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The present research paper is dedicated to the problem of differentiation between Tolstoy’s texts and intertextual elements in Solzhenitsyn’s “Cancer Ward” by means of revealing the frequency and relevance of an appeal to the ideas of Tolstoy as well as Stalin, Gorky, Bacon, Pushkin, Herverg. In “Cancer Ward” Tolstoy’s ideas put forward in the story “What Men Live by”, in the short novel “Cossacks” and in the novels “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina”, engender disputes between their characters about the meaning of life. These ideas serve as a rate scale of the events, set the highest religious and moral objectives, influence reflecting characters thus, leading some of them to the adoption of his ideas and spiritual resurrection whereas others to the search for their own answers to the question of being. In Solzhenitsyn’s short novel the title of Tolstoy’s story “What Men Live by” serves as an epigraph; the system of characters is built in accordance with the person’s integration into the dialogue with Tolstoy’s ideas and the cultural heritage.
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The urgency of the work lies in the fact that English culture and literary tradition were significant in the life and creative development of Pasternak. The article is devoted to the problem of interaction of Russian and English literatures in the Boris Pasternak’s works. It deals with the facts of direct appeal of the poet to the creative heritage of English poets and playwrights, special attention is paid to the images of Shakespeare’s tragedies, which manifested not only in the poet’s correspondence with his relatives, but also in the poems (The Decade of Presny, Shakespeare, English Lessons etc.) and in the novel Doctor Zhivago. The images of Shakespeare’s tragedies (Macbet’s witches, Ophelia, Desdemona, Birnam forest) allow Pasternak to describe the events taking place in the family and in the country in whole. They become the topic of Pasternak’s literary-critical articles (Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (on behalf of the translator), Notes on Shakespeare, etc.). They express not only the understanding of the main images of his works, the interpretation of their conflicts and Pasternak’s observations on Shakespeare’s style, but also the reasoning about his own method of translating. Thus, the Pasternak was under the influence of Shakespeare’s style long before working upon the translations of his plays.
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The experiment was analyzed literary-historical, interpretive and comparative scientific method Branko Milanović (1931-2011). It points to the area of his scientific interests, then special attention to the analytical essays devoted to the three Serbian writers: Aleks Šantić, Svetozar Ćorović i Petar Kočić. The first method involves the study of cultural context and historical and political circumstances in which the Šantić, Ćorović and Kočić formed as writers (family background, schooling and later work, the first literary contributions, political affiliation and national work, the adoption of poetic ideas and the creation of major works). Another method is to interpret and evaluate literary texts of the three writers, with particular divisional Šantić poetry, novels and short stories Ćorović and Kočić stories and satirical briefcases. The third method shows the comparative characteristics, the contact links and literary analogies, most of the works of the writers, the Serbian literature of romanticism and realism, partly modern, the Serbian oral tradition, and then Šantić poetry by German Romantics, in Ćorović part of the Russian novelists, and in the work of Petar Kočić by Russian and german novelists.
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The paper points out a link between troubadour poetry and its reflexes in the poetic works of Dante and Petrarch. Also examines the phenomenon and the origin of Provencal lyric and variations of motifs in works of these two poets, considering theoretical perspectives of DeRougemont, Kristev and Todorov, theorist which among the other things deal with discourse of love.
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Some observations are made and some conclusions drawn in the article about the translation and spread of the exegeses of various Biblical texts in Bulgarian literature from the 10th to the late 17th с. The preferences are outlined for a particular interpretaion depending on the age and the literary centre for which they were intended, drawing general conclusions about their place in the translated literature in Bulgarian. The causes for the popularity of some exegetic books at the expense of other works have also been sought.
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The paper seeks to explore the value of silence in theatre and the language of silence, pause and “second degree dialogue” in the works of Maeterlinck, Ibsen, Strindberg, Beckett, Pinter, Caryl Churchill and Sarah Kane.
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The essay is focused on the war experience conveyed in the fiction and non-fiction texts written by three friends and prison comrades, Austro-Hungarian Croats, committed to the ideology of so-called Yugoslavhood (Ivo Andric: Ex Ponto, stories of Toma Galus, Niko Bartulović: My Friend Tonislav Malvasia, Oskar Tartalja: The Traitor). The author considers imprisonment of Ivo Andric during the Great War as a milestone both in his life and literary work explicable mainly by his friendship with young Dalmatians dedicated to the struggle against Austro-Hungarian hegemony and for freedom of the South Slavs whom they saw gathered in the new state with Serbia as a Piedmont.
