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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 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.

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).

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.).

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.

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.

On July 11, 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird was published in the United States. This novel had a huge impact on American society, becoming the second most popular book after the Bible. The author received a Pulitzer prize for it and many other honors and awards. However, a new book from Harper Lee had to wait longer than half a century. Go Set a Watchman was a sequel of To Kill a Mockingbird, but chronologically it was created first. Both novels were the focus of interest of domestic researchers, while other works by Harper Lee still remain little-known and unexplored in Russian literary studies. Thе paper introduces all works ever published by Harper Lee in USA since 1937 to 2006, and gives the list of Lee's manuscripts which could be discovered in the future. The bibliographic descriptions are arranged in chronological order and contain fragments from unknown works by Harper Lee. The presented list gives an opportunity to get acquainted with the content of “small forms” in which the author worked throughout her life. These are essays, parodies, one-act plays, poems, satirical columns, open letters, etc. The paper is dedicated to the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Harper Lee's first novel.

The paper dwells on the Argentine contacts of the American writer Waldo Frank (1889–1967): two lecture tours to Argentina in 1929 and 1942 and subsequent literary projects. The author discusses the peculiarities of Waldo Frank’s literary image formation in Argentina before his visit: since 1925, Samuel Glusberg, one of the trip organizers, introduced Frank's works to Argentinean readers on the pages of his magazines Babel and La vida literaria. Together with J.C. Mariátegui, Glusberg made arrangements for publishing Frank's books in Latin America. After his first trip in 1929, Frank gained a great popularity in Argentina, became the ideological inspirer of the large-scale journal Sur edited by Victoria Ocampo, was published in the Latin American press and issued the travelogue America Hispana: a Portrait and a Prospect (1931). The second trip of 1942 was significantly different from the first one: Frank led anti-war propaganda and was declared persona non grata for criticizing Argentina policy. After leaving Argentina, Frank did not lose faith in the New World utopia and continued the Latin American theme in his work. The paper compares the writer’s two visits to Argentina, reconstructs the content of his speeches according to his two lecture collections Primer mensaje a América Hispana (1930) and Ustedes y nosotros: nuevo mensaje para Iberoamérica (1942), as well as travelogues America Hispana and South American Journey (1943) and Memoirs of Waldo Frank (1973); traces the evolution of his utopian ideas about the unity of the Americas. The correspondence between Frank and Glusberg sheds light on many joint projects of the writers. The paper uses materials from the Latin American press of the 1920–1940s, for the first time systematizes publications on W. Frank’s work in Babel and La vida literaria. The study is complemented by a brief analisis of North American book reviews of Frank’s books on Latin America and the Argentinean chronicles of August 1942 from The New York Times. A list of the Argentine editions of Frank’s books is published in the addendum.

The paper is devoted to three stage productions at Provincetown Players theatre featuring Eugene O’Neill as an actor: Bound East for Cardiff, Thirst and Before Breakfast (1916). For the first time in the Russian theatre studies an attempt is made to revive the stage productions based on Eugene O’Neill’s one-act plays. The findings in this study are derived from reviews by American theatre critics, books about the history of Provincetown Players theatre and memoirs by its staff members. Provincetown Players’ activity is looked at in the context of the socalled Little Theatre Movement. The full cast of three o’neillian stage productions is systemized. Also being explored is the creative tandem of O’Neill and director George Cram Cook, as well as the playwright’s collaboration with two set designers – William Zorach and his wife Marguerite. Besides the reconstruction of stage productions, the paper also analyzes three early one-act plays by O’Neill. Born in the Barrett House Hotel on Broadway into the family of famous actor James O’Neill, Eugene O’Neill never wanted to act on stage. However the article exposes O’Neill’s pursuit of his American dream about a new theatre while he was being involved in a stage birth of his own dramaturgy. The paper also examines O’Neill’s acting performance, his directorial debut in the Bound East for Cardiff stage production (a co-work with his colleague Edward James Ballantine); the first introduction of a black character in Thirst, and a young playwright experimenting with long monologues in the Before Breakfast production. The universality and continuing relevance of one-act plays are underlined in the course of the analysis of O’Neill’s work.

