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Ad hoc corpora are considered effective to deliver native-like technical (and legal) translation. This paper explores how the translation of a system-specific document such as an Italian procura alle liti (power of attorney to appear in court) can be addressed. Translating this legal document may be problematic due to the fact that it is not recurrent in the common law system, which contemplates other types of special powers of attorney (PoAs). This paper explores whether and to what extent a corpus-based translation is possible when L2 parallel texts are difficult to find in native contexts. To this aim, a translation project with technical translators and lawyers is carried out. The participants compose an ad hoc corpus which they consult as a language reference tool. The paper findings report that the translators' corpus-based translation is mostly a word-by-word rendering of the source text, which may sound unnatural to an expert of the field. The lawyers' translation partly deviates from source words, but addresses the communicative function of the source text. The paper highlights the need for a balance between the two strategies, for example by focusing on textual functionality and/or paraphrasing, although at the cost of a reduced formulaicity.

Forensic Linguistics as a discipline has gone through more than 30 years of development in China, which can be divided into the brewing period, the establishment and development period, and the comprehensive improvement period. Scholars have presented the origin and development of forensic linguistics in the form of papers, monographs, translations, textbooks, seminars, conferences and other forms, which promotes the future development of forensic linguistics. In the past decade, the study of forensic linguistics has mainly focused on the theoretical research of forensic linguistics, the application of legislative and judicial language, the translation and teaching of legal language. This paper will adopt the method of literature research to summarize the origin and development of Chinese forensic linguistics in the past 30 years, and to anticipate the future development direction of forensic linguistics in the light of the current research characteristics and the hotspot of the times, so as to provide references for the theoretical development and application practice of current forensic linguistics, and to better guide future discipline development in China.

Two texts by A. Rimbaud, published in 1886, but written earlier, and not poems by G. Kahn, J. Laforgue or J. Moréas, are considered the first vers libre in French. The paper shows two approaches to the analysis of free verse rhythm: the rules for reading and counting silent [Ə]; free verse is considered as a derivative of verse or prose, respectively (K. Scott and M. Murat), which proves the fundamental ambiguity of this poetic form and the importance of the reader’s perception in the process of reading as co-creation. The arguments of opponents and supporters of free verse, the so-called “free verse controversy” (“querelle du vers libre”) prove that in the imagination of writers there exists the connection between the poetic system and the social order. The paper considers the opposition proposed by the French researcher M. Murat — that of the national French vers libre and the international free verse that goes back to the American, that is to say Whitman’s model of Whitman through Valerie Larbeau’s poetry. The creative act of Larbeau, who created a heteronym — the English-language poet Barnabooth, raises the question of erasing national prosody and switching the linguistic code.

“A Tree of Night” is probably Truman Capote’s most terrifying piece, which, along with “Miriam”, has become his signature story. Created in 1943 and published two years later in Harper's Bazaar, this story was called a “pure distillate of terror” by reviewers. Despite the absence of the manuscript in Capote’s archive and his silence about how and when this story was written, the paper pieces together the writer’s personal circumstances during that period. Based on these data the paper makes a suggestion on when the story might have been created and identifies the archetype of the mysterious character named the Great Pasha. This information corrects a number of inaccuracies contained in Capote’s biography published by Gerald Clarke in 1988. The paper explores in detail the history of the Great Pasha — “a fakir from Egypt”, who toured American South with a bold performance “Buried Alive”. According to the hypothesis made in the article, it was the Great Pasha who met six year old Truman at his aunts’ house in Monroeville in May 1931. Twelve years later Capote drew on his memories of the Great Pasha and his assistant Madame Flozelle to create sinister characters of his Gothic story “A Tree of Night”. Thanks to the archival materials the paper managed to bring out the traits that Capote’s characters owe to their archetypes, and to reconstruct the facts of the fakir’s life. For the first time in Russia the article reproduces a unique picture featuring the Great Pasha, his assistant, and the writer’s mother Lillie Mae Faulk.

In 1949 Maria and David Burliuk made a trip to France “following Van Gogh” in order to restore the memory of the French painter's stay in Arles. This trip was embodied in a series of Burliuk’s paintings and in the text Journeys available in Russian (handwritten manuscript) and in English (magazine publication). The paper considers author’s narrative strategies in both versions of the travel journal; special attention is paid to the subjective organization of the text. One can hear the voices of Marusya Burliuk as well as her husband’s although she employs the author’s we. Complex narrative structure of the text is construed with a number of techniques, the most important one being switching of point of view. The paper focuses on the goals of the journey that were set by the travelers and on the ways they were reflected in the text. It is shown that the trip to France, first of all, was aimed at strengthening Burliuk's reputation as an “American Van Gogh”, and, next, at commemorating the French painter and preserving his heritage. The publication in the magazine Color and Rhyme is a unique complex work based on the interaction of both visual and textual material, it includes ekphrases, literary allusions, an epistolary, reprints of materials from the press, American reviews of the Burliuk’s works, etc. There are lots of descriptions, genre scenes, literary portraits, masterfully created by Marusya Burliuk in the published version of the journey, while on the handwritten version reflects private, intimate aspects of the journey (letters to the family).

The article focuses on the two great figures of the XX century, Bernard Shaw and Albert Einstein. Their occupations belonged to quite distant realms of science and fiction, and the only event that united the two in public consciousness was Shaw’s speech in honor of Einstein at the OTR fundraising dinner at the Savoy Hotel on 28th October 1930 where he bestowed the honorary title of “Maker of the Universe” upon the scientist. However, these two great men had much more in common than it is generally accepted. The paper presents some little-known details of Shaw — Einstein relationship, establishes a correlation between their views on a number of socio-political, scientific, philosophic, ethical and aesthetical issues including common grounds and principal differences in their attitude towards the USA and the American social structure. Apart from the few existing articles in the foreign academic journals, this research relies on the official European and American press records of Shaw’s and Einstein’s speeches, their private correspondence, diary entries, memoirs and (auto)biographies created by their close friends, colleagues and contemporaries (such as Beatrice Webb, Leopold Infeld, Ronald Clark), as well as Einstein’s essays and Shaw’s dramas. Another significant figure in the paper is the American writer and scientist Archibald Henderson who, according to professor W.L. Phelps, was “perhaps the only living man who can talk on their own level with the two greatest intellects of today, George Bernard Shaw and Albert Einstein.” The vast majority of documents, radio and video addresses cited in this article have not been translated into Russian; the paper is a pioneering study in Russia, where this topic remains unknown and haven’t so far attracted attention of the Russian academia.

