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This paper introduces, for the first time in Slavic studies, a fictional character from the Soviet magazine Pioneer (1920s) – a funny twelve-year-old boy named Kuz’ka, who prompted a heated debate between the magazine and the Pionerskaia Pravda (Pioneer’s Truth) newspaper. This debate became a crucial point in the history of children’s literature of the late 1920s – early 1930s. Kuz’ka was a joint project of the best children’s illustrators and authors of that time: the graphic artist Alexey Laptev, and writers and poets Lev Kassil, Nikolay Agnivtsev, and Daniil Kharms. This paper focuses on the ideological attack on Kuz’ka led by Pionerskaia Pravda, the magazine’s desperate resistance, and its final defeat, which resulted in the character’s comic death and travesty mourning.

This paper provides the first detailed description of the initial phases of the wider circulation of Dostoevsky’s works, in the context of the enlargement of the reading audience and of the development of the book publishing industry in Russia at the turn of 19–20th centuries. Special attention is paid to A.G. Dostoevskaia’s editions of the Complete Works and to the adapted editions of Dostoevskii’s works addressed to specific segments of the Russian public, such as children and peasants. Alongside with statistical data on the diffusion of Dostoevskii’s works in the last two decades of the 19th century, the paper touches upon two aspects: on the one hand, publishers and pedagogues’ efforts to adapt Dostoevsky’s texts to half-educated readers of lower-middle classes, and on the other, readers’ reactions to them. The paper includes a large number of quotations from memoirs and sociological reports that testify how the new publishing formats and mechanisms of distribution of Dostoevskii’s works informed their circulation and reception.

The key aim of this paper is to try to formulate a typology of the image of monster in Russian postmodern fiction. Literary monsters are classified into different categories, depending on the presence of anthropomorphic traits in the psychophysical makeup. The paper also pays special attention to the prevailing tendency in postmodernist fiction which includes all types of monsters, that the Russian postmodernists (e.g. Iurii Mamleev, Tat’iana Tolstaia, Viktor Pelevin, Vladimir Sorokin, Viktor Erofeev and Dmitrii Prigov) almost neutralise the traditional opposition between the hero and the monster present from the ancient heroic epics, which results in the impossibility to tell them apart. Moreover, the analysis of the works analysed in the paper uncovers the metathesis of the opposition, in which the hero often transforms into the monster (as in Tat’iana Tolstaia’s novel The Slynx), or, alternatively, the monster becomes the hero (as in Viktor Pelevin’s novel Empire V). Finally, the paper tries to answer why this considerable part of Russian postmodernist fiction tends to overlap the hero and the monster and introduce a porous line between the human and the monstrous.

This paper provides an analysis of the novel Russian Beauty (Russkaia krasavitsa) by Viktor Erofeev. Written between 1980 and 1982 and published in 1989, the novel caused a stir among critics. The paper focuses on the mythological elements in Russian Beauty. Mythological elements are visible in the novel’s structure and in its narrator-protagonist Irina Tarakanova, who recounts her life and accomplishments as a promiscuous girl, a model and a lesbian. Her navigation of obstacles can be interpreted through the lens of Campbell’s monomyth (2009), as the journey of a hero who, thanks to a calling “from above”, leaves everydayness and enters the world of adventures, eventually returning spiritually and physically renewed. Irina undergoes the same journey also based such a “calling”, but her story is subverted as the mythological is trivialised, and the spiritual downgraded to the corporeal. Irina’s independent decisions, which are diametrically opposed to “higher goals”, are interpreted through the concept of narcissism (Freud 1914; Matijasevic 2016), since the protagonist successfully realises (writes) her own myth – a monomyth.

This paper explores Hungarian responses to Pasternak’s award and refusal of the Nobel Prize in 1958, barely two years after the suppression of the 1956 Revolution, and to his novel Doktor Zhivago both in 1958–1959 and subsequently at the time of Hungary’s political transition (1985–1990), when the novel first appeared in Hungarian translation. It compares the reactions in the Hungarian daily papers and literary periodicals during those times of, respectively, repression and liberation and introduces the political and cultural contexts, Pasternak’s friendship with Hungarian writer Gyula lllyes, and the familiarity of the Hungarian reading public with Pasternak’s works.