The paper addresses the theme of the fantastic in Melville’s Moby Dick, or The White Whale. Its importance is underscored in the writer’s letter to Hawthorne, where he mentioned the secret motto of the book, namely, the presence of the demoniac. It is embodied in the figure of Fedallah endowed with pointedly satanic features. An examination of the plot proves that throughout the ship’s journey Ahab was closely connected with Fedallah and acted on his bidding. This mysterious figure has not attracted much attention of the Russian scholars. The analysis of Fedallah’s role in the novel, however, helps to reassess both the protagonist and the message of the book. The paper shows that the definition of Ahab as a romantic individualist pursuing higher values, is inapplicable to the character. At the helm of the “Pequod” was a mad captain possessed by the devil. The assumption that Ahab embodies the principle of Emerson’s “self-reliance” does not hold water, since the captain doesn’t rely on the voice of God in himself, but on the voice of the devil. Emphasized in the book is the theme of revenge as an irrational, blind passion infused into Ahab by the Satan. The analysis of the fantastic element in the novel helps to avoid a certain bias in determining the message of the book, which some Russian scholars define as a protest against the “bourgeois America”. The paper contains a revaluation of the symbolic figure of Moby Dick traditionally treated as an embodiment of the world’s evil. The White Whale in Melville’s novel represents some natural force which carries out punishment for human cruelty, blind revengefulness, and fanaticism.

This work presents to the Russian reader a translation of Ezra Pound’s poems devoted to Olga Rudge. The poems written in 1962–1972 first appeared in the 2002 collection Canti Postumi (ed. Massimo Bacigalupo), and later were published by Carcanet publishing house (Posthumous Cantos). The paper contains commentaries of texts and discusses a would-be ending to the unfinished poem The Cantos of Ezra Pound. A conjecture is made that the poem’s ending could have been written in the style of a lyrical poetic work. Such an ending could have revealed new allusions and meanings of the modernist epic and could help to understand The Cantos as a private diary reflecting the existential experience of the 20th-century man. The paper contains a biographical sketch of Olga Rudge. The author expresses his gratitude to Mary de Rakewiltz for her hospitality and conversations on life and work of her parents, and to the Italian poet, translator, and scholar Massimo Bacigalupo for his advice. The presented translation is the first attempt to render into Russian the texts that introduce the reader to the world of Pound in his late years and his relationship with Olga Rudge. The publication rights have been cleared with the Carcanet publishing company. The author and the editorial board express their sincere gratitude to the poet and publisher Michael Schmidt for his support.

The paper dwells on Ezra Pound's translations of Old English poetry. The essay gives a brief outlook on Pound’s study of the Old English language during his college years, highlights the poet’s interests in a field of Old English culture. Pound’s view on the very issue of translation as an interpretation (that is the reason why Pound’s translations are not literal) is analyzed on the basis of his essays. It is highly characteristic for Pound to reduce the text of the original while translating it, which is due to several reasons. First of all, it is connected with the imagery which was of Pound’s interest: he translated fragments which were compliant with his own poetic voice (the character of the poem often becomes the poet’s persona; a certain conflict is reflected in the poem). Next, it was characteristic of the early XXth century scholars of Old English who strove to “clean up” authentic Old English texts from later insertions, to return them into their original state. Thus, Christian motifs in Old English poetry were considered to be later insertions; Pound, translating Old English texts, removed all Christian imagery from them. Finally, Pound's interpretative translation technique could be drawn from the medieval translation strategy called translatio, which allowed changing the original text while translating it. However, despite taking some liberties in his translations, Pound paid special attention to the sound image of the translated texts. On the basis of the abovementioned, the paper gives an analysis of two Pound’s translations – Old English charm “Wið færstice” (ca. 10th century; Pound’s translation ca. 1904-1905) and the heroic elegy “Sæfaran” (10th century; Pound’s translation “The Seafarer”, 1911).

Truman Capote’s novel Answered Prayers, the most controversial work by the American writer, remained unfinished and was published posthumously in 1987 in the USA. The article reconstructing the history of its creation is timed to the first Russian publication of the novel (AST publishing house, June 2019, transl. by Ekaterina Romanova). Capote’s novel was conceived as a roman á clef; the paper cites the names of the writers who influenced Capote and his Café Society literary project. New archival findings – a fragment from an unpublished Capote’s letter to the literary critic Arvin Newton referring to the acquaintance of the writer with Mikhail Lermontov’s works – become the starting point for the investigation of the possible influence that Mikhail Lermontov’s novel A Hero of Our Time could have exerted on Capote’s concept of the “dark comedy about the rich and the famous”, and his narrator P.B. Jones that can be compared to Lermontov’s Grigory Pechorin. Proceeding from various sources the article analyses the publication of excerpts from Answered Prayers in the Esquire magazine in 1975-1976, testimonies of people who became archetypes of Capote’s characters, and critical response to Capote’s work. The final part of the paper is devoted to the negative consequences of the publication: it caused the writer’s depression and forced him to stop working on the novel. The paper also sheds light on the missing parts of the Answered Prayers manuscript.

