RUSSIAN LITERATURE最新文献

This article studies the emergence and development of the iambic tetrameter in Ukrainian poetry. Its genesis and evolution are examined against the background of Russian metrical verse. The evolution of the Ukrainian iamb’s features is traced from 1761 to Taras Shevchenko. The main hypothesis of this study is that, despite a certain dependence on Russian models, the rhythm of Ukrainian verse develops independently: while the early forms of the Ukrainian tetrameter are closely connected with the poetic work of Mikhail Lomonosov and Alexander Sumarokov, afterward the originality of the Ukrainian iamb intensifies. The Ukrainian tetrameter represents a new evolutionary stage of European metrical versification, which is drifting further away from the continental prosodic canons.

The subject of this article is the structure, key ideas, terms, and research methods of an unpublished monograph by Boris Yarkho, The Rhymed Prose of Hrotsvitha’s Plays. They are compared with the corresponding elements of Yarkho’s Methodology for a Precise Science of Literature, the most comprehensive exposition of his pre-structuralist and pre-digital approach to the history of literature. The article shows that the plan of both works, the main statistical parameters and their meanings are almost identical. In the interpretation of the key ideas one can see the development of Yarkho’s thought. This makes it possible to conclude that work on Hrotsvitha preceded the Methodology, and that Hrotsvitha was the first significant elaboration of Yarkho’s methodological approach to literary studies.

Alexander Gorodnitsky, Dmitry Bykov, and Dmitry Danilov are among the first modern Russian poets to problematize and transfer into an aesthetic space the previously unknown disease that has spread across the whole world – COVID-19. Analysis of selected works has made it possible to highlight the general motif of human confrontation with the disease. The figurative system of the confrontation correlates with the aesthetics of depicting war, revolution, political races, duels, or sports matches. Gorodnitsky uses stable associations connected with the image of the Great Patriotic War. Bykov compares fear of the unknown in a pandemic with fear associated with revolutionary time, and also identifies the head of state with a deadly disease. Finally, Danilov focuses his attention on the existential dimension of the struggle, as well as on the thoughts and inner experiences of a modern man.

All three authors are mindful of Russian literary tradition. The sources of inspiration for them were mainly the Russian classics: Pushkin, Nekrasov, Blok. The lyric compositions analysed in the article can certainly be considered as a prelude to the further development of the topic of the Coronavirus pandemic.

This review article considers several studies (most of them written in Russian) on Andrei Platonov that have been published during the last three years. Evgenii Iablokov’s book Children and Adults in Andrei Platonov’s World is based predominantly on a psychoanalytical approach to Platonov’s works. The focus in Robert Hodel’s Native Country and Electricity is on the issue of Platonov’s language. A cluster of four articles that appeared in the journal Wiener Slawistischer Almanach deals with various motifs and contexts of Platonov’s works. Finally, the dynamic transcription of the manuscript of Chevengur, edited and commented by Natalia Kornienko, sheds light on the genesis of Platonov’s famous novel.

This article investigates the evolution of the approach to translating Bulat Okudzhava’s songs into Italian. The first collections of Okudzhava’s poems and songs, published in Italian in the 1970s and 1980s, were characterized by lack of respect toward any formal features of the source text. The translated songs provided an opportunity to acquaint the Italian public with the writer’s work, and were used as didactic material for teaching Russian in Italian universities, but they could not be performed on stage. Since the 2000s, poets and singers have started paying attention to the rhythmic-metrical structure of Okudzhava’s works and trying to reproduce the equivalent form of the source text. This change corresponds to the general trend in the translation of Russian poetry in Italy, with more attention recently being paid to analysing and translating the formal features of the poetic text, in a quest for a “fruitful hybridity” between the source text (ST) and the target text (TT). The first part of the article briefly describes Okudzhava’s first collections of poems and songs, mentioning his famous performance at the Tenco Festival of Songwriting in 1985. The second part examines the disc Alla corte dell’Arbat, released in 2018 by the poet and bard Alessio Lega. The analysis highlights a promising approach to the translation of Okudzhava’s songs, and marks an original technique in the very narrow niche (within the practice of translation) of song translation.

This review of four books describes how recent Slavic scholarship disrupts the world-system discussion that places Paris, London, and New York at the center and relegates the rest, including Moscow, to the periphery. Arguably, ideological profits might be a motivating factor, beyond the economic profits associated with Western nations. As a result, the four books offer examples of how we might reorient the scholarly discussions of world-systems and the center-periphery relationships of a world literature.