RUSSIAN LITERATURE最新文献

This article examines how the discourse about the re-education of besprizorniki, street urchins, became closely interconnected with the debate around the concept of the New Soviet Man in the 1920s and 1930s. This made child homelessness the ideal field in which to test different pedagogical approaches and the power of either the individual or the collective in the process of reforging human souls. By comparing two prototypical novels on besprizornost’, Respublika SHKID (The Republic of SHKID, 1926) and Pedagogicheskaia poema (Pedagogical Poem, 1933–35), this article analyzes how the discourse on children’s re-education and conversion was portrayed differently in literature, reflecting the changes in Soviet society under Stalin and in the approach to street urchins and children in this period.

The article focuses on the issues of memories and memory in new Russian book reportage. The research is based on work by opposition journalists: Yulia Yuzik (born 1981) and Valery Panyushkin (born 1969). The article’s basic assumption is that in the case of literary journalism, the memory of informants and the reporter’s own memory are the main source of factual data, alongside documents and material testimonies. This memory is subject to distortion and filtration – it changes over time and is subject to social influences. The analysis is based on theoretical works by Paul Connerton, Aleida Assmann, Paul Ricœur, and others. The article also draws attention to the fact that the way in which passages of reportage – which are based on the narrative of memory – are shaped in formal terms may resemble memoir and autobiography. The main thesis of the article is the belief that the role of the journalist consists not only in juxtaposing various points of view (their own, the informants’ points of view), but also in confronting the memories of individual witnesses.

This article presents various ways of adapting Russian texts of folk magic and non-Russian magical traditions in contemporary Russian manuals of folk magic. The analyzed books belong to the genre of applied literature.

Due to the extensive nature of the topic, ten books by six authors were selected for analysis (1998-2012). The main criterion for the selection of publications for analysis was the declaration by the authors of close relations with the Russian folk tradition – in particular, their belonging to families of healers who have passed on their knowledge and power from generation to generation.

Behind the slogan of the “Russian folk healing tradition”, other ethnic traditions and occult practices taken from Western literature are often present. Ways of obfuscating this information include quoting spells from ethnographic publications and esoteric literature without indicating the source, or giving spells allegedly in another language that are in fact zaum'-like nonsense. Such literary mystification allows authors to manipulate the minds of readers, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, to respond to their needs. Deliberate misleading of readers – like in the literary and folklore tradition – arises from the specific needs of the audience and serves the specific goals of the authors.

This review article describes recent English-language scholarship on the representation of money, capital, and labour in nineteenth-century Russian fiction. Reviewing three monographs written by Russell Valentino, Jillian Porter, and Vadim Shneyder, this article traces the advantages and shortcomings of this type of criticism in Russian Studies.

This article analyses the book Veda of Magic Spells (Slavic Magic Spells Book) (2014) written by Ilya Cherkasov, who publishes his works under the pen name of Magus Veleslav (Volkhv Veleslav). The title of the book points out its dual genre. On the one hand, this is a collection of “pagan” magic spells that have been purified by double-faith historical layering, but on the other hand, this is also a compilation of Vedic hymns glorifying the Slavic Gods. There are some texts in the book which have close parallels with folklore compilations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At the same time, there are many texts which are probably personally composed in the style of traditional magic spells by Magus Veleslav himself. Unlike traditional magic spells, in the texts of Magus Veleslav any Christian elements are absent. For example, instead of the Christian “Amen” at the end of a magic spell, he puts the exclamation “Goi!” And instead of the traditional word-combination “the slave of God (name)”, the author uses the formula “the grandson of Dazbog (name)”. The article finds that Magus Veleslav takes a free approach to traditional spell texts, seeing them as material for his own idiosyncratic literary reconstruction of pagan poetry.

M.O. Gershenzon theorized that poetry is a magic action which appeals directly to “the primal myth”. The primal myth in the poetic word is opposed to metaphorical meaning in its rhetorical sense (as A.A. Potebnja described it). A poet sees an invisible world and really believes in the existence of ghosts (Gershenzon stated this in The Poet’s Vision, Pushkin’s Wisdom, Gulfstream, etc.). The magic poetic word of antiquity is no longer accessible to the understanding of the modern reader. Therefore, Gershenzon thought, a scholar / exegete must have congenial intuition in order to reveal the word from under layers of obliterated metaphors. It is ironic that for many decades this view was realized as a metaphorical style of thinking, almost destroying itself. But the theoretical ideas connected with this view went unnoticed (unlike the theory of Russian formalists, who also relied on Potebnja’s ideas about the genesis of metaphor). Gershenzon’s theoretical intuition is based on transference of the properties of the studied subject (the primal myth in a poet’s word) into research itself (attempts to reveal the poetic word’s “spell” through slow reading), making the magic a constructive element of the theory.

This thematic cluster of articles examines contemporary incantation texts – whether literary, parodied, or falsified – from the repertoire of pseudo-healers or neo-pagans. It also explores the influence of mythology and traditional verbal magic on poetic texts, including an analysis of one philosophical-literary methodology that sought to restore to poetry its original mythological-magical meanings. This introduction examines the functioning of traditional folklore magic and the differences between incantations and folk prayers. It takes an approach to folklore magic in terms of performativity theory. It further extends this performativity-focused approach to literary magic texts. It highlights the main features of the so-called “literary incantation”. It concludes that verbal magic has not disappeared from modern culture, and has even mostly retained its traditional forms in new circumstances – so long as the necessary performative context remains.