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The article is a preliminary study of contemporary Chechen bard Timur Mutsuraev and texts of his songs. The underground bard and active participant of the First Chechen War has become a legend and symbol of the Chechen struggle for independence and freedom. Despite strong anti-Russian and Islamic message Mutsu¬raev’s songs are popular not only among independence-oriented Chechens but also among Russian youth. Most of Mutsuraev’s works are patriotic war-songs glorifying national effort to defend Chechnya against Russian aggressors. The artist celebrates Chechen national symbols, myths and ethos. Mutsurayev’s songs are particular in¬teresting subject of study in context of postcolonial theory.
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The article outlines the aesthetic and culturological context of the inception and functioning of the series “Anna Karenina. The History of Vronsky” (2017) by Karen Shakhnazarov. It describes the transformations of the original narrative model of L.N.Tolstoy’s novel and its relation to the structure of the parable (Gabdullina) and the parallel story structure (Nabokov). It also interprets the novel’s narrative assembly with the documentary prose of V. V. Veresaev as a model of presenting Russian history of the end of the XIX – early XX century.
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A presence is proved in the article of lines of expressionism in the novel of V. Bryusov the "Fiery angel" and in opera of S. Prokof'ev with the same name.
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If one were to single out the most characteristic feature of the Russian theatre in exile, it would be the severe scarcity of everything: theatre troupes were small, productions were executed on a very meager budget, etc. Dmitri Nikolayev’s article discusses the way that Mark Aldanov adapted his style to meet this challenge, which resulted in the creation of “Liniia Brungildy” (1937), a play in thegenre of vaudeville.
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The article analyzes the phrase from the preparatory materials to F. M. Dostoevsky’s novel “Crime and Punishment” published in the seventh volume of his Complete Works in 30 volumes, uttered by the main character of the novel Rodyon Raskolnikov: “Abominably I don’t want to mimic people”. To prove the thesis that reproduced as it is the phrase ideologically contradicts all other Dostoevsky’s texts, including the final version of the novel, we rely on a number of theories that consider text ambiguity in linguistic and literary aspects. We demonstrate that the draft phrase is of a different textual nature than the printed text of the novel. It could have contained omitted punctuation marks, letters or words; these possible omissions are not misspellings but constitute a natural element of the autocommunication format chosen by the writer, that is a fast recording of artistic ideas in a reduced mnemonic form. We arrive at the conclusion that this phrase is wrongly presented in the above mentioned edition and assert that it should be read either as: “It is abominable / I don’t want to mimic people” or “It is abominable to mimic people, I don’t want this”. Hence the mark “/” designating the place where there should be a comma, a full-stop or a semicolon in the printed edition.
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The importance of stenography, i. e. the art of writing at speech rate, is widely recognized in the history of evolution of the world science and culture, politics and economy. The given article systematizes the facts about the writers of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries who mastered the shorthand or used to resort to the help of professional stenographers in their creative activities. Taking into consideration this review the article makes a conclusion about the role and meaning of stenography in the creative process of F. M. Dostoevsky. He was the second writer in Russia (following V. V. Krestovsky) who applied shorthand writing in his literary work, but the only one in the world literature for whom stenography became something more than just shorthand. He considered it to be mysterious and “high art”. It modified and enriched the model of his creative process not for a while but for life, and it had an influence on the poetics of novels and of the story “A Gentle Creature”, it contributed changes in the writer’s private life and provoke the relatives’ interest (stepson P. A. Isaev, niece E. M. Dostoevskaya). In the course of the marriage of Dostoevsky and stenographer A. G. Snitkina the author’s artistic talent came to the peak. The largest and most important part of his body of work was created in that period. Unfortunately, the Dostoevsky archive keeps only a moderate part of the manuscripts with stenographic notes in them. It is described in the supplement to the article.
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The article attempts to give characteristics of Russian digital literature within the international context. Using A. Ilianen's text Pensia which exists in both electronic and print form - as a series of texts published in the course of several years in the social network VKontakte as well as a print book—the author attempts to explore new possibilities of the interaction between traditional print literature and electronic/digital literature.