The paper reviews various interpretations of the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald in both Russian and American critique. A conclusion is made that the idealization of the protagonist is the result of a long tradition of treating Jay Gatsby as both a victim of circumstances and a romantic dreamer. The social context of the time and the place is not adequately assessed, although it determines the character of the central figure of the novel. Fitzgerald’s famous book not only renders the charm of the Jazz Age, but reveals the seamy side of American life in the 1920s. American press of that time was full of news of mafia wars, racket, money laundering, bootlegging, wide-spread corruption of politicians closely connected with the criminal world. The echo of these events is quite audible in “The Great Gatsby”. The paper is, in fact, an enquiry aimed at revealing the real character of Jay Gatsby. It traces his evolution – from a penniless officer who after returning from Europe to New York City agreed to work for the mafia – one of the leaders of a criminal gang. The combination of artistic imagination and historic facts requires an untraditional analysis – searching for clues, juxtaposing facts and dates, checking the words of witnesses and weighing different versions of events described in the novel. The quality and exactness of translation also come under scrutiny: the translation of the novel made by E. Kalashnikova sometimes deviates from the original, which does not help the reader to get an adequate idea of Gatsby’s true nature.

The paper concentrates on Claude McKay’s Soviet contacts, editions and his image in the Soviet literary criticism of the 1920s. Claude McKay arrived in Petrograd in 1922 as a delegate to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International and spent about 6 months in the USSR. His visit aroused interest in his poetry; two of his books – a collection of short stories Trial by Lynching (1924) and Negroes in America (1923) – were published for the first time in the USSR in Russian, their American editions haven’t appeared before 1970s. Claude McKay had vast contacts with Soviet leaders, writers, poets, artists, theater managers. His poems, essays and memoirs about his “Russian pilgrimage” help to understand both his interest in communism and his disappointment in the leftist movement and stalinism. McKay’s literary reputation in the Soviet Union underwent a change during the 1920s due to his evolution as a writer and his contacts with Leon Trotsky and Max Eastman. First he was introduced as a revolutionary American Negro author writing about Black proletariat, and a “friend of the Soviet Union”; however in late 1920s when his novels Home to Harlem and Banjo were published in Russia, critics stigmatized McKay as a “Bohemian lumpen-intellectual” and a petty bourgeois Black nationalist. McKay failed to become a symbol of the oppressed American Black proletariat; in the 1930s his poems are published very rarely, his name practically disappears off the Soviet literary criticism. The paper uses publications of American and Soviet press of the 1920s and archived documents.

James Grover Thurber (1894–1961) is not only a famous humorist and cartoonist, but also an author of sophisticated psychological fiction, a thoughtful reader of Henry James and Edgar Poe, American and European modernist writers, etc. The basic conflict between male and female gender roles, vital for Thurber, is dramatically reflected in the visual and acoustic imagery of his stories. Thurber makes his male characters in a modernist way sensitive to “the sound and the fury” of the world. Thurber’s stories are based on the complicated psychological cases, e.g. the impact of sound on male behavior or the transformation of sound into visual images. The paper deals with James Thurber’s short stories of the 1940s that represent the mechanisms of power. The majority of the stories are dialogues between men and women (usually 2–4 participants) who reveal the connectedness of power and subjectivity. They are usually married couples; the women are housewives. The paper mainly focuses on the stories “The Whip-Poor-Will” (1941), “The Сane in the Сorridor (1943) and “Am I Not Your Rosalind?” (1947). There are some especially interesting cases, including various images of blindness (some of them based on Thurber’s biography) and peculiar “male” borderline states of mind challenging “normal” visuality (intoxication, hallucinations, dreams, etc.). Any rhythm is usually perceived as a source of terror. Thurber’s male characters are especially sensitive to the sounds made by animals and birds which symbolize the intrusion of the absurd into everyday life. On the contrary, women have onedimensional vision and are insensitive to most loud sounds; their mechanical perception reminds the automata of Romanticism.