The ‘migration’ of concepts from one language to another, which takes place in cultural exchange, frequently gives rise to changes in the target language, primarily involving the lexical field. The reception of the Romanist legal tradition in China has led to the formation of a specialized lexicon which, along with the translation and production of Roman law-related works, has been subject to constant growth. This kind of terminological transposition has often resulted in the emergence in Chinese of more than one translatant for the same Latin word. As a concrete example of this phenomenon, this paper aims at providing a synoptical overview of the rendering in Chinese of the concepts of dolus and culpa, two legal institutions also largely connected to the field of commercial law. The sources analyzed from a diachronic and contrastive perspective range from the earliest manuals of Roman law published in China at the beginning of the twentieth century to recent documents, translated or directly composed in Chinese. More specifically, this paper will try to answer the following questions: what is the historical evolution of the main terms used in Chinese to express the concepts of dolus and culpa? What are the criteria adopted by Chinese translators/authors in choosing these terms? What are the main features and issues related to the linguistic rendering of the two legal institutions? As for the results of this study, attention will be paid to one of the peculiarities of the linguistic rendering of the concept of culpa, that is the use of two different translatants: guoshi 过失 and guocuo 过错. At the same time, another aspect on which this paper will shed light is the existence of a plethora of translatants related to the concept of dolus (qizha 欺诈, guyi 故意, zhaqi 诈欺, etc.). In this sense, on the one hand, it will be shown how the presence of multiple translatants is acceptable and useful when they are used to express the different shades of meaning conveyed by dolus and culpa that cannot be rendered by means of one single translatant for each of these two notions; on the other hand, this paper will highlight the necessity of a higher homogeneity and standardization of the Chinese Romanist lexicon.

The paper deals with a comparative and contrastive analysis of the experience Azerbaijani and Turkish languages have gained in the transition to the Latin script. The methods of rendering personal names from European languages which, similarly to Azerbaijani and Turkish, use the Latin alphabet into the specified Turkic languages and vice versa are considered. The author presumes that the way a problem of rendering personal names as a special category of proper names is solved provides the grounds for giving an opinion on how successful the integration of a language that has switched to a Latin-based alphabet into a family of languages and cultures sharing the similar Latin alphabets has been or is going to be. In this respect, the study is topical since it enables one, by considering similar experiences of the languages involved, to forecast the trajectory the Kazakh language, intending to switch to the Latin-based alphabet in the near future, is going to follow. The novelty of the study consists in the linguistic forecasting method applied, which implies solely the study of the real experience of the languages subject to study and therefore provides the forecast with one hundred percent verifiability to be achieved once Kazakhstan has entirely transitioned to the Latin script. The theoretical value of the research consists in a contribution it makes to the methodological basis of the comparative and contrastive studies of related languages, including the creation of alphabets for them, as well as in a possibility of making use of the results achieved herein in further studies aimed at theoretical comprehending the peculiarities of a language functioning in the translation aspect after its transition to a new alphabet. The study has made it possible to identify the methods of rendering personal names from/to European languages, used nowadays in Turkish (absolute and relatively complete transfer) and Azerbaijani (transcription and transliteration) languages. Through the prism of practical experience of these languages, an objective forecast is made with respect to the Kazakh language in case of its complete transition to the Latin-based alphabet. The paper concludes that the Kazakh language has reasons to follow either the way of Turkish, as the language of the state, which to a certain extent has managed to successfully integrate into Europe in cultural, economic and political terms, and what Kazakhstan certainly strives for, or the way of Azerbaijani, to which the Kazakh language is connected with ties of a shared cultural and historical past.

The paper is concerned with some aspects of politeness in the request act by the pragmatic connotations of syntactic structures in Hindi and Persian. Considering the role of politeness as an explanation for the deviation from the Grice’s cooperative principle, the main question of the paper is whether Leech’s maxims of politeness operate on the syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations and whether there is any hierarchy in their manner of application. To answer the abovementioned question the main hypothesis of the research posits that Leech’s maxims of politeness have a structure of hierarchy in both Persian and Hindi. Considering the Pandharipandes' (1979) hierarchy of the degree of politeness proposed for Hindi, this paper aims to develop a similar hierarchy of the degree of politeness for Persian and to analyze the Leech’s maxims operating in the respective hierarchies of politeness. The general theoretical framework adopted for the present study is based on Lakoff (1972), and Leech (1980). Whereas the findings of this research indicate a hierarchy in Hindi and Persian at the syntagmatic planewith regard to their respective Leech’s maxims,no such hierarchyis detectable for paradigmatic relationwhichholds good for all types of social situations.

The paper offers the comparative study of two poems: Paris by Hope Mirrlees (1920) and The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot (1922). The research aims to consider Paris as one of the key works of modernist poetry and a possible model for The Waste Land. The author of the paper turns to some parallels confirming the similarity of these two poetic texts. Particular attention is paid to the “anthropological” or “ritualistic” mode of both poems. The philosophical concept and poetic structure of these poems were based on the ideas presented in the books and research papers by the representatives of Cambridge anthropological school (J.G. Frazer, J.E. Harrison, J.L. Weston, etc.). Both poems could be considered in the context of modern anthropological and psychoanalytic theories. The ritualistic mode of the texts not only provides scientific grounds for the embodiment of personal and collective experience in poetry but creates a powerful vital impulse inherent in those archaic rituals, the elements of which were reconstructed by the poets. The works of J.G. Frazer, J.E. Harrison, J.L. Weston, and others help the readers to comprehend and expand the content of certain episodes, clarify “dark” places, to see a harmonious poetic structure and sophisticated concept of the world order, civilization and man behind the external arbitrariness and fragmentation. Both Paris and The Waste Land became manifestations and embodiments of the “mythological method” articulated by Eliot in 1923.

The paper examines in detail the history of the creation of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, as well as the methods of its research in Western and Russian literary studies. The author proposes to combine a careful reading of this text with the notion of this poem as a spiritual autobiography of Eliot, which has various dimensions: from personal, proper poetic to esoteric. Based on the analysis of the biography of the young Eliot, the poet's relationship with J. Verdenal, the history of the poem, the drafts, the final text, the title of the poem, the epigraph, the poem's place in the poet's work, Eliot's statements about “Prufrock” the paper identifies the parameters of the symbolism of this work, which, playing on Eliot's complex relationship with the inexpressible (having an ambivalent nature), extends to its composition (the relationship of “I” and “you”; the paradoxical nature of the ending), the system of images and motifs (Prufrock as a theatrical person, the opposition of the male and female world), the special sense of reminiscences from Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, the philosophy of creativity as a mystery (Prufrock as a poet, combination of eroticism and mysticism, the theme of sacred crime) and love (homoerotic theme), genre (elusiveness of genre, Faustian beginning in it), symbolism and esoterics (“Prufrock” as a Masonic text on initiation, on life as theatre). The author gave a special place to the concretization of ekphrases (Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Burne-Jones), the content of which confirms the thesis that the poem has a text in the text.