Based on archival findings, the paper traces the itinerary of Shalamov’s manuscript from Moscow to the United States, where it was serialized, in an edited form, in the Russian emigre periodical Novyi zhurnal from 1966 until 1978. It focuses on the patterns of its reception across generations of Russian emigre writers and critics and situates Kolymskie rasskazy in the socio-political and linguistic contexts of its first tamizdat publication. The paper also analyzes the western reception of Kolymskie rasskazy vis-a-vis Solzhenitsyn’s novella Odin den’ Ivana Denisovicha, which seems to have overshadowed nearly every other text on the Gulag topic since its official publication in Novyi mir in 1962. It argues that the formal(ist) features of Shalamov’s “new prose” remained ultimately inaccessible to the older generation of Russian emigre critics, who lacked the necessary familiarity with the new Soviet language, let alone a first-hand experience of the Gulag, where much of this language and Soviet culture in general had been tempered. The example of Kolymskie rasskazy and the history of its first publication and reception abroad is used as a case study of the transnational network of tamizdat, which mediated the relationships of many Soviet authors, including Shalamov, with official state publishing (or gosizdat), on the one hand, and with the non-conformist literary underground, including samizdat, on the other.

The purpose of the paper is to compare Nikolai Leskov's debut short story ‘A Case That Was Dropped’ (1862) and its second redaction, published in 1869 and titled ‘The Drought’. Comparative analysis covers major text elements, such as the title, motto, composition, time and place of the action, characters, etc. Special attention is paid to the central figure of the story, i.e. the rural priest, and the changes to his image introduced in the second version of the text in which Leskov emphasized his significance and elaborated his psychological profile. As the paper suggests, the writer also examined the most acute ecclesiastical problems of the 1860s, including peasant superstitions and the attempts to eradicate them, as well as the low social status of the clergymen, and the disdainful attitude of the Russian nobility towards Church ministers. The paper concludes with the assessment that the second redaction of the story exposes the evolution of Leskov's talent and his journey towards making a priest the lead character of the novel The Cathedral Clergy .

The paper dwells on the philosophical-religious aspects of the title hero of Dmitrii Merezhkovskii's novel The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci . Bearing in mind these aspects and the position this novel occupies in the trilogy Christ and Antichrist , we will try to provide an answer to the question of how the author builds the title character who succeeds in bridging the gap between pagan and Christian art. The paper also points out the key philosophical and religious systems implicitly present in the novel and explores what relation they bear on the religious-philosophical aspect of the hero.

Although ageing has become an important issue in the arts and humanities, there is a striking lack of coverage of old age and ageing as represented in Russian literature. This paper highlights a theme constantly recurring in Russian narratives of ageing: the memory of the past and a witness's testimony as constitutive of the identity of the narrated self. The article provides analyses of 20th-century Russian women's prose in which memory and testimony play a decisive role for the ageing protagonist and her sense of self. Drawing on Paul Ricœur's concept of “narrative identity”, this paper aims to show that, in these texts, age identity is constructed around the notion of “having remained the same” and that this, notably, applies to the intersection of ageing and gender.

This paper presents a survey of the major trends and personalities of Czech popular culture in the 20th century and focuses on the interrelationship of various genres and personalities over the decades. Film, as a popular genre of the 20th century has been included in this survey, only when closely related to the theatre and is not an independent part of this study. In today's internet climate, vast information on this topic is freely accessible, and a wide variety of all of the presented personalities can be found on such platforms as youtube.com, however to date, a synthesizing systematic analysis comparing these individual artists, genres and styles has not yet been attempted. This paper seeks to fill this gap.

