RUSSIAN LITERATURE最新文献

This article systematises and analyses parodies of East Slavic incantations and charms. Although these texts sporadically came to the attention of folklore researchers in pre-revolutionary Russia (N.I. Nadezhdin, P.S. Efimenko) and the Soviet Union (G.S. Vinogradov, J.I. Smirnov), they have rarely been viewed as parodies of real-life verbal magic. This was due partly to lack of study into incantations and charms, and partly to the ideology of official Soviet folkloristics, which pushed to ignore research into East Slavic magic practices and declared them gone irrevocably into the past. The article gives an overview of the characteristics of incantation parodies common in oral folklore. This is supplemented by a description and study of two works of fiction by A.P. Chekhov (‘Home Remedies’) and M.M. Zoshchenko (‘The Medic’), which make playful deformations of oral and written incantations against illnesses combined with various ceremonial actions. The article also analyses parodic incantations which emerged from the “energetic” rituals developed and promoted by V. Dolokhov and V. Gurangov as part of a popular esoteric “psychotraining” programme. Finally, the article elucidates the mechanisms determining the origins of parodic incantations and charms that can be found in Internet folklore.

This article discusses the language of world-famous nineteenth-century Russian texts from the perspective of a linguist. The main source material is ‘Fatalist’, the final part of the novel A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov. ‘Fatalist’ is analyzed in a broader context of data provided by the Russian National Corpus, which spans the whole period of the development of Russian literary language and is not limited to one writer. It is shown that the Russian language of the early nineteenth century, usually regarded as comprehensible and rather “modern”, has become so distant from contemporary Russian that in many cases linguistic commentaries are required. The article illustrates this issue with four fragments of ‘Fatalist’ that might not be lucid enough for speakers of twenty-first-century Russian and are therefore likely to be misinterpreted. It is not merely a matter of lost realities of the past, but of fundamental changes within the language – word formation, syntax, lexicon, and constructions. These linguistic shifts are gradually alienating nineteenth-century literature from new generations of readers.

The first publication of Alexey Kruchenykh’s album “zzZudo” (1921 – 1927, 1962 – 1964). The publication is accompanied by a scholarly commentary and an introductory article. The introductory article explores the constructive principles of the Futurist album, the correlation of the temporal and semantic levels of the text, the etymology of the title, and the linguistic experiments of Alexey Kruchenykh.

Kruchenykh’s archive should be considered a cultural institution and at the same time an artistic practice. However, the concept of “archive” in relation to Kruchenykh’s creative phenomenon is rather conditional, because its components are dispersed around various Russian and foreign private and state repositories.

Kruchenykh’s albums are a separate “archive in the archive”: a superarchive. This superarchive was of crucial importance for the literary process in Russia from the 1930s to the end of the 1960s. Kruchenykh’s archival practices were not only a “refuge”, a marginal niche, but they were also connected with official culture through various social and individual channels. The albums acquired new functions and became meeting places for authors and audiences. Events were documented in the form of chronicles, reports, and memoirs in the albums themselves.

This article looks at the reception of Kruchenykh’s archive in the light of the metaphorical performativity of the writer’s “archival behavior”.

The cult of Pushkin, begun in the late nineteenth century and adopted by the Soviet regime, continues to be worshipped in Russia to the present day: by the state, by the people, and especially by the intelligentsia. This article explores the phenomenon of Pushkin’s cult as reflected in Tatyana Tolstaya’s short stories, essays, and novel The Slynx [Kys’] (2000). The authors aim to prove that, although Tostaya’s attitude towards this phenomenon has been consistently ironic, she nevertheless retains some genuine quasi-religious beliefs in Pushkin herself.

This article explores the peculiar intermeshing of continuity and discontinuity in Russian culture through the prism of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s essay, ‘Obrazovanshchina’ (‘The Smatterers’). Written in 1974 for the collective volume Iz-pod glyb (From under the Rubble), Solzhenitsyn drew on arguments advanced by contributors to the famous pre-revolutionary work Vekhi (Landmarks, 1909), both as a polemical tool to distance himself from his immediate contemporary rivals and as a template in his bid to establish a new spiritual elite in Brezhnev’s Soviet Russia. This article suggests that if one intention of Solzhenitsyn’s essay was to declare an irrevocable break with the culture of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia tradition, the discursive tools he used to do this (intertextual devices, ad hominem polemics, selective historical and ideological narratives) remained firmly anchored within that tradition.

This paper introduces a thematic cluster derived from the conference ‘A Culture of (Dis)Continuity? Russian Cultural Debates in Historical Perspective’, held at the University of Central Lancashire, England, in May 2016. It maps the place of this vast, diverse, and increasingly relevant topic in current debates by situating it within the polemics of a broader nature – of the existing methodological approaches to studying cultures and their evolutions. It then elucidates the contribution of this ‘(dis)continuity’ cluster to the existing research, with a focus on Russian literary discourse.

This review article is devoted to three recently published books on Russian literature of the mid-nineteenth century. Contrary to the trend already established in the Soviet scholarship, the authors of these books consider the works of Russian literature of this period not as a naive attempt to reflect social reality, but as the result of a complex reflection by the writers on the capabilities of literature and its connections with reality. The books all take different approaches and analyze different authors. Margarita Vaysman (2021) performs narrative analysis of the works of Nikolay Chernyshevsky, Alexey Pisemsky, and Avdotya Panaeva. Alexey Kozlov (2021) describes the literary position of almost forgotten novelist and critic Nikolay Akhsharumov. Finally, Chloë Kitzinger (2021) considers the character-systems in the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.

Discontinuity (preryvnost’ / прерывность) is a pivotal concept in Pavel Florenskii’s philosophy and theory of knowledge. He utilises it in many fields and subjects: mathematics, physics, semiotics, aesthetics, theology, and literature. Florenskii’s universe is a “discontinuous double” in which an earthly and natural state of things is opposed to an upper-world that is ruled by different geometrical laws and is knowable only by abstraction. In between there is always a threshold (a symbol, an “icon”) that connects the two. The general intent of this article is, on the one hand, to give an indication of the main directions of the concept of discontinuity within Florenskii’s works and, on the other hand, to highlight its relevance for a “philosophy of culture” and for a “philosophy of the symbolic forms”, but also – as Florenskii puts it – for a specific understanding of the “Russian mind”. The article also devotes a section to the literary aspects of Florenskii’s concept of discontinuity (less explored by Florenskii scholarship and perhaps by the author himself), which involve among other things a reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and an original and ambitious attempt of interpreting physical space in Dante’s Divine Comedy.