The paper attempts to build an integral system of myth and determine its poetic function in the literature of the first half of the 20th century. There are a huge number of approaches to the study of myth as an unconscious symbol, but a myth becomes a literary phenomenon only when it is purposefully used by the author as part of his creative vision. Remythologization or the conscious return of literature to the original sources and archetypes in the work of W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, J. Joyce, and others are part of the poetic innovation of an entire literary era. The article briefly traces the history of remythologization, and the name of T.S. Eliot stands out as the first to state and fix a new attitude to myth (“‛Ulysses’, Order, and Myth”, 1923). Myth, according to Eliot, is not an unconscious “force” of the writer's creative imagination, but is conceived as a poetic category, as a means of recreating the aesthetic orderliness of a work from the chaotic reality. Conscious mythologization is also conditioned by the need to synthesize several heterogeneous creative structures in a single artistic whole. The reader conceives the presence of a myth in a literary work through the association of imagery with extra-textual plots, thereby fulfilling the author's intention. The paper, using the example of Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot and “The Wheel” by W.B. Yeats, shows how the suggestive archetypes and the variety of reader associations contribute to the timeless perception of the text (reading does not last in time, it is extremely generalized, cyclical, integral). All poetic means of remythologization are aimed at such a synchronous perception of the artistic time and space of the work, which acquires a mythologically universal character, becomes an artistic model of the world.

The paper is dedicated to the poem by T.S. Eliot Four Quartets (1943), it examines its artistic specificity, its poetic and musical peculiarities with their complex symbolic subtext and a whole layer of meanings. The organizing principle of the Four Quartets is the synthesis of myth and melos. The poem contains features “borrowed” from music so that the “musical energy” (melos) that is not yet a melody finds a specific poetic embodiment. Built on the principles of musical poetics, Eliot's poem contains various artistic images that alternate and combine according to the principle of the development of musical themes (like Wagner's leitmotifs) and their meaning does not remain the same, but is changing. Another similarity between the poem and a musical work is its timeless character: a full perception of the musical integrity of Four Quartets is achieved after repeated reading of the text, simultaneous experience of what has already been read and what has yet to be read — and this is like listening to a symphony, the desire to perceive it in its entirety, beyond time. The myth, in contrast to the quite specific mythologems of The Waste Land, in Four Quartets and its melodiousness, does not have any subject or plot even in its infancy and is rather represented by abstract, general ideas and archetypes. The article analyzes the archetypes and elementary symbols of Four Quartets (circle, square, quaternity, intersecting lines, etc.) and reveals their significance. The paper demonstrates that the imagery of Four Quartets is also based on Eliot's personal impressions, which merge with many “intellectual” associations and, refracting in the mythopoetic structure of the poem, turn into general, universal symbols.

The article investigates works by Octavia E. Butler (1947 –2006), an African-American writer who had a significant impact on the development of science fiction in the USA and the world. The paper provides an overview of Butler’s works and reveals the relationship between the problems and language / style of her prose, the latter being determined by the former. The first part of the paper examines the main topics of Butler’s works and focuses on the problem of survival. Being a disappearing minority, Butler’s heroines are usually isolated from others and, consequently, in order to survive they have to adapt to the circumstances, since resistance is impossible. However, for Butler the survival of an individual is less important than the preservation of the humankind. For Butler’s heroines it is the reproduction of the genetic and/or cultural memory of mankind that make the future possible and guarantee the survival. In the second part of the paper Butler’s works are analyzed in the context of Afrofuturism and it is pointed out that although Butler has much in common with other representatives of this movement, she deals with the projects for building an ideal society in a different way: Butler is skeptical about utopia as a project of a conflict-free society. The final part of the paper examines Butler’s language and style, noting that for her language serves as an impersonal, objective tool of analysis of human behavior. A special attention is paid to Butler’s latest novel Fledgling (2005), in which language serves both as a tool for expression and a topical issue.

The article provides an overview of the 29th international conference “Ezra Pound and Friendship.” The conference was held at Kyoto University from June 24 to June 26, 2022, virtually. The conference was attended by researchers from fifteen countries, including scholars from the USA, Germany, France, Japan, China, Great Britain, Russia (Lomonosov Moscow State University). Two crucial themes of the conference related to (1) Pound's friendships and (2) the Asian, in particular the Japanese dimension in the work of the American poet did not limit its participants in their choice of material. The papers presented at the conference were distinguished by an extraordinary thematic diversity, which made it possible to construct a global context to study Pound. During the conference, a number of papers touched upon Pound's friendship with W.B. Yeats, E. Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, A. Gaudier-Brzeska, B. Banting, Katsuo Kitasono. Several panels were dedicated to Pound's interactions with his younger pen friends. The very concept of friendship in Pound's work, the specificity of its perception by the poet and its closeness to the Neoplatonic, Provencal, Confucian traditions was discussed. A number of speakers turned to the “Cantos” and methods for their study. One of the most important features of the conference was its focus not only on the study of Pound's poetry, but also on the poetry of contemporary authors: according to the established tradition, the closing panel of the conference was dedicated to poetry readings and subsequent discussion.

The paper presents the analysis of attendant texts in the poems of one of the authors of the American Enlightenment epoch Joel Barlow (1755 –1812) “The Vision of Columbus” (1787) and “The Columbiad” (1807). G. Genette pointed out that paratext as a system of secondary texts is the constituent part of the totality of literary work and produces its impact upon the reader. The examination of the titles, prefaces and commentaries undertaken in the paper helps to reveal means and mechanisms used by Barlow to originate the contact with the reader, and also reach the poems’ pragmatic potential. According to J. Barlow‘s intention the synergy of the text and all the paratext elements was to generate a coherent narrative of American history “from Columbus to Washington.” Comprehensive unity of the poems’ texts and their peritexts address the dual goal. First, they create a large-scale historic panorama, and on the other hand strive to implant onto readers’ minds some philosophic and political ideas having both crucial importance for the national identity formation in general, but also momentary relevance. But in “The Columbiad” paratext acquires an additional dimension of ideological and methodological guidance. The author reveals his narrative strategies defining the reading procedure. The poem’s paratext explicitly records author’s awareness of the crisis of the Enlightenment aesthetic conscience at the turn of the 18th –19th centuries. So, the comparison of paratextuality of the two poems created with an interval of 20 years at some point presents the logic of fate of the Enlightenment literature in the USA.

The paper explores a Whitmanesque influence on Igor Terentiev, a Tbilisi-based minor Futurist poet, Alexei Kruchenykh’s disciple. While residing in Georgia with Zdanevich and Kruchenykh (that’s from 1917 up until the 1920s), Terentiev would write books of poetry exhibiting an unusual typographic design as a means of enhancing the poetic effect. In one of these books (“17 Non-Sense Tools”), Whitman’s name is invoked, and the paper investigates the connection between the poets further. The paper focuses on Whitman’s and Terentiev’s approaches to the issue of poetic signification. Whitman not only works with the nature of the signifier modifying it but also tries to render it inseparable from its signified, equating names and objects with each other. Such a semiotic approach could be interpreted through the lens of the opposition “presence effects” / “meaning effects” coined by H.U. Gumbrecht. Presence effects are interpreted as “[m]aterialities of communication... are all those phenomena and conditions that contribute to the production of meaning, without being meaning themselves” (informational content. — A. Sh.) [Gumbrecht 2004: 8]. Whitman tries to integrate both “meaning effects” and “presence effects” into the body of a poetic sign. Terentiev identifies that poetic orientation of “objectifying” signifiers and tries to devise an original poetic program on its basis. Terentiev engages Whitman’s poetic semiotic so that it informs his poetics to the extent that he designs creative writing techniques aimed at a direct communication of meaning, without relying on semiotic substitutes.