The paper continues the author's efforts to research the tricky relationship of Moscow Conceptualism with the issues of irony and laughter. The role of language acquires a unique position and in a certain way structures the conceptualist universe of carnivalesque laughter. Using the notion of cognitive dissonance, the paper offers a parallel between Zen koanic practice and what Moscow Conceptualism has been performing for nearly four decades, providing a few characteristic examples. Another portion of the text is dedicated to what is termed “Soviet mythological ideology” and the way the conceptualist milieu has been dealing with it. The main part of the paper focuses on Dmitrii Prigov, who continues the tradition of Kharmsian grotesque absurdism, which could be traced back to Alfred Jarry and later to Henri Michaux and Raymond Queneau (the mock-serious College de Pataphysique and related material). These issues are further elucidated in an extensive interview with the poet conducted in 2003, the English translation of which is included in this publication.

This paper discusses the life and oeuvre of Pushkin and his closest milieu from the point of view of two important dispositifs, or artistic and behavourial strategies, namely libertinage and dandyism. The author points out that in the Russian context they intermingle and influence each other. The paper consists of four parts: 1. Pushkin the libertine and the “Green Lamp” debate; 2. Pushkin the dandy; 3. Dandyism and libertinage in Eugene Onegin; 4. Aleksei Vul'f as Pushkin's “disciple and follower”.

The paper addresses Pasternak's negative attitude towards libertinism by pointing out the significant role assigned to the caricaturesque libertin Viktor Komarovskii in the novel Doktor Zhivago . Since it is Komarovskii who triggers a good deal of the plot, he is all but a secondary character. His libertinism, then, consists not so much in excess as in taking control over others' lives. On the other hand, there are unmistakably libertinist traits in the conduct of Iurii Zhivago, Pasternak's anti-libertinist protagonist. Moreover, Zhivago criticizes the asceticism of the revolutionary Pavel Antipov-Strel'nikov as rationalist and heartless. While using Hans Jonas' typology of libertinism and asceticism as just two ways of “contempt for the world”, the paper aims to conceptualize Zhivago's third position of openness and gratitude.

The present paper reconstructs and examines a plot of friendship and split between two famous Russian philologists, Boris Eikhenbaum and Viktor Zhirmunskii. The starting point is that a quarrel itself is under implicit taboo within academic profession and has to be substituted by alternative forms, i.e. public and intimate text production (articles, reviews, letters, diaries). This multi-genre textual array could generate an independent story which demonstrates complicated reference to reality. The paper is devoted to the case of academic quarrel as a specific kind of narrative encoding psychological and worldview drama between closest friends.

The paper presents a survey of stable compositional models and basic components of Maiakovskiiʼs imagery system found by the poet as early as in his cycle book I! ( Ia! ). A new viewpoint is proposed on the problem of the subject of utterance in the notorious verse “I like to watch children die” (“Ia liubliu smotretʼ, kak umiraiut deti”); the original way of treating the “father and son” conflict in the culmination point of the cycle (‘Some words about myself’ – ‘Neskolʼko slov obo mne samom’) is accounted for. It is demonstrated that the search for an idealistic incarnation of “paternity” obtains a further development in the poem ‘Listen!’ (‘Poslushaite!’), inspired by Francis Jammeʼs lyric poetry, and further in the poems for children ‘What is good and what is bad?’ (‘Chto takoe khorosho i chto takoe plokho?’). The genre and stylistic conventionality of poetry for children makes it possible for the author to interpret the situation from the position of a wise father and solve all the contradictions in a space dominated by the artistʼs rational and humane will. ‘What is good and what is bad?’ is a rendering of the eternal problem of good and evil in childrenʼs language, the problem from which Maiakovskiiʼs development as a poet started. The authors of the paper arrive at the conclusion that the cycle I! is not a mere precursor of Maiakovskiiʼs further development but it appears to be the prototype of his artistic world.

The paper reframes the discussion of the superfluous man tradition by relying on the vocabulary and insights of postmodern discourse of the self. It argues that along with such commonly discussed attributes as ineffectiveness, alienation, and heightened self-reflexivity, the superfluous men in Turgenev's Diary of a Superfluous Man, Dostoevskii's Notes from the Underground, and Bitov's Pushkin House suffer from a (proto)-postmodern malaise whose manifestation is the dissolution of the autonomous, essential self that exists independently of language. Furthermore, the paper suggests that somewhat paradoxically, the awareness of this malaise and the anguish associated with it become not more but less intense with the advent of the postmodern era. Of the three characters I consider, Leva Odoevtsev, the protagonist of Bitov's postmodern novel, seems to be the least aware of his condition and the least paralyzed by it.