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The review discusses the bilingual anthology Украински поетически авангард. Антология (Sofia, 2018) which presents artistic texts from the 1910s and 1920s in Ukrainian and in Bulgarian translations. The anthology offers various examples of literary works from typical avant-garde genres (poetry, visual poetry, manifestos), which are divided into the categories of Futurism, Constructivism, Expressionism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and Scientism. The movements and their general positions within the Ukrainian avant-garde are briefly explained from a historic perspective in the foreword and appendix. Thus, the anthology makes a phenomenon, which so far has received only a little attention in terms of research and translation, available to readers in Bulgaria. However, from a methodological point of view, the publication first and foremost presents a classical collection of literary works, which can be regarded as an eligible basis for further analytical approaches to the Ukrainian avant-garde in Bulgaria, particularly from a comparative perspective.
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Through his vision of the theatre and Shakespeare’s most famous play (Hamlet), in the story about the title character of the novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Goethe emphasizes how theatre and play, and poetry in general are just a small part of the comprehensive mosaic of problems in education, personality development and humanity. Accordingly, the writer makes the Man the central figure of the novel, i.e. his shaping and the betterment of his personality. A man can only improve in his work, and in order to succeed he must turn to education. Therefore, we are free to say that what we see in front of us is an educational novel (germ. Bilgungsroman, a novel seen among the critics as a thin boundary between individualism and romanticism). Goethe’s novel had a permanent influence upon the development of German educational novel. Great storywriters of the 19th and 20th c. Loudwig Pick, Jean Paul, Adalbert Stiftler, Gottfried Keller, Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse found it both a role model and inspiration.
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In his artistic approach, Benjamin Britten (1913-1974), the greatest 20th century opera composer, kept to Hellenistic tradition and the role of a choir as an important segment of the drama, specifically opera as a complex scenic form. The paper included the analysis of treatment of choir either when employed explicitly or symbolically as well as the circumstances where the choir actively participated in the plot or only borne witness to its mainstream. With great respect for his famous predecessor, Henry Purcell (XVII century), Brittan always returned to the myth. His heroes were Oedipus or Prometheus now in new robes, named Peter, Owen, or Billy, but behind the outer shell, we find the human nature, the fight between the good and the evil, Eros and Thanatos, the destiny and the action. When treating the choir as a representative of masses, Britten assigned it the positive (Peter Grimes) or the traditional role (Owen Wingrave), following the mythical pattern of binary oppositions. Either assigning it main or ‘ambient’ role, Britten masterly employed choir in his operas, using versatile musical means with delicate sense of script and form.
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The aim of this paper is to connect the work of John Berger, a versatile artist, critic, activist, with other renowened artists, social and literary critics of similar convictions. Special attention is payed to Berger’s novel G., notably to segments exemplifying Berger’s feminist orientation. Berger’s novel is placed within the humanist tradition in social and cultural criticism. Furthermore, the paper deals with other theoretical works of this author. In conclusion, this paper underlines the connection between feminism, humanism, activism and art, and contrasts them to globalisation as the dominant economical, political and ideological construct of modern societies.
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When it comes to differentiation by literary forms, types or genres, the complex examination of individual stylistic methods on the basis of belonging to them is essential, but even more essential is the depth of the semantic oneness supported by the phrase "the whole contains more than its separate elements”, which is especially expressed in the Aristotelian-like coherent texts, having in mind that the degree of coherence itself can vary in terms of genre, but also in terms of author, poetics, stylistic formation. In this sense, the internal and psychologically-refering features arising from or intertwined with the semantic, syntactic and structural aspects of a work, as well as the more complex whole composed of all of them, directly affect the determination of the boundary points between objectivity and subjectivity, its contextualization and its very necessity in given speech and literary situations. Literary stylistics can overcome some of its challenges if it continues to develop in all directions, paying attention to individual methodologies in all types/genres, thus extracting certain conditional universals that could help in the in-depth analysis of literary works in which the ultimate meaning arises from developed coherence and organicity.
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Of all subtexts in Vasko Popa’s poetry studied so far, it seems that the least studied is the one which relates certain poems and circles of poems of this poet to the alchemic tradition. In the book of poems Nepočin-polje we recognized several such links. In the first place, it is the case of the book’s symbol whose basic motive is Uroborus, which has a significant position in the alchemic symbology. Moreover, in the poem Srce belutka we also noticed the relations with certain alchemic texts which are linked to Uroborus and life of a stone which has a heart, i.e. soul. We also found alchemic layers in the book of poems Vučja so. The circle of poems Ognjena vučica, one would say, is completely based on the motives from alchemic tradition. She-wolf is the mother-Earth, and the sky represents the male principle. In the earth, there are processes of transformation of stone and ore into the supreme matter, where the wolves-stones are embryos. In the mentioned cycle we also see the motives of fire, mercury, salt, iron, gold, which are also related to alchemy. In the same book, in the circle of poems Vučje kopile, more precisely in the 4th and 6th poem, one can notice relations illustrating ancient beliefs about smiths, which are again in accordance with the alchemic tradition. We also recognized the meaning of the motive of dew, which had a role in the preparation of the stone of wisdom, as well as the colours denoting specific stadiums in the process of its preparation. However, the poem Raspra o rosi from the book Rez explicitly talks about alchemy.