Fixed lexical or syntactical expressions and formulae hallmark legal language. They serve both linguistic and legal purposes, and should be rendered accordingly in a target language and legal system. Most of the times, however, formulaic expressions are translated by resorting to calques, false cognates, or phrases that are uncommon in the target legal language (and legal system). This paper is aimed at exploring how and if corpus analysis can dispel doubts and help find acceptable translation candidates. As there are currently no publicly available legal corpora addressing corporate documents such as contracts and agreements, this paper wishes to bridge this gap by building and relying on an ad hoc corpus of authentic agreements written in English as a first language according to the laws of England and Wales. In this way, corpus evidence can help find equivalents and, possibly, address recurrent mistranslations from Italian into English. During the corpus analysis process, the paper shows and discusses search queries and how equivalents can be obtained. At the same time, it questions dictionary entries. The paper findings highlight that the consultation of the ad hoc corpus allows to find acceptable translations of Italian legal formulae and address recurrent mistranslations. English formulaic expressions, in fact, can be rendered satisfactorily thanks to the possibility of noticing word usages in context, keywords in contexts and collocations. Further research can encompass a wider variety of formulae and/or legal documents so that scholars and translators can be equipped with useful reference tools.

The paper explores the effects of multilingual reading with students studying several foreign languages. The importance of this study is determined by the search for better practices leading to the incorporation of all language experience of the students when proceeding with a new language. Multilingual reading is defined as a skill aiming at simultaneous perception and comprehension of several written texts in different languages translated from one authentic text. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate the potential of multilingual reading in the formation of metacognitive strategies of comparison, transfer and code switching in the process of studying French and English after Russian (the students‟ native tongue). The paper examines the causes of referring to reading as a universal language skill for the enrichment of the students‟ repertoire of multilingual activities; the goals of multilingual reading; existing approaches to reading in a foreign language which have led to the idea of multilingual reading. The conclusion is drawn that to implement multilingual reading a certain level of mastery of a language under study is expected. Multilingual reading is best for incorporating into the language teaching after second foreign language is introduced. This is the time when a student is considered to be a sophisticated reader in his / her native tongue and first foreign language. The main goal of multilingual reading is to form the students‟ metacognitive strategies of comparison, transfer and code switching. The most appropriate literary genre for starting multilingual reading is popular science. Relative simplicity of its structural organization allows the readers to comprehend its meaning avoiding difficulties of reading a work of fiction full of specific stylistic devices. Besides, popular science incorporates features of science, colloquial, journalistic and feature literature styles. All things considered, popular science becomes a universal tool of multilingual reading.

The article focuses on the problems of literary translation, mainly the problems of conveying the individual style of a young adult literature author. The relevance of this topic stems from the insufficient analysis both of the notion of the individual style itself and the interconnection of the individual style and the genre of a literary text. The paper discusses the core theoretical concepts of the individual style as well as the main characteristics of young adult literature, and examines the specific features of transfering the style elements of a young adult author. The paper is based on the novel “The perks of being a wallflower” (1999) written by an American author S. Chbosky, and its translation into Russian made by E. Petrova in 2013. The purpose of the research is to identify some dominant elements of the author‟s style and to evaluate the degree of their adequacy in the Russian translation. In the course of the study, the following problems of conveying the individual style of a young adult literature author were identified: a specific narrative structure, the usage of colloquial vocabulary; a number of specific syntactical stylistic devices. The paper examines a set of examples illustrating these features of the author‟s style and analyses their translation into Russian. The analysis reveals that the author‟s individual style is often not adequately transferred, thus, alternative variants of translation that convey the key elements of the author‟s writing style may be provided. As a result, a conclusion is made that the individual style of a young adult literature author has its own peculiarities, and its appropriate preservation requires not only a general understanding of the genre‟s specific features, but the skills of a linguostylistic analysis of the text and the ability to translate certain lexical means and stylistic devices that an author can use at all language levels.

The article considers the problems of conveying verbal means of expressing humour in translation taking the American comedy “Sixteen Candles” by John Hughes as an example. The comparison of the original and its three translations (two voice-over translations and subtitles) made it possible to analyse in detail the verbal and non-verbal means of creating a humorous effect in the film and assess their interpretation in Russian in specific comic situations. Furthermore, in some cases we offer our own translation solutions. The problem of conveying humor is still one of the most difficult problems in audiovisual translation; it is often related to specific cultural peculiarities reflected in the speech of the source language speakers and the speakers of the target language. The relevance of the paper lies in the need for further research on the means of creating humour and the problems of its preservation in translation. The goal of the paper was to study the verbal and non-verbal means of creating humour in a particular comedy film, as well as to analyse and assess the effectiveness of their transfer in Russian translations. The following methods of analysing the data were employed: comparative-contrastive analysis, linguistic analysis, lexicographic analysis, situational analysis and functional-stylistic analysis. The study revealed some losses in translation usually caused by unjustified lexical replacements (mainly generalization), a change in the word‟s register (for instance, using a neutral literary word for a slang word) and resorting to outdated vocabulary. Besides that, translators often ignore non-verbal, situational means of creating humour and their influence the verbal description of the situation.

The paper focuses on time marks that may be detected in common law agreements and the translation issues they imply. In the first section, the author discusses the relation between time and law. The legal time governs the social time, as it ensures order and security. If memory is the manifestation of the legal past, the promise is the expression of the legal future. Depending on the legal culture taken into account, the legislator’s time may be more or less important than the time of the judge. The second section of the paper deals with time avatars that may be identified at the macrotextual level. The contract is understood as a promise that becomes obligation. The legal time is also expressed in contracts by the predictive capability of the parties, its acceleration and backwardness, its finiteness. The last section is an analysis of the translation of terms, collocations and metaphors expressing time in common law contracts.

The paper provides an overview of the Dostoievski Society of Argentina (Sociedad Argentina Dostoievski, SAD), created in 2015. The main goal of the Society is to unite specialists in the work of F.M. Dostoevsky and Slavists. The activities of the SAD include organization of scientific conferences, meetings, seminars, round tables, edition of books and online journals. The paper examines two journals published by the SAD, outlines their scientific profile and history of creation. The journal Estudios Dostoievski, created in 2018, was conceived as a continuation of the international dialogue on the work of F.M. Dostoevsky and united the Hispanic Dostoevsky scholars. Another project of the Society — the journal Eslavia, established in the same year, became a meeting point for Slavic scholars and all those interested in Slavic culture and literature, as well as Spanish American–Slavic cultural links. The article highlights the peculiarities of these contacts, their historical background and prospects. The scientific program of the journal Eslavia consists in the publication of articles on various branches of humanitarian knowledge on the basis of the material from different Slavic countries. Estudios Dostoievski and Eslavia were awarded a gold diploma of the International Slavic Forum “Golden Knight” in Russia. The Dostoievski Society of Argentina cooperates with other national and international associations, organizes the International Slavic Readings and since 2016 has been a member of the International Dostoevsky Society (IDS).