This paper offers a genealogy of Roman-themed writing in recent Russian cultural history, with special attention for so-called “Soviet antiquity” – that is, the extent to which allusions to the history of Ancient Rome were used and allowed within officially accepted Soviet literature. The author maps and compares different instances of interest towards Roman antiquity among poets of the second half of the twentieth century. She demonstrates that there was a strong tendency towards using Roman subject matter as part of the Aesopian language of the time, transforming covert messages into explicit expressions of the author’s viewpoint. More pointedly, the author unpacks the social and literary context of Rome-inspired Jaan Kaplinski’s (‘Vercingetorix’) and David Samoilov’s (‘Remus and Romulus’) lyric poetry, as well as their relationship with Classical subject matter and nineteenth-century civil poetry. The analysis also traces how Roman mythologemes developed in writings by coeval poets. In their work, ancient exempla morph into a source for ideological and literary creation. Bulat Okudzhava’s poem ‘Roman Empire’ is analysed as an act of reflection about the tradition of allegory in civil poetry, and as a mark of the poet’s weariness of Aesopian language in historical situations like the decline of the Roman Empire.

The present paper analyses short prose texts written in the 1830s–1840s under the generic label “legend” either in their titles or subtitles. The aim of the research is to ascertain whether such texts followed a similar generic pattern. The article shows that the chosen texts share a network of constituent properties, which indicates their generic cognateness and allows the reader to classify them as literary legends. The Russian literary legend of the 1830s–1840s may be characterized as a historical narrative relating extraordinary, sometimes criminal events. Though the audience is likely to disbelieve the story, the narrator finds it necessary to communicate it, as it contains an important truth or idea missing from conventional sources. Despite the similarity of the generic pattern, the genre had fuzzy boundaries in the first half of the nineteenth century, which is revealed in numerous title alterations, inconsistency in using cognate labels (“skazanie”, “predanie”, “byl’”), the absence of legend cycles, and a paucity of discussions about the genre. However, it can be concluded that the literary legend of the time was the grain from which the late-nineteenth century genre developed.

In nineteenth-century Romantic poetry, the lyric “I” was usually identified with the poet himself. This changed at the beginning of the twentieth century, when poets (Pound and Eliot, for instance) introduced speakers (“personae”) into their poetry who were clearly different from themselves. Instead of “the poet”, new terms were introduced to refer to the speaker in the poem. In German lyric theory, the term “das lyrische Ich” (“the lyric I”) became popular, as in Russian did “liricheskii geroi” (“the lyric hero”). English and American critics generally use “the speaker” and “the poet” (often indiscriminately in the same book or article). As the speaker in the poem is, in principle, a fictive construct and cannot be identified with the poet, and as many poems do not have an “I”, this paper argues for the use of the term “the speaker”.

The paper discusses Andrei Bitov’s book The Inevitability of the Unwritten, in which the author develops through several texts an autobiographical myth about a journey to Japan, which did not take place. Japan becomes a topic about which the author is unable to write and thus writing itself is ascribed a utopian character. The folk utopian tradition of the “Empire of Apon” in combination with several auto-intertextual relationships confirm the autoreferential aspects of this myth which expresses the utopia of writing in a time of the “inevitability of the unwritten”.

This paper is the introduction to a cluster of articles on the Gothic in Russian and Soviet culture and literature. It offers a general definition of the term “Gothic” in cultural history and a brief overview of the history of the Gothic mode in Russian and Soviet culture, as well as of treatments of the Russian and Soviet Gothic in scholarship. The authors note that the Gothic was late to take root in Russian cultural traditions, and speculate concerning the relationship between Gothic, as a mode that is concerned with the threatening resurgence in modern experience of archaic experience, with revolutionary social transformations and associated political discourses and social structures. The introduction concludes with preliminary remarks about each of the articles included in the cluster.