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On the basis of the concept of “Christian realism” in the works of F. M. Dostoevsky and V. F. Odoevsky the article deals with the biologizing and sociologizing concepts of the human nature since the Enlightenment and their connection with the fragmentation of the completeness and integrity of this nature, its complexity and inconsistency, with the descensive processes in the spiritual and moral world of people and entropy trends in the course of history. It is shown how spiritual laws, that go beyond the field of view of the rationalistic and pragmatic consciousness, transform the social and progressive engineering and planning, bring nihilistic elements into them. It is emphasized that the methodology of Christian realism is universal, associates the “mystery of man” with the mystery of history and becomes one of the fundamental principles for assessing the hierarchy of values in various worldview, ideological and social systems for the disclosure ascending and descending processes in them, the analysis of the elements of utopianism and social Darwinism.
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The present paper strives to analyse the works and ideas of three authors F. M. Dostoevsky („Legend of the Grand Inquisitor“), Simone Weil (The Need for Roots), and Stojan Steve Tesich (On the open road) in the light of their struggle for reviving man’s primordial forms of conscience and consciousness which will help humanity regain ability to resist religious and ethical mutations of the present era. These authors believe that the official religious institutions of Christian church, having cast away Christ’s gospel of brotherly love, have sided with “Him”, (as voiced and testified by Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor) the Satan himself, who tempted Christ in the desert by offering him rule over “kingdom of earth” in exchange for Christ’s submission. Scientific humanism coupled with Christianity’s betrayal of eternal values posited by Christ has stripped man naked of the religious context which gave his life meaning, leaving him/her free falling in the abyss of nihilism. Weil suggests, which is one of her major ideas in The need for Roots, that the cure to the moral plight of modern European humanity resides in its ability to bring back “the spirit of truth”, love and grace into modern Christianity, which is in its present state devoid of these evangelical virtues. Weil and Dostoevsky’s ideas are shared by Steve Tesich, a Serbian-American screenwriter, playwright and novelist, whose play On the open road is based on Dostoevsky’s „Legend of the Grand Inquisitor“.
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Pushkin’s works of different genres have three permanent characteristics. The first one resides in the contraposition of the completeness or incompleteness of the text; the second one concerns a subordinate position of the storyline in relation to the subject (the completeness or incompleteness of the writing) and the third particularity is an open composition. All the three features are three sides of the unique law of Pushkin’s poetics, which manifested a new stage in the development of historicism in the European aesthetic consciousness. Pushkin depicts life as a process; therefore he uses the artistic techniques that help to embody his idea in specifically artistic forms.
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The subject of this research are the two fantastic novels Janko Borisavljević and Sekund večnosti. Considering that Ksaver Šandor Đalski and Dragutin Ilić lived and wrote at the same time, this paper explores the similarities and differences between them. We have noticed that these writers used the same motif of the idealised world and that their heroes have similar characteristics and paths. Also, both writers used the same or similar symbols – symbols of eyes, flowers, water and dreams and a certain philosophical literature as a background of their prose. The similarities among these authors represent the frame of fantasy in the novels and provide a step forward into modern literature. The most obvious difference between them is in the construction of an alternative reality. While Ilić stepped entirely into fantasy, Đalski very often rationalises the fantastic elements used in the novel.
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This paper is devoted to the analysis of ways of artistic representation of the queer strategy, which was relevant in the female rock culture of the 1990s. At first, the strategy worked primarily for the benefit of the image of performers. Later, it promoted their cultural codification. The relevance of the study is due to the great interest of the humanities in gender issues, particularly, in the gender analysis of the text. The study has been performed in order to identify the main forms of explication of the queer strategy in female rock culture. To fulfill this purpose, the following main methods have been used: structural, motivational, and biographical. The paper cites a series of examples proving that this strategy was used in the most declarative and consistent way by the duet “Nochnye Snaipery” (‘Night Snipers’) by Diana Arbenina and Svetlana Surganova. The duet was perceived as a queer due to the biographical myth that was created by both the musicians themselves and their fans. Simulation of the queer image took place at two levels: visual (appearance, style of dress, behavior) and verbal (lyrics). The material for the literary analysis is the first album of the duet “Kaplya degtya v lozhke meda” (‘A Drop of Tar in a Spoon of Honey’) (1998), the authentic version of which included 27 compositions. Based on the results of the study, the following conclusions have been made: the queer strategy in the verbal subtexts of the rock composition is realized through the “floating” gender identity of the lyric subject and object and the poetics of corporeality. The obtained results are of great importance for further research of the gender image of the world in female rock poetry.
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