The review traces papers of the International conference V. Nabokov and Transatlantic Relations in American and European culture hosted at Saint Petersburg State University on May14–16, 2021. Scholars in various fields of humanities traced the routes of intercontinental cultural contacts of the XX-th century to construct a global context to understand Vladimir Nabokov as a paradigmatic transatlantic figure. The main direction which was discussed in papers of D. Ioffe, T. Venediktova, G. Kruzhkov, O. Panova, A. Astvatsaturov, O. Antsyferova, I. Golovacheva, A. Shvets, O. Sokolova, traditionally turned out to be American and British. The Russian cultural context viewed through the transatlantic prism was outlined by E. Penskaya, V. Feshchenko, A. Rodionova, A. Masalov, Y. Probstein, C. Bernstein and by Marjorie Perloff. The issues of transatlantic transfer in Romanesque literatures were presented in the papers of L. Muravieva, A. Petrova, V. Popova and I. Khohlova. The speakers discussed Franco-American autofiction, the images of Americans in the works of G. Apollinaire and the history of Soviet-Latin American and Portuguese-American poetic contacts, German and Scandinavian contexts viewed the in light of transatlantic problems. Discussion of Vladimir Nabokov works summed up a kind of outcome of the conference that brought together linguists (A. Kretov, Zh. Gracheva), historians of literature and culture (D. Tokarev, A. Bolshev, N. Shcherbak, A. Stepanova, N.A. Karpov ), scholars of poetics and narratology (F. Dvinyatin, V. Schmid, E. Kazartsev, D.Yu. Dovzhenko, N.I. Emelyanova).

Several are the European Directives dedicated to e-commerce, focussing on consumer rights, the distance marketing of consumer financial services and the protection of consumers indistance contracts.In contract law, the terms “termination”, “withdrawal”and “cancellation”have peculiar and distinct meaning. Nonetheless, they tend to be misused and applied interchangeably. This article will shed light on these relevant terms in thelight of EU Directives on the protection of consumer rights in off-premises and distance contracts.To do so, it will first present instances in which the meaningand use of these terms is either clear-cut or somehow blurred. By analysing word usage and meaning in context, it will explore how EU Directives, and EU drafters in general, made(un)ambiguous distinctions. Then, it will investigate whether English-speaking drafters (such as those of the pre-Brexit UK, Ireland and Malta) made a consistent use ofsuch terms. Finally, this paper will explore whether online conditions of sale writtenin English by non-English speaking sellers or traders (such as Italian and Polish) also make a consistent use of the terms.The paper findings highlight that the use andlegal purpose of these terms in European Directives have not been particularly consistent over the years. Furthermore, Member States’system-specificity has weighed on the meaning, application and scope of the terms. On the other hand, at EU level the absence of a unique legal system of reference and the challenges of harmonization may have created false equivalences.

This paper mainly discusses the distribution and rhetorical functions of personal pronouns in English and Chinese legal news reports which is divided into two narrative types, the objective and the semi-dialogic. Through the comparative analysis of some English and Chinese legal news texts in the two types, it finds that the differences in narrative type directly affect the distribution of personal pronouns. In objective narrative, the use of third person pronouns accounts for an absolute proportion, and the frequency of using first person and second person pronouns is close to zero. In semi-dialogic narrative, the use of third person pronouns is still the highest, but only slightly higher than the use of first person and second person pronouns, accounting for only a small number. After analysis, this paper holds that there are three reasons for the uneven distribution: first, the differences between the dialogic style and the narrative style; second, the legal narrative being a story narrative; third, the specific restrictions on the use of legal rhetoric.

The paper explores basic political relations between the European Union and India which are at theoretical level almost “terra nullius”. The paper starts from the present epochal situation and enters the realm of EU–India geopolitics from the perspective of Gandhian moral practice on one side, and challenges presented by the impact of Coronavirus politics on the other. Our question is – on which platform is strategic negotiating between the EU and India possible? Despite their Lisbon summit in 2000 as well as virtual summit in 2020, it is obvious that until today the EU and India could not find a common denominator. Our idea is that the missing link of a better understanding partly lays in the new perspective that may be unexpectedly found from the Balkans’ point of view. Only unprecedented cognizance today may set up the roadmap for the times to come.

It is generally assumed that a good knowledge of the legal field is a prerequisite to deliver legal translations. This paper will challenge this assumption by presenting a case study with third-year bachelor’s students who participated in a translation project. The students, enrolled in a course in translation practice, were trained in corpus consultation at the beginning of the academic year. Nearly at the end, they translated an extract of a supply contract without being trained in the legal field. They consulted a pre-compiled offline corpus and online bilingual dictionaries. The paper findings highlight that knowledge of the legal field would have certainly helped the students make more informed decisions and avoid some mistranslations. However, the major shortcomings were actually due to ineffective corpus or dictionary consultation. In particular, formulaic expressions and collocations were neglected. In light of the paper findings, it can be speculated that in translation training, effective corpus consultation may help users deliver high-quality legal translations. It also seemed that thorough knowledge of the legal field is not a prerequisite, at least as far as short texts are concerned.

The paper presents an analysis of the novel Grendel (1971) by American writer J. Gardner (1933–1982) in light of M. Eliade’s, R. Girard’s and V. Toporov’s concepts of myth and ritual studies. Literary studies concerning the ritual-mythological aspect of the novel are reviewed in the article. The research hypothesis suggests that the key features of Gardner’s poetics can be systematically analyzed in the context of myth and ritual. Meanwhile, the bulk of previous research covering the issue tended to rely primarily on other analytical frameworks, like P. Bourdieu's sociology of literature (B. Ekelund) or the theory of intertextuality (H. Ellis, W. Ober), the myth and ritual theory playing a supplementary role. While placing myth and ritual theory at the core of the methodology, the present study highlights its two key categories singled out in line with B. Malinowski’s “functionalist” view of myth and ritual as two complementary aspects of the archaic culture — the “theoretical” one (myth) and the “practical” one (ritual). Here they are presented as the etyological nature of myth (i.e. its ability to view all phenomena as dependent on the primordial origin of the universe) and the redemptive sacrificial ritual. Accordingly, the etyologization of Grendel’s narrative and the presentation of the protagonist as an “emissary victim” (in Girard’s terms) are the specific features of Gardner’s poetics which the paper primarily addresses.

The paper traces David Burliuk’s evolution as a poet, essayist and editor in the United States, where he began his career in the pro-Soviet Russian émigré newspaper Russky Golos and then switched to his personal project — Color and Rhyme, the Burliuk family magazine. The paper examines some strategies of Burliuk's self-presentation in Color and Rhyme; since in this edition Burliuk is presented as a poet and an artist, the paper analyzes, how both of these roles of Burliuk relate to each other in the texts published in the magazine. Focusing on the English-speaking reader, Burliuk emphasized the European context of his artistic biography; other contributors that published their articles and reviews in the Color and Rhyme stressed his cultural affinity with Paul Gaugin, Expressionists, Fauvists and characterized Burliuk as “American Van Gogh”. Special attention is paid to the ways of representation of American poetry in Color and Rhyme. Burliuk’s magazine published works by members of some New York poetic communities, such as The New York Poetry Forum and The Raven Poetry Circle of Greenwich Village. In particular, it is described how Burliuk as an editor represented beginners or littleknown authors in the earlier periods of his editorial activity. The article shows that Color and Rhyme magazine can be viewed not only as a tool for “promoting” D. Burliuk's art, but also as a chronicle of his activity as a writer and artist.