Krasnoe koleso (The Red Wheel), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s mega-saga of World War I and the Russian revolution, is a work of literary historiography, rather than historical fiction, a generic distinction that explains the discontinuities in its reception. This paper examines Solzhenitsyn’s philosophy of history and predilection for historical counterfactuality as expressed in his “epopee”, as well as its anthologizing treatment of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature. The experimental aspects of the saga, for example the quasi-cinematic Screens, use of montage, variable modes of narration, and diegetic blanks and ellipses, are discussed with reference to the practices of Russian and Western modernism.

The present paper sets out to explore the history of the Hungarian responses to Solzhenitsyn’s biography and his poetics are shown through the reception of the generation which was formed under the strong influence of the writer. The author argues, first, that Solzhenitsyn’s works reveal a fundamental connection between his nonconventional personality and his dominant artistic device, which can be typified in terms of the Russian formalist concept of ostranenie (estrangement). Second, the author claims that this connection explains the idiosyncratic place that Solzhenitsyn occupies in Russian literature and in Russian history.

This paper offers a study of the theatrical context of Boris Pasternak’s unfinished play Blind Beauty (Slepaia Krasavitsa, 1959–1960). One of the storylines of the play is the history of two actors (man and woman) of a Russian serf theatre in 1860. I examine the serf actress Stepanida Surep’eva, first, as model for a female destiny and poetic art a la Tsvetaeva; and, second, as a figure whose life and theatrical art are associated with the lives and roles of two of the best known actresses of Soviet theatre of the 1930s–1950s: Alisa Koonen (Phaedra) and Zinaida Reich (Marguerite Gautier in La dame aux camelias).

This paper analyses and compares models of the universe presented in two seventeenth century texts, Simeon Polotskii’s Aristotelian-Ptolemaic model in Venets very kafolicheskiia and Archpriest Avvakum Petrov’s vertical-horizontal universe in his treatise ‘Sniskanie i sobranie o Bozhestve i o tvari’. It considers the writers’ sources, cosmological imagery, purpose, and the aesthetic and value properties represented by the two models and interprets them within the context of the seventeenth century cultural crisis in Russia. Examining how the macrocosm was presented by the two antagonists in the dispute over faith broadens our understanding of a pivotal cultural conflict in pre-Petrine Russian history.

This paper examines the work of two poets of the late Soviet period, Oleg Grigor’ev and Vsevolod Nekrasov, who were both employed in some capacity in official Soviet children’s literature while writing “adult” poetry that remained unpublished. As unofficial writers nevertheless employed in the Soviet literary system, Grigor’ev and Nekrasov negotiated a complicated relationship with Soviet literature both contemporary and historical, both children’s and “adult”. This circumstance is reflected in the presence of a childlike aesthetic, evident in elements like alogism, naivete, nonsense and other inventive wordplay, in their work. To some extent, Grigor’ev and Nekrasov were drawing on the experience of predecessors like the OBERIU poets and the legacy of early Soviet children’s literature. In their unofficial work, they were also making creative use of the conventional features of children’s poetry in obviously non-childlike contexts. Indeed, the childlike aesthetic could be more evident in their adult poetry than children’s, blurring and calling into question these generic divisions. I demonstrate this deliberate ambiguity through a comparison of their adult and children’s work, and suggest that the evocation of the childlike in adult work, as well as the blurring of boundaries between genres, functioned as a rhetorical gesture marking texts as implicitly oppositional to official Soviet aesthetics.

The satiric writer Mikhail Zhvanetskii occupies an important place in Soviet/Russian culture; he has been an extremely popular satirist and now enjoys the status of a living classic. This paper fol ...

Literature and magic: how did these two entities coexist with each other during various periods of human history? What is magic? How was it ritually perceived in Europe? Which theoretical and scholarly approaches might assist us in devising its historical scope and literary ambiance? The introductory essay helps positioning a number of major conceptual issues regarding magic and its role in cultural and literary studies with special attention paid to Russian literature, spells, the supernatural and folklore. The essay offers a detailed historical overview of the main hermeneutical trends regarding magic, proceeding to Russian literature with special attention to Russian Symbolism (Aleksandr Blok and Valerii Briusov) and Russian Avant-Garde (Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh). The introduction also positions the special volume’s papers within the broader context of magic and supernatural.