The paper dwells on Ralph Ellison’s biography and his works, especially on his masterpiece Invisible Man (1952), its topical issues, poetics, the phenomenon of its exceptional success and the way it influenced over to Ellison’s status as one of the biggest XXth century classics and a reputed contributor to the African American and American literary canon. The essay traces the publication history of Ellison’s works, including posthumously released editions of his unpublished texts in 1990s-2010s, that became a result of an extensive research made by Ellison’s literary executor, literary historian, editor, textual critic John F. Callahan. The survey of American and European Ellison studies characterizes the basic corpus of books, academic papers, critical essays, collections, etc., both of the earlier (before mid-nineties) an contemporary period; the most outstanding scholars in the field are mentioned. Finally the essay gives a brief outlook of the scanty Soviet / Russian Ellisoniana – translations and editions, critical response and studies, and stresses an obvious discrepancy between the situation in the West and in Russia, where the Invisible Man still remains untranslated and the amount of scholarly papers, devoted to Ellison, scarcely reaches a dozen.

W. Saroyan, one of the most significant American writers in the first half of the XX century, was always strongly attracted to theater. However, his drama debut did not take place immediately – only when he gained mastery and success as an author of short stories. The legendary Group Theatre (NYC) helped his play see the stage for the first time. The paper centers on the history of Saroyan’s one-act play “My Heart’s in the Highlands”, its creation and onstage production in the Group Theatre. The production united the efforts of the playwright (Saroyan), the composer (Paul Bowles), and the director (Robert Lewis), having become one of the most important works of the Group Theatre. It allowed to essentially develop the Group’s artistic possibilities, given the experience of acting in a “poetic fable”, a style beyond psychological realism and naturalism. The analysis given in the paper is aimed at expanding the knowledge of the Group Theatre’s activity as well as theatrical history of Saroyan’s plays.

The paper makes a survey of the life and works by Phillis Wheatley (1753?- 1784), the first African American female poet, analyses critical reception of her poetry during her lifetime and up to nowadays, shows the way her literary reputation has been changing (sometimes drastically) as a result of the changing bias and attitudes in the course of the development of African American literary studies since 1960s till 2010s.The paper also attempts to assess Phillis Wheatley’s role in American literary and cultural history.

The paper is devoted to The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950, 1959) – the most famous Octavio Paz’s essay, which occupies a central place in his versatile work and gives a characteristic example of the hybrid genre most corresponding to the idiosyncrasy of Latin American cultural thinking. Deciphering the turning-points of Mexican history, facts of culture and literature, idioms and codes of behaviour, and revealing archetypal structures of the Mexican cultural imaginary, Paz seeks to abolish certain national myths, but, despite his own intention, gives them a new life: the literary quality of the text he created favours a crystallization of the second order myths, like the figures of macho and Malinche, the images of the Conquest and the Mexican Revolution, and, finally, the labyrinth of solitude itself. The paper traces the genesis of the essay, as well as its conceptual and textual origins, interprets the symbolism of the title, and points out the French influence: the essay was written in the summer 1949 in Paris, where the poet was living and working in 1945–1951. The paper is followed by the translation of the second chapter “Mexican masks” that can be regarded as a matrix of the whole essay: there Paz introduces the key concept of the Form and a correlated image of the mask that help him to catch a rhythm of Mexican history, culture and psychology – duality, dialectics of the authentic and the artificial, the concealed and the exposed, the veiled and the revealed, of the solitude and the communion.

This paper is concerned with “The Wishing Tree”, the only children’s story known to have been created by William Faulkner. It was written in 1927 for Faulkner’s future stepdaughter Victoria Franklin and published in 1967. Though it has been seen as a marginal part of Faulkner’s work, “The Wishing Tree” provides an aid in interpreting his major themes. It should be studied together with Faulkner’s modernist novels and stories of the late 1920s, especially taking into consideration Faulkner’s deep interest in children’s consciousness. Faulkner pays respect to the conventions of children’s literature, so the story includes didactic elements. At the same time, in “The Wishing Tree” Faulkner experiments with estrangement techniques and introduces several motives particularly important in “The Sound and the Fury”, e.g. desire and the relativity of time and memory. Moreover, in “The Wishing Tree” Faulkner juxtaposes the intuitive thinking of a child and of an adult “primitive”. Faulkner’s children’s story is a quest, taking place in the allegorical space in which wishes are instantly verbalized and words become flesh. The dreamlike nature of the plot provides parallels with “Alice in Wonderland”, yet the whole range of allusions is rather peculiar: Maeterlinck's symbolist dramas, James Branch Cabell’s fantasy novels, etc. The paper also investigates the parallels between “The Wishing Tree” and “Mayday” (1926), another example of young Faulkner’s “fantasy fiction”, a “fable” about a young knight’s quest for love.