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The paper is the first attempt to reveal the genre specificity of I.A. Goncharov’s novel in the light of the parodic variety of sentimental travel (“A Journey Around My Room” by Xavier de Maistre). It has been noted that the plot of journey in the work by I.A. Goncharov, which is connected, as it would seem, only with the book of essays “Frigate Pallas”, is actually present in all three novels of the writer, showing itself as a theme or a motive and as a symbolic image or an ideal form of human activity. The author gives a number of examples proving that the novel “Oblomov” can be defined as “anti-travel”: as a book about a man who “did not go”: did not travel through Europe, did not go to the springs, did not visit Oblomovka, did not keep his promise to come to Paris… The comparative-historical method of analysis (historical-typological and “contact”) have been used during the research. As a result, the following conclusions have been drawn: 1) the artistic entity of the novel contains the genre signs of “anti-travel”; 2) this genre component represents the actualization of the sentimentalist tradition in a parody aspect and in part - the transformation of Xavier de Maistre’s famous book “A Journey Around My Room”; 3) the commonality of the two works reveals itself at various levels: at the genre level, the central character and the plot and in the system of characters and in the figurative and symbolic system. The version of the title translation adopted by the researchers (“A Journey around My Room” as opposed to “A Journey through My Room”) does not enclose the character within the space of his home but brings him out into the limitless imagination. The most important of the results obtained is the following: the tradition of sentimental travel, with its reduction of the external space, minimization of movement and actualization of the inner world, with irony characteristic of the Sternian variety of sentimentalism, turns out to be kindred to Goncharov. The obtained results are important for understanding the genre specificity of the novel “Oblomov”, for recreating the historical and literary context, for determining the place of I.A. Goncharov’s work in the history and theory of the travel genre, and for preparing comments for the complete collection of works by I.A. Goncharov.
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The article refers to the phenomenon of Western European, primarily French, and Russian socio-philosophical thought that got a traditional name of “Social Christianity” but in the Soviet times was entitled “Christian Socialism”. Dostoevsky’s “Russian socialism”, as the author himself denominates it in “A Writer’s Diary”, is for a long time and justly related to French “Social Christianity” and to its most famous representative F. R. de Lamennais (Hugues-Félicité Robert de Lamennais). At the same time “Russian Socialism” and all the entirety of Dostoevsky’s socio-philosophical views of 1860s — 1880s extremely remind Gogol’s ideas of his later period. Certain parallels between the two Russian classics are revealed in the article, and it is pointed out that while Dostoevsky’s views are usually treated with sympathy the same ideas in Gogol’s later works are often sharply criticized. The similarity between two writers, apart from certain influence of Gogol on Dostoevsky, is due to their orientation to the same currents in Western European socio-philosophical thought, and first of all to the “Social Christianity”. Both writers shared the key principle of this movement: aspiration to the transformation of social relations on true Christian basis, according to the Christian ideal of brotherhood between people regardless their class position. It was Gogol, along with Chaadaev, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, who more than any other Russian writer or thinker was inspired by Lamennais’s “Paroles d’un Croyant” (1834) and other writings of the latter. Taking this into account a well-known correspondence between Belinsky and Gogol could be qualified as a dispute between an adherent of socio-political utopia and a disciple of “Social Christianity”.
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The paper discusses some major publications dealing with Mavro Orbini’s Il Regno degli Slavi and its translation in Russian by Sava Vladislavich, which in turn is one of the sources of Paisiy’s Istoria slavyanobalgarska. Works by numerous Slavicists and philologists provide comprehensive explorations on this subject. This paper mainly focuses on studies by Bulgarian and Italian scholars.
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This article suggests that the delay of the first night of Alexander Ostrovsky’s comedy "Bednost’ ne porok" (1854) in St. Petersburg can be explained by the fact that the playwright was deeply dissatisfied with the music of Wiktor Każyński, the author of popular polkas. From what we know from Ostrovsky’s correspondence, the playwright was skeptical about Każyński’s decision to use polka tunes in the version of the comedy meant to be staged in the Alexandrinsky Theatre. For Ostrovsky the very genre of the polka was deeply related to vulgarity, something Ostrovsky had always tried to avoid.
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This is the first publication of a previously unknown version of Osip Mandel’shtam’s poem “Ia vernulsia v moi gorod, znakomyi do slez...” (1930, 1932), which survived in the archive of the famous Russian scholar Arkady Dolinin (1883–1968) (currently located in the Manuscript Division of the National Library of Russia). It has come to us in the spisok (copy) made by an unknown person, who almost certainly met Mandel’shtam in the period between late December 1930 and early January 1931. Although the name of the copyist cannot be established, the text as such is remarkable in the way it differs from the final version.