The paper focuses on the magical dimension of the poetic work of Boris Poplavskii (1903–1935), an emblematic figure of the “lost generation” of Russian emigres in Paris. In his youth, Poplavskii was much influenced by anthroposophist and theosophist doctrines, and later manifested a deep interest in occult and magical writings. In this article, I analyze the magic in Poplavskii’s work from a number of perspectives, including those of concrete rituals and techniques (witchcraft, invocation, alchemy, meditation), as well as practical mysticism (Christian and Jewish) and different patterns of “divine-working” (theurgy) which have had an explicit or implicit impact on Poplavskii’s poetic and narrative texts. In particular, I highlight the visual component of various magical practices referenced by Poplavskii.

The paper considers sex and gender issues underlying Mikhail Kuzmin’s longer poem ‘The Trout Breaks the Ice’. In the Russian literary canon, Kuzmin has not obtained the high status he deserves because his openly gay writings are not acceptable either under homophobic Soviet law or by today’s official anti-LGBT Russian mindset. Interestingly, despite the poet’s notorious reputation, the homosexual core of ‘The Trout’ has been consistently ignored in most critical analyses. Nor has the other side of Kuzmin’s homosexuality, his misogynism – also an important part of ‘The Trout’ – been discussed so far. Dissolved in rich intertextuality, symbols and rhetoric, it is responsible for the ambivalent portrayal of the heroine. She is a Psyche who patronizes the love between the two male protagonists but also a femme fatale who drives one of them, who becomes her lover, to death. Women were avenged later, in Anna Akhmatova’s ‘Poem without a Hero’, a tribute to her 1920s romance with Ol’ga Glebova-Sudeikina, which was inspired literarily by a rivalry with Kuzmin, especially his ‘Trout’. The poetess’ inherent Lesbian agenda led to a covert reworking of Kuzmin’s gay poetics, which was programmatically open about homosexual love being more rewarding and less tragic than heterosexual love. As the ‘Poem’s hidden real message has been ignored even by scholars for fear of diminishing Akhmatova’s reputation, ‘The Poem’ succeeded in eclipsing Kuzmin’s more genuine and artistically daring portrayal of bisexual triangular love that flourished in the Silver Age.

The paper discusses the theatrical and performative poetry project Citizen Poet created by Dmitrii Bykov, Andrei Vasil’ev and Mikhail Efremov. This project satirically reflects Russia as it was in the turbulent years 2011–2012. In particular, it deals with the Russian protest movements known as the “Snow revolution”. The essay analyses the reasons for the project’s popularity against the background of the relevant history of the genre of Russian parody. Bykov’s mocking poetical satire is analysed with a view to existing scholarship focusing on parody and irony, including Russian stiob . The Russian literary canon emerges as an important issue in this respect. The complex views expressed in the various performed texts of Citizen Poet lead us into a debate of Dmitrii Bykov’s poetical attitudes and opinions.

This paper contextualizes Khodasevich's poem ‘Slezy Rakhili’ (‘Rachel's Tears’; 1916) and his article ‘Voina i poeziia’ (‘War and Poetry’; 1938) as his responses to World War I and to the Munich agreement, respectively. I contend that the First World War provided the impetus to Khodasevich for starting to write modernist poetry, in which he explicitly opposed “then” and “now”, a contrast that lies at the core of modernist consciousness. In Khodasevich's case, this acute awareness of a break with previous values had a personal quality, as the birth of his modernist poetics evolved out of a personal crisis in the wake of the suicide of his closest friend, Samuil Kissin, on 22 March 1916. Khodasevich's poem ‘Slezy Rakhili’ recapitulates macro- and micro-histories, referring to the broader issue of refugees and deportees and to Kissin's tragic end. ‘Slezy Rakhili’ is also a self-referential war poem as it reflects on current war poetry and questions whether poetry can adequately negotiate modernity in its most extreme form of a modern war. It is a conscious exploration of the contrast between “established things” and the new catastrophic reality of war and postwar Russia and Europe that makes Khodasevich a modernist poet and unites him with other modernist poets, like Vladimir Maiakovskii, despite their personal and literary animosities.