The paper discusses the works of African American writers of the end of the 1960s — the end of the 2010s that address the historical past of African Americans and explores the traumatic experience of slavery and its consequences. The tragedy of people subjected to slavery as well as their masters who challenged the moral and ethical norms has remained the topical issue of contemporary African American historical novel. Pivotal for the development of the genre of African American historical novel were Jubilee by the outstanding writer and poet Margaret Walker and the non-fiction novel Roots by Alex Haley. African American authors reconsider the past from today’s perspective making use of both the newly discovered documents and the peculiarities of contemporary literary techniques and showing a versatility of genre experiments, paying attention to the ambiguity of American consciousness in relation to the past. Toni Morrison combines the sacred and the profane, reality and magic while Ishmael Reed conjugates thematic topicality and a bright literary experiment connecting history with the problems of contemporary consumer society; Charles Johnson problematizes history in a philosophic tragicomedy. Edward P. Jones reconsiders the history of slavery in a broad context as his novel’s setting is across the whole country on a broad span of time. The younger generation of African American writers represented by C. Baker, A. Randall, C. Whitehead, J. Ward and other authors touches on the issues of African American history in order to understand whether the tragic past has finally been done with. Contemporary African American historical novel relies on documents, new facts, elements of fictional biography, traditions of slave narratives and in its range makes use of peculiarities of family saga, bildungsroman, political novel, popular novel enriching it with various elements of magic realism, parodying existing canons and sharp satire.

The article is devoted to the origin and formation of the so-called green hell literature — a variety of Latin American tellurism. The origins of this phenomenon are associated with the work of the famous Brazilian writer and journalist Euclides da Cunha. The novels of the Portuguese-Brazilian regionalist writer José Maria Ferreira de Castro The Jungle (A selva, 1930) and the Colombian José Eustasio Rivera The Vortex ( La vorágine, 1925) are considered as a continuation of the tradition laid down by da Cunha. The paper considers typical features and differences in the approach to the material in The Jungle and The Vortex. The genetic memory of the pioneers is analyzed as a means of recreating the image of the rainforest, which allows Ferreira de Castro to demonstrate the inversion of the traditional myth of the American Eden. The analysis allows to bring out some new features in the image of the Amazonian selva, which were subsequently developed and / or rethought by other writers of the green hell literature: overreaching (going beyond limits), a specific sense of closed space, irrational cruelty, chaos of the self-reproducing primordial nature. It is emphasized that not only heaven and hell, but also many other Biblical and Christian images are recoded and desacralized. The Portuguese-Brazilian tradition of understanding the green hell of da Cunha and Ferreira de Castro with its reliance on the personal experience of the writer, the poetics of testemunho, can be viewed as the first contribution to the concept of marvelous Latin American reality.

The study focuses on the adaptation of a politically engaged dramaturgical work from Bolshevik Russia — Vladimir Kirshon’s and Andrey Uspensky’s play Konstantin Terekhin (Rust) — to the specific requirements of Broadway, the commercial theater of the USA, and the textual changes of the Soviet original associated with it. The basic principles of the Broadway theater creative and organizational model, drastically different from the repertory theater of post-revolutionary Russia, are defined — the primacy of commerce over artistry, the absence of state support and censorship, a respectable audience that does not accept radical political ideas. On the American stage the Soviet play was produced in 1929, with the changed title (Red Rust), and the text subjected to changes and distortions. The paper considers these changes in the context of American socio–economic life of the Red Thirties. The discrepancy between the original dramaturgical material and the specific requirements of the American commercial theater is analyzed. The free handling of the text from Bolshevik Russia in the US theater is due to the absence of copyright regulations between the two countries. The process of exporting the play to the United States — via Paris and London — is being reconstructed. Three sources that have carried out the textual transformation of the Soviet original are characterized: the authors of the French-language adaptation from Russian (Fernand Nozière and Vladimir Bienstock), British translators from French into English (Virginia and Frank Vernon) and Broadway stage director who previously visited Moscow and sought to introduce into the text what, in his opinion, Soviet censorship would not allow (Herbert Biberman). The study is based on the materials from the Beinecke Library of Rare Books and Manuscripts collections (Yale University), as well as documents from the Houghton Library (Harvard University), the New York Public Library for Performing Arts, the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (Moscow), and the museum of the Mossovet State Academic Theater (Moscow). The study is aimed at expanding the understanding of the stage history of the Russian drama in America.