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Review of: "Я очень любил получать письма Марины..." Marina Tsvetaeva. Letters to Valentin Bulgakov. 1925-1927. Prague, Museum of the Czech Literature, 1992.70 p. (Galina Vaněčková Publishing, Editor Marta Dandova). by: Lev Mnuhin
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In 2018 the Decree of the Ministry of Labour and Social Protection of the Russian Federation abolished the profession of a stenographer due to the absence of demand. Researchers of the creative work of Fyodor Dostoevsky cherish the memory of two female stenographers — the writer’s collaborator Anna Dostoevskaya and Ceciliya Poshemanskaya, a modest stenographer from Leningrad that managed to fi nd the key to the shorthand system of the former. In the 1950s-1970s Poshemanskaya disclosed to the public the diary of Anna Dostoevskaya of 1867, the rough copies of “A Writer’s Diary” and “The Brothers Karamazov” and some more pages written shorthand by the writer’s assistant. Th e information on Poshemanskaya and her long-term, broad scale work in the memory of Dostoevsky is scarce. This article gives a brief description of the main stages of her creative career of the stenographer from Leningrad. Some additional details on life and work of Poshemanskaya are available in the documents kept in the fund of historianregistrar Sarra V. Zhitomirskaya (10239-fund). Principally, in the letters of Poshemanskaya to Vera M. Fyodorova and Sarra V. Zhitomirskaya, employees of the Manuscript Department of the V. I. Lenin State Library. The fragments of Poshemanskaya’s letters and her two letters to Vera M. Fyodorova published in the article’s supplement throw light upon the methods of the stenographer’s work and assign the objective to use her experience while decoding shorthand notes from the Dostoevsky archive as well as other historic stenographs.
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This paper proposes a new interpretation of Nikolai Vsevolodowich Stavrogin – a relentlessly intriguing character in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Devils. This reading opposes the very influential line of interpretation employed in works of thinkers working within the current of Russian symbolism and “cultural renaissance” from the beginning of the 20th century. The author argues that this “religious” interpretive tradition contributes to one of the greatest misunderstand- ings concerning Dostoyevsky’s work in that it oversimplifies its ambivalence and obscures one of Dostoyevsky’s darkest insights into the human soul, initially revealed in Notes From the Under- ground and from that time on recurring in each of his major novels. In the first part of the article, several classic Russian interpretations of Stavrogin are examined in order to show their common tendency to morally judge Stavrogin from the Orthodox point of view, recognize his greatest sin in the lack of faith in God and for that reason see before him only the perspective of self- disintegration and inevitable death. The author argues that “religious” interpretations do not explain the mystery of Stavrogin. What is more, they homogenize the complexity of his character and offer an all-to-easy solution to the vital philosophical problem which reiterates in Dostoyevsky’s entire mature fiction and which finds its greatest artistic representation in Stavrogin himself.
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Female types in the publicistic and fictional works of V.P. Meshchersky (1839–1914), the publisher and editor of the “Grazhdanin” journal and the same-named newspaper, have been analyzed. The influence of romanticist and realistic principles, aesthetic and moral principles has been identified. The role of the conservative ideology supported by V.P. Meshchersky has been determined. The paper discusses the half-forgotten works of the author that were published in the 1870s and have not been reprinted for a long time. These works are “Women of St. Petersburg’s Haut Monde” (1874–1879), “Notes of a High-School Student Who Shot Himself” (1875), “Conventionalist’s Speeches” (1876), “Secrets of Contemporary St. Petersburg” (1876–1877), “Caucasian Travel Diary” (1878), “Petya Skuratov” (1878), etc. As a result of the study, the following types have been singled out in the system of female images: angel women, a loyal friend and faithful helper; noble woman, in particular a socialite longing for being totally worshiped; selfish nihilist forgotten about her natural mission; reclaimed woman who turned to the Christian patriarchal traditions.
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One of the most mysterious figures in the history of Russian literature, mysticism and philosophy is Daniil Leonidovich Andreev (1906–1959), the son of Leonid Andreev, the famous prose writer and playwright of the Silver Age of Russian literature. The research object in this monograph is the magnum opus Russian Gods by Daniil Andreev. He created this work from the beginning of the 1930s to 1955; he repeatedly reworked it, rebuilt compositionally, but did not manage to finish it. Three of its parts have been preserved only in the form of drafts. In Russian Gods we are dealing with a myth project oriented on the values of Russian culture. The anthropology of this myth is based on the spiritual (homo religiosus) and creative (homo creans) human potential, while the poetic world takes on the symbolic cross which horizontally indicates the process of history, and vertically – the interpenetration of real space with the unreal (in heaven and hell). The emphasis on the intertextual approach in the study of the literary text was dictated by the specificity of Andreev’s creativity. Its distinguishing feature is referring to “other people’s “words in their various manifestations. The texts of Daniil Andreev abound in historical, cultural and literary parallels, quotes, reminiscences, allusions, literary associations and other forms of intertextuality. He conducts a dialogue with representatives of Russian culture (from the earliest times to modern times) and literature (Alexandr Pushkin, Fyodor Tyutchev, Afanasy Fet, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Alexandr Blok), as well as with Europeans (William Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Charles Dickens, Herbert Wells, Richard Wagner).
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