This paper is devoted to the influence that the experience of emigration had on the poetics of Khodasevich's book European Night (Evropeiskaia noch'). Till the spring of 1925 Khodasevich thought that he had the possibility to return to the Soviet Union. This state of mind determined the pragmatic meaning of the poems that Khodasevich wrote in the period between 1922 and 1925, i.e. the time in which he emigrated to Europe and yet did not feel himself a “real” emigrant. These poems are characterized by a satirical orientation as well as by a radical rejection of emigration. On the other hand, the texts that were written between 1925 and 1927 (when Khodasevich formed his self-identification as an emigrant) radically changed the pragmatics of European Night: In this way it becomes a book expressing a deep existential despair. This inner crisis includes the Russian space as well as the space of emigration. In our study we also analyse the way in which Khodasevich mitigates the satirical orientation of the first version of the book.

In this paper I focus on one of Tolstoi's marginal characters, Sonia in War and Peace. I examine Sonia's unusual narrative trajectory in the novel by comparing two key episodes – the Yuletide sequence and the epilogue. Tolstoi highlights Sonia's triumphant turn during the cross-dressing scenes only to prepare us for her eventual, and rather cruel, narrative and familial marginalization in contrast to the happily married Rostovs. While rarely studied, Sonia's narrative, I argue, is crucial to Tolstoi's overall design in War and Peace: in a novel that explicitly attacks historians as liars, Sonia's fate illustrates Tolstoi's intolerance of the historical mode of thought, what Morson terms “semiotic totalitarianism”. I claim that Sonia is an example of just such a thinker, and that her being, to quote Grenier, “the (insignificant) ‘Other’ squared” – both a woman and a member of the lower class – only aggravates this fault in Tolstoi's eyes, which results in her “punishment” in the epilogue. This is the ultimate cross-dressing that is Sonia's downfall: a “marginal woman”, an inconsequential creature in Tolstoi's universe, she attempts to control and shape events in an authoritative “masculine” way that befits historians and statesmen like Napoleon, Pfuhl, and Speranskii.

The article proposes an inquiry into the work of Aigi as a religious poet and mystic of the metaphysical mould, manifesting in his poetic experience an attitude of attaining the essence of being. In his works, Aigi advocates for Poetry in its original sense – as a sacrament. He understands the poetic word as the Word the Creator (St. John's Logos), adhering to the logos principle and believing that silence can only be created by the Word. The paper discusses some issues of poetology, semiotics and linguistics, relevant for the interpretation of Aigi's poetry and its place in linguistic poetics and philosophy of creativity.

The paper considers the philosophical aspects of repetition in Gennadii Aigi's poetic texts. The author concludes that repetition in Aigi's works is of a non-numerical nature. Unlike the quantitative parameters of repetition, their non-numerical ability to correspond to the entire poetic text is of major importance. In this regard, repetition manifests itself as a structure that reminds a fractal. The cornerstone of Aigi's repetitions is a cyclic model of time that is impossible to describe in terms of evolution and memory. Repetitions accumulate nothing: topics and ideas do not grow from each other, but rather grow into each other forming the general poetic unity. Repetitions in Aigi's poetry constitute a non-communicative phenomenon that is not associated with imitation and mimesis.

The objective of this paper is to examine the profound ties that link philosophy and poetry in Boris Pasternak's theoretical and poetical works in the perspective of a broader problematic of relations between philosophy and poetry. I argue that Pasternak's writings do not simply bear the imprints of his prior engagement with philosophy, but that his poetry as such can be interpreted, at least in some of its aspects, as a result of his philosophical vision of the world shaped back in Marburg, in his readings of Kant and Cohen. In his poetic work he manages to redefine the limits between philosophy and art and to elaborate a new approach to some poignant philosophical problems.