Starting with a survey of historical and ideological reasons for the unprecedented rise of Western interest in Russia after 1917 and especially after the Great Depression, the paper focuses on the travel books widely read on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1930s. The decade saw the blooming of travel prose in the English-speaking world, as well as the peak of enthusiasm for Russia during the XXth century. The paper attempts a closer look at the travel books on Soviet Russia, usually dismissed by critics as lacking in the quality of writing, too ideological. First the model of stereotypical book based on short Intourist tour is described (motive structure, prevailing parroting of Soviet propaganda clichés). Next follow the books produced by Western residents in the USSR, or persons who escaped Intourist surveillance and experienced some direct contact with Soviet people. They certainly look at Russia under the Western eye, but are able (to a different degree) to empathize with the drama and tragedy of Stalin’s Russia. From half-hearted account of “fellow-traveller” M. Hindus, the paper proceeds to fundamental “Assignment in Utopia” by E. Lyons, who turned from ardent Communist into highly argumentative critic of Soviet Russia, and to the unique project of writing a comic book about kolkhoz by E.M. Delafield, that resulted in a witty critique of Soviet aims and ways. In finding their way not just around Stalin’s Russia, but in providing the reader with the road to the authors’ inner selves, these books are still relevant today.

The paper deals with the analysis of reception and poetic transformation of aesthetic concepts and music ideas of Richard Wagner (1813–1883) in the works by T. S. Eliot (1888–1965). The research material includes the poems of the 1910-20s (“Opera”, “Paysage Triste”, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, The Waste Land) as well the essay “Dante” and lectures “The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry”, “The Music of Poetry”. The research is aimed to solve the problem of genesis of Eliot's Wagnerianism and identify the Wagnerian codes for his poetic texts. Following the representatives of literary Wagnerianism Eliot assimilated the ideas of revolutionary art, anti-bourgeois pathos, ideas of synthesis of arts, indivisibility of poetry and music, mythopoesis, etc. The poetry of the 1910–20s reflected Eliot’s interest in a wide cultural context (Wagnerianism and “Wagnerovschina”), Neo-Mythologism, etc. The poetry of this period is characterized by representation of Wagnerian “situations” and plots (the Grail plot), themes, composition strategies (system of leitmotifs, multi-layered text, etc.), music techniques (atonality, “endless melody”, suggestiveness, etc.), the direct quotations from Wagner’s works, etc. The author of the paper suggests that The Waste Land was created as a Gesamtkunstwerk, a complex multi-level poetic intermedial structure incorporating the elements of different arts (music, painting, scenography, dance, etc.).

This paper explores the concept of legal translation as a Third Space through the lens of the ‘multilingual’ Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ). In many ways legal translation at that Court fits readily with the characterisation of translation as a Third Space. Due to complex internal production processes the ECJ produces texts which are undoubtedly hybrid in nature, and which exhibit distinctive features on a lexical and textual level marking them out as a product of cross-fertilisation of influences from source and target languages and legal cultures. Even the teleological approach taken towards legal reasoning at the ECJ occupies a space outside the strict confines of the texts involved. Both the processes and the product of the ECJ’s language system appear to bear all the hallmarks of translation as a Third Space. However, translation at the ECJ also challenges the concept of a Third Space. The prevailing definitions of translation as a Third Space fail to effectively conceptualise additional nuances of the specific nature of drafting and the complex nature of translation at the ECJ. This paper uses original empirical data to demonstrate that translation at the ECJ places constraints on the undefined, vague and fluid nature of the Third Space, warping the forces at work within that space. In this regard, rather than an amorphous space, the Third Space is better thought of as a determinate area which is delimited by elements of translation process which constrain it. This adapted framing of the Third Space can consequently be used to better understand and illustrate the dynamics at play in other areas of legal translation where the current concept of the Third Space is equally inadequate for encompassing the specific nature of translation practices which impact on that space-in-between.

The article provides an overview of the conference “American and Russian Poetries. Links and Circulations”. The conference was held at the University of Toulouse from June 2 to June 5, 2021, virtually and was organized by Americanists, professors at the University of Toulouse, D. Rumeau and C. Gheerardyn. The conference attracted scholars from the USA, France, Israel, Russia (including scholars from Lomonosov Moscow State University Lomonosov, the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, etc.). During the conference, a number of papers touched upon the issues of reception and “transfer” between poetic cultures. These papers would concern not so much a passive “transfer” of a literary phenomenon from one culture to another, but rather an active process of transferring, or transcoding the phenomenon through an intertext already existing in another culture. Apart from topics related to issues of reception and metamorphoses of cultural translation, during the conference, the contrast between Russian and American poetic traditions was questioned as a contrast between the tradition of “expression”, psychologism, and the tradition of “description”, a formal experiment. This opposition was coined by the Imagist poet J. Cournos, a Russian émigré, also known as Ioan Grigor’yevich Korshun. A number of speakers disputed the rigid division of Kurnos, drawing attention to (1) the similarity of conceptual schemes for comprehending experience in the poems of Russian and American poets, (2) a formal experiment in Russian futurism and the development of a theoretical vocabulary for describing form in Russian formalism, (3) the influence of Russian futurism on the American neo-avant-garde. The influence of Russian futurism and Russian formalism on American poetry was traced on the example of the Language School phenomenon.

The topic of this paper is represented by the translation of French contracts through functional equivalence. In the first part of the study, we present the avatars of the concept of equivalence in Translation Studies, the notion of dynamic equivalence introduced by Eugene Nida and the functional equivalence principle, theorized by Katarina Reiss and Hans Vermeer. We also analyze the concept of equivalence in relation with legal translation and we emphasize the normative nature of the legal text and the importance of adequacy in translation. The second part of the paper is represented by the contrastive analysis of translation difficulties implied by French contracts. Such difficulties pertain to two classes: they may be terminological or discursive. We also propose translation solutions based on the functional equivalence principle.

The article examines similarities between French and Serbian languages at the morphological level. The study of linguistic contacts in modern linguistics is a separate direction, which contributes to the growth of interest in the processes of borrowing, where a special place is given to the theory of tracing and its fixation in scientific materials in Russian, the Baltic and some Turkic languages. The paper considers the tracing of French lexemes by the Serbian language as one of the types of external influence on the language, which makes it possible to reveal the nature and extent of this influence from certain sources. The goal of the paper was to identify and describe some structural and semantic similarities in certain lexical groups in French and Serbian languages in comparison with Russian at the morphological level. 140 French and Serbian linguistic units were analysed and compared to their Russian equivalents. Continuous sampling method, componential analysis and comparative analysis were used in the study. As a result, it was found that the French and Serbian lexemes under study are marked by coincidence of the inner form and morphological structure. As for the Russian equivalents, they are represented by word collocations, loan words (transliterations or transcriptions), or lexemes with a different inner form.

