act as photographs, forming the basis of knowledge about Gulag, its rules and everyday life from the prisoners’ perspective, although of necessity they were frequently created in the noncamp reality. In the spotlight there are works by Boris Sveshnikov, Nikolay Getman, Sergey Reichenberg, Ülo Sooster but also testimonies by Olga Ranitskaya, Galina Tsivirko-Leshchinskaya, Eufrosinia Kersnovskaya, confirming that traumatic experience of labor camp, although extremely difficult to present, is possible to present and should be an important part of the culture of memory.
More...
The aim of this study is to address the issue of the collective fate of the Jewish diaspora in the significant traumatic moments for the minority inhabiting Odessa since the founding of the city. Therefore, references will be made to the pogroms of the Jews, the “final solution” of the Jewish problem during World War II, the mass westward migration (mostly to the United States) gaining momentum since the late 1970s. All these elements will be considered in the light of Russian-speaking Jews’ contribution made in the areas of social, economic, and cultural life of the city. Tragic events areportrayed based on selected texts of the two leading representatives of the “Odessan galaxy” (i.e. Isaac Babel and Valentin Kataev), while the notions of annihilation and painful migration are exposed briefly in relation to the Liev Schreiber’s movie Everything is illuminated.
More...
In this article, author analyses postcolonial trauma in Vasiliy Golovanov’s novel Island, or an Excuse for Pointless Travelling (also known under the second English title: Island or A Justification for Meaningless Travel). The analyzed novel reveals many examples how the Russian/soviet colonialism methods worked by decades as well as the results of colonial pressure on native Kolguyev Island inhabitants. After the fall of the Soviet Empire, situation of Nenets people was very similar to situation of other nations after Western colonial empires fall: Nenets as Africans or Asians also suffer postcolonial trauma. Franz Fanon described French colonialism in Algeria, Golovanov described soviet colonialism on Kolguyev.
More...
The article is devoted to political, cultural and mental diversity of Donbass from the rest of Ukraine. The author shows the uniqueness of this region as a result of a complex and contradictory history, as well as the effect of permanent social, economic and ethnocultural processes of a colonial and totalitarian character. This is the reason for the hybrid identity of local residents. Later on, more space is devoted to the work of two writers — Ukrainian-speaking Serhiy Zhadan and Ukrainian-Russian-speaking Vladimir Rafeenko.
More...
In this article we made a review of the works of Russian literature in which Bukharian Jews are mentioned: for the first time in the 19th century — as an ethnographic and aesthetic discovery in the prose of Nikolai Karazin; at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries (in the prose of Dina Rubina, Marina Chernova, Marina Avrukina) — as a reflection of the previously half-tabulated theme till the stereotype breakdown; in the contemporary works of Yevgeny Abdullayev (Sukhbat Aflatuni) — as a reception with postcolonial overtones, the departing and forever gone nature of the Soviet and post-Soviet everyday life — Bukharian Jews.
More...
This article presents Jewish portraits and views on the so-called the Jewish question of Zinaida Hippius and Maria Dabrowska based on their diaries. Their analysis leads to the conclusion that both the Russian and the Polish writers referred to the Jews in the ambivalent way, and their views, determined by historical events, evolved over time. Both authors were declared opponents of anti-Semitism, understood as a racist ideology manifested in the use of violence against Jews. However, the attitude of Hippius, especially after the Bolshevik Coup, and Dabrowska — after the Second World War, largely have defined the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism and stereotypical approach to another.
More...