The article tracks Howard Fast’s literary contacts with the USSR until 1955, when he met Boris Polevoy, the chairman of the Foreign Commission of the Union of Soviet Writers. Fast’s fame reached its zenith in the late 1940s – early 1950s, the period of the Cold War and fierce anti-American propaganda campaign in the USSR. The paper considers how and why Fast caught Soviet attention, what literary contacts he maintained, how much he had to pay for them, what compromises — reputational, political, he had to make to remain for the Soviet audience “the most widely read author of his century”. Obviously, Fast was acknowledged as a loyal friend of the USSR not only due to his literary achievements, i.e. historical novels, which brought him popularity both at home and around the world. Soviet propaganda perceived Fast’s disgraced experience (in 1950 he was sent to prison for contempt of Congress) as a valuable fact, a compelling proof of his active struggle for the cause of communism. Left Western writers were expected to take part in pickets, rallies, international congresses, demonstrations, and publish their nonfictional materials in the party press. Fast who was a delegate to World Congresses for Peace (Waldorf Conference 1949, Paris Congress 1949), the laureate of the International Stalin Peace Prize in 1953, perfectly met these requirements. Fast’s correspondence with P.A. Pavlenko from the funds of the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art is published in the addendum.

The paper discusses spatial characteristics of two novels by E.E. Cummings in the context of the author’s changing view of the revolution. Persistent spatial patterns and oppositions (e.g., closed vs. open space, circularity vs. linearity of movement) are considered in connection with respective grammar categories of Cummings’ language (e.g., negation vs. affirmation, plural vs. singular). Consequently, the paper argues that the concept of revolution, which in the first novel (The Enormous Room, 1922) was associated with kinesis, overcoming of borders and the affirmation of life, in the second novel (EIMI, 1933) ends up being linked with absolutely opposite spatial, grammatical and value categories, i.e. with stasis, closedness, and ultimately with death.

The paper discusses translations of Poe’s poetry and prose in Russia since 1847 till the beginning of the present century. It analyzes the evolution of the techniques employed and the dependence of the translation on ideological climate. Particular emphasis is made on the impact Poe’s critique has made on translators’ practice. It also assesses ways of “improving” the target text (neutralyzation of obvious absurdities, numerous omissions) in translating Poe’s Gothic tales. The paper contains a comparison of several translations of Eureka.

The paper addresses forms, paradigms, and trends characterizing the reception of American literature by Ukrainian academia over the past decades. The fateful socio-political shifts that transpired in early 1990s have radically changed both the mode and the nature of American literary studies in Ukraine. It is argued that after independence America’s diverse experiences in building workable relationships between an individual and the state informing its literature have been of special significance for Ukraine as potential models for a budding nation. This fact explains growing interest in American literature both for research and teaching purposes, as well as principal lines along which its study has proceeded. The paper looks at the institutional forms American literary studies have taken in Ukraine, major developments and seminal publications in the field, as well as current theoretical frameworks for approaching US literary phenomena

The paper deals with some aspects of the early works by T.S. Eliot (1888-1965). The object of the research is a collection of poetry, the notebook under the title “The Inventions of the March Hare” (1909-1917). In the paper presented “The Inventions of the March Hare” are considered as a creative laboratory of a young American poet, a collection of texts including the primary elements of the main themes and images of the subsequent poetic and dramatic works, an important commentary to the later works being instrumental in better understanding of Eliot’s mature works. The paper presents a study of history of the creative process, cultural-historical and biographical contexts, the poetics of the title, peculiarities of the composition, the key images and themes, such categories as “musicality” and “dance”, etc. The author of the paper concentrates on three central images-masks: “Pierrot lunaire” (“Suite Clownesque”, etc.), “a King-Bully” (“Columbo and Bolo Verses”) and “a Burnt Dancer” (“Suppressed Complex”, “The Burnt Dancer”). They refer to three important “avatars” of the young poet’s personality (the “dandy”, “bully” and “mystic”) and connect his works to three literary traditions: French symbolism, English literature of nonsense and Dante’s works.