The paper discusses the issues of teaching nationality languages of Russia to preschool children, taking the Udmurt language and culture as an example. The relevance of the study is dermined by the scientific data according to which ethnic stereotypes in behaviour are formed most intensively in preschool age. Getting acquainted with new cultures and languages is particularly important for preschool education in multinational regions as it prevents the development of ethnocentric personalities. The paper aimed at a detailed analysis of the didactic and substantive content of the educational programme “Zarni bugor” (“Golden ball”) (hereinafter referred as the Programme) with the elements of teaching the Udmurt language to children from 4 to 7; the Programme is to be realised within three years in the Russian group of kindergarten № 5 in the town of Agryz, Republic of Tatarstan. The novelty of the Programme lies in introducing the Udmurt language (along with Tatar and Russian) into the educational process of the kindergarten. The research methods are theoretical (the study of academic literature on the problems of intercultural education in a multi-ethnic region) and empirical (observation and behavioral analysis of preschoolers). The system of exercises included into the Programme, its content, the forms and methods of teaching preschoolers present a consistant didactic material for teaching the Udmurt language and culture in this age group. The programme is expected to provide a high level of intercultural competence corresponding to the age of children, it is supposed to arouse their interest in the Udmurt language and culture, make them open for perception of other cultures.

The paper focuses on the peculiarities of literary translation of the texts where the story is told by an unreliable narrator. This relatively new way of narration has not been properly considered yet, as well as the criteria of an unreliable narrator and the translation strategy that should be chosen while translating such fiction. The paper discusses the features of this literary device, its functions and the ways of its linguistic representation. The paper is based on the novel “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” by M. Haddon and its translation into Russian made by A. Kukley in 2003. The comparative analysis of the source and target texts focuses on the stylistic peculiarities of the novel and the language personality of the unreliable narrator. The paper reveals the following challenges that a translator can deal with: the formation of a speech profile of the narrator, the translation of colloquial vocabulary and the translation of realia. Each example that includes an extract from the original book and its translation shows the features of the narrator’s speech profile; these features can have an impact on the translation and thus, should be taken into consideration throughout the whole process of translating. The analysis touches upon the examples representing inadequate translation, and for this reason, an alternative variant, the most relevant one and conveying the idea of the author of the original book is provided. The authors make a conclusion about the best translation strategy to be used while dealing with literary texts told by an unreliable narrator.

The article discusses one of the problems of audiovisual translation – translation of documentary films, taking “A Life in Japan” by a Swedish director Petri Storlopare as an example. The choice of the film was determined by the presence of difficult situations from the point of view of translation, as well as by the lack of Russian translation. The paper considers typical characteristics of an operational interview which is an important constituent of the film under study. Special attention is given to the problem of synphase in voice-over translation. The topic is relevant as there are no fundamental theoretical papers devoted to translation of documentaries, both in domestic and foreign translation studies. The main goal was to consider the existing algorithms and strategies of audiovisual translation and to find the most optimal ways of translating the definite documentary film. We employed the following methods of analyzing the data: comparative analysis, lexicographic analysis, contextual analysis and communicative analysis. The conducted research allows to define the main problems of translating documentaries, they include transmitting the meaning of realia of another country’s culture and solving the “phase shift” problem when syncing the text in voice-over translation. In this paper we tried to account for our own translation solutions. The research has shown that it is possible to achieve adequacy of translation by using compression, a certain set of transformations and techniques for transferring the meaning of culturally marked lexical units.

Poetic and dramatic works by T.S. Eliot include numerous allusions to Shakespeare's plays, different collisions based on Shakespearean plots, theatrical techniques and settings of the great playwright, etc. This paper considers the ways and instruments of transforming and representing Shakespearean images in Eliot’s poetic texts, such as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, The Waste Land, “Marina”, “Coriolan”, etc. The important aspect of Eliot's reception is the appeal to Shakespeare’s heroes (Hamlet, Lady Macbeth, Ophelia, Pericles, etc.) as archetypes for creating his own poetic characters. The researcher identifies two main ways of transforming and representing Shakespearean images: masks and dramatic monologues (“dramatis personæ”). The characters in Eliot’s poems use Shakespearean masks as a means of self-identification (Prufrock), they are components of “compound” images (“a cubist woman” in The Waste Land). The dramatic monologues of Eliot’s protagonists are pronounced on behalf of Shakespearen heroes (Pericles, Coriolan). Shakespearean allusions in Eliot’s poetry are to expand the boundaries of the text, deepen the characters, include them into a certain cultural paradigm, etc. The analysis of Shakespearean images in Eliot's poetry allows us to understand the peculiarity of perception for Shakespeare and methods of poetic mastering of his heritage in Modernist culture.

The article reconstructs Howard Fast’s literary contacts with Soviet writers during the Khrushchev Thaw and traces the history of his painful break with the Communist movement. Based on Fast’s autobiographical books, personal correspondence, as well as articles in the Party press (Masses and Mainstream, Daily Worker), the paper demonstrates that at the beginning of 1956 the writer condemned the Stalinist regime as “bloody” and “criminal”. However, in his correspondence with the Soviet friends (Boris Izakov and Boris Polevoy) Fast tried not to enter into direct confrontation and only lamented the plight of the leftist movement in America. His Soviet friends learned about the writer’s departure from the US Communist Party from the press only in February 1957. Having every reason to believe that Fast would have informed them about such a serious step personally in a confidential manner, prominent functionaries of the Foreign Commission of the Soviet Writers’ Union became upset and furious having read Fast’s exclusive interview to Harry Schwartz, a newsman working for the New York Times. At this point Fast declared a fullfledged information war on the USSR: he accused the Soviet government of being anti- Semitic, antidemocratic and terroristic. In turn, Moscow launched a campaign to discredit Fast. After 1958, the writer was no longer mentioned in Soviet reviews, correspondence with him ceased, and all working contacts were broken off. In his post-communist period, Fast turned to the autobiographical genre, writing two books: The Naked God and Being Red, where, among other things, he provided insights into his difficult relationships with the representatives of the Soviet literary establishment. Fast’s correspondence with Boris Izakov and Boris Polevoy from the funds of the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art is published in the addendum.

The paper deals with the poetics of the novels of the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa and the evolution of his style. To solve research problems, it is used the Delta method which is the most authoritative and reliable stylometric tool that allows you to compare texts based on the distribution of most frequent words. The work poses three questions: 1) Do Vargas Llosa's early total novels The Time of the Hero, The Green House, and Conversation in the Cathedral differ at the level of style from the later novels, forming a separate group, as the literary hypothesis claims? Answer: the hypothesis is confirmed; 2) Is it possible to divide the fifteen texts of the second period into smaller groups based on stylistic similarities? Answer: novels of the second period are divided into three large groups. Moreover, an interesting correlation is revealed: the novels grouped into separate groups have similarities not only at the level of style, but also at the level of themes, composition and narrative features; 3) Whether the “boom” is a stylistically isolated period in the poetics of its key authors? Answer: the novels written by Latin American authors during the boom period (1960–1970s) are not stylistically isolated: the authorial signal is stronger, and the case of Vargas Llosa with a clear differentiation of groups of novels is unique.