The article makes an attempt to sound the novelty of Virginia Woolf's and Boris Pasternak's literary theory in the context of literary tradition. I argue that at least in two crucial fields, in the definition of the self and the treatment of the relationship of art and reality, it is the paradigm established by the Romantics that seems to be the most important point of reference. In order to prove this, I discuss both the authors' statements about romanticism and the romantic traits in their philosophies of art. Some of their concepts relevant to the topic (for example, Woolf's moments of being, or Pasternak's idea of creative subjectivity), expounded mainly in ‘A Sketch of the Past’ and in A Safe Conduct , and the Romantic influences on their work are in the focus of the paper.

The paper explores the tight relation between “art” and “immortality” in Boris Pasternak's author's ideology on the basis of a newly found letter to his second wife Zinaida Nikolaevna Neigauz, written in the beginning of 1931. This letter, preserved only in a copy, sheds new light upon one of the most important points of the author's ideology. In this document, Pasternak explains his views on the unacceptability of suicide. The letter is closely related to his autobiographical work Safe Conduct , the final part of which was written soon after the suicide of Vladimir Maiakovskii. It is possible to draw a line from the letter to the novel Doctor Zhivago . The ends of two protagonists' lives, Iurii Zhivago and his antipode Pavel Antipov-Strelnikov, are compared. The main protagonist dies, leaving behind his poetry. For Pasternak, it is the way of continuation, “life after death”, and the symbol of creative immortality of a poet. On the contrary, Antipov committed suicide, an end consistent with his life position.

Emil Medtner is important to Russian culture not only as a theorist of Symbolism, but also as a patient and friend of Carl Gustav Jung and one of the first Russian supporters of psychoanalysis. Here Medtner as a person is of particular interest. Complex and morbid, even in its most extreme expressions his personality reflects the spirit of the Silver Age. The first part of the present paper traces patterns in Medtner's private life as manifested in a series of love triangles. The second part briefly analyzes a dream about two sisters which Medtner discussed with both Freud and Jung and which demonstrates the specific features of his split psyche.

In the present paper I shall try to offer an interpretation of the symbols related to Hades' realm in Mandel'štam's Tristia. The importance attached to the adjective "transparent", which turns out to be a clue to deciphering the complex network of allusions contained in the collection of poems, will be especially taken into account. As a result of a detailed research of the mythological and literary sources, it will be shown that Mandel'štam has codified a message of hope in the midst of the apparently gloomy poems of Tristia.

Within literary comparative studies, inquiries into typological connections represent a markedly high level, primarily because the principle of comparing phenomena can be applied in its full spectrum, which includes dissimilarities. An overarching central European climate becomes clearly apparent when comparing the Czech and Slovak poetry of the 1920s (e.g., Březina, Hlavacek, Hviezdoslav, Lukac, Novomeský, Smrek, Toman, Wolker). Czech movements such as Devětsil and Poetismus ran alongside the Slovaks' poetic naivete, not unlike its Czech counterparts and their socially-engaged lyrics, as this developmental relationship was fostered in large part by the union of both nations' literatures. Set against the backdrop of a wider context, including French and American poetry, as well as Russian prose, this paper traces the highly international niche established by the Czech and Slovak lyrical schools.

In the present paper those of Sumarokov's psalm paraphrases are analyzed which he published in 1774, three years before his death. Special attention is devoted to a group of ten texts which he marked as “exactly as in Hebrew” and which he wrote in free non-rhymed verse. In these ten texts he shows an unexpected philological concern with closeness to the Hebrew original. Not knowing Hebrew himself, he mentions using a German translation of the Hebrew original. But which one did he use? The answer: he used the translation of the theologian Johann Michaelis (1612–1674).

This paper is about Derzhavin's ode ‘Khristos’, which he wrote in 1814, two years before his death and thirty years after his ode ‘Bog’. These two odes represent two stages of Derzhavin's religious thought. ‘Bog’ represents a time in his life when he was striving to reconcile Western European Enlightenment with the traditional Russian faith. An analysis of the later poem ‘Khristos’ indicates clearly that in his old age, Derzhavin renounced his version of the religious Enlightenment. He now put faith above reason and the Scripture above modern science, thus returning to his religious roots.