The paper deals with the first decades in the work of Dr. Seuss (the pseudonym of Theodor Geisel, 1904–1991), one of the most prominent children’s authors of the 20th century. Seuss was not only the author of children’s tales, but also a talented artist who illustrated his own books and whose manner was deeply influenced by his 15-year experience as a cartoonist. In 1920–1940s he worked for different print media, from humor magazines to a political newspaper, drew cartoons and commercial advertisements. Our aim is to study the mutual influence of Seuss-thecartoonist and Seuss-the-writer and illustrator. Our main focus is the “bestiary” of Dr. Seuss, the animal characters of his cartoons and tales. Seuss created his first eccentric animals in the series of cartoons and anecdotes for a weekly satirical magazine Judge in 1927; he blended the Victorian tradition of nonsense and the features of newspaper cartoons and comic strips of the first decades of the 20th century. The motif of eccentricity is developed in the first children’s tales that Seuss published at the turn of the 1930–40s. The same motif is significantly transformed in his political cartoons for a daily newspaper PM in 1941–1942. Seuss puts the familiar animal images into the context of World War II and gives them different political meaning, from the totalitarian insanity of the Axis leaders to the carelessness and blindness of the “America First” supporters. Interestingly enough, Dr. Seuss used in his political cartoons some plot elements of his tales for children, as well as his old sketches and drawings. In its turn, his post-war tales are peculiar parables that absorb the political issues of the previous historical period. Creating his images of tyrants, Seuss makes use of the techniques of political cartoons. He puts his human and animal characters into the situations of tyranny or isolationism, that can be overcome with the help of common sense.

Kenneth Burke’s performance at the First American Writers’ Congress in 1935 has been already considered by American scholars; for this reason the paper aims to complement the existing research with some facts and details that have to do with the Soviet reception of Kenneth Burke’s speech “Revolutionary Symbolism in America” presented on April 27 1935 (the second day of the Congress). The paper is based on the archival material stored in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI) – a manuscript of the American Writers’ Congress proceedings, translated into Russian, edited and fully prepared for the press that nevertheless remained unpublished. The volume was based on the American record of the Congress edited by Henry Hart (International Publishers, 1935), but two papers were removed – Moissaye J. Olgin’s report about the Soviet Writers’ Congress and Kenneth Burke’s speech. The preface to the Russian edition written by the editor Sergei Dinamov throws light on the reasons for excluding Burke’s paper. In his introduction Dinamov dwelt at some length on Burke’s text and criticized his “errors”. Dinamov’s criticism makes it clear that the main problem was the fact that the American “fellow traveler” used the concepts “people” (narod) and “national spirit” (narodnost’) which at the moment were on the agenda in the USSR due to the Popular Front policy. Kenneth Burke’s speech “Revolutionary Symbolism in America” at the First American Writers’ Congress, translated into Russian by Tatiana A. Pirusskaia, is published herewith as an addendum to the essay.

The paper is dedicated to the famous Russian Latin Americanist Vera Nikolaevna Kuteishchikova (1919–2012), who became the second Russian woman after A. Kollontai to be awarded with the Mexican Order of the Aztec Eagle for her merits in the study of Mexican literature. However, V. Kuteishchikova’s specialization was not limited to the Mexican literature; her academic interests included a wide range of issues. The paper demonstrates that she laid the foundations for the scientific study of Latin American literature in Russia and outlined the ways for further research in the field. Therefore, V. Kuteishchikova’s life and work are considered in an inseparable context with the development of Latin American literary studies in Russia. The list of the Russian editions and translations of Latin American writers and the number of critical works published before the 1960s clearly confirm the fact that until then Latin American literary studies did not exist as an independent branch of philological science in Russia, since Russian scholars had a very vague notion of the Latin American literature. The first research work in philology on the Latin American literature was the monograph by V.N. Kuteishchikova Latin American Novel in the XX century (1964). The paper pays special attention to this significant work. An analysis of this book proves that its author identified and revealed a number of essential topics and problems that would be center of Latin American studies in Russia. With an amazing sagacity V.N. Kuteishchikova mapped out a program for Latin American studies for half a century ahead. These ideas were developed in her work in 1970s, in particular, in New Latin American Novel (1976), co-written with her husband, L.S. Ospovat. The paper traces the participation of V.N. Kuteishchikova in the creation of the academic five-volume History of Latin American Literatures; analyzes her last book Moscow – Mexico – Moscow. A Lifelong Road (2000), gives a spiritual portrait of the Russian scholar.

In 2020 the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the American poet and essayist Louise Glück. Glück was recognized “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”. Born in 1943 in New York, Louise Glück belongs to the poetic generation of the late 1960s – 1970s with their balancing between describing personal experience and an exact reproduction of the external world. The paper includes the analysis of the imagery in Glück’s poetry: it considers the ways mythological characters and archetypes transmit ‘universal’ through ‘individual’. The paper mentions the most representative poems and essays by Louise Glück, outlines the peculiarities of her work and her creative evolution, demonstrates the connection of her poetry with the language of psychoanalysis. Louise Glück’s most notable poetry collections are The Triumph of Achilles (1985), The Wild Iris (1992), Averno (2006), she is the author of two books of essays (Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry, 1994; American Originality: Essays on Poetry, 2017). Louise Glück is also Professor (Adjunct) of English, Rosenkranz Writer-in-Residence at Yale University and has previously won the Pulitzer prize (1993), Bollingen Prize (2001), National Book Award (2014) and National Humanities Medal (2015), among others. The essay presents the new Nobel laureate to the readers and traces the poetic manner of the author.

Several plays by William Saroyan written in the mid-1930s reached the Soviet stage only during the Khrushchev Thaw, in the early 1960s. The paper focuses on the first Soviet productions of Saroyan’s play My Heart’s in the Highlands, premiered in Armenian (Yerevan) in 1961, and in 1962 staged in Russian by the Mayakovsky Moscow Theatre. The paper analyses the reasons for such a late appearance of Saroyan’s dramas on the Russian stage, traces how Saroyan’s trip to the USSR in 1960 prompted the staging of his work in Armenia’s capital, which thereon paved the way for its Moscow production. The theatrical history of Saroyan’s work in the USSR is viewed in a wide social, political and cultural Soviet-American macro-context during the Cold War. The paper based on the rare materials from the museum of the Mayakovsky Moscow Theatre, focuses on the reception of the play and its production in the Soviet Union. The director Ya.S. Tsitsinovski strove to transmit the elevated, poetic spirit of Saroyan’s work and find a vivid expressive form, which was not typical for the Mayakovsky Theatre of N.P. Okhlopkov’s time. Its appearance on the Moscow stage in 1962 marked the beginning of the scene history of the American author’s drama in our country. The paper is aimed at reconstructing the theatrical history of Saroyan’s plays in the USSR.