Opyt — essai. Z problemów genologii komparatystycznej
The article is an attempt to encounter the popular tendency among translators to treat the Russian opyt and the Western-European essai/ essay as mutually equivalent and substitutable genre names. Opyt is viewed not as a local mutation or replique of essai but as a genre endemic to the Russian cultural discourse. Its unique character is predominantly determined by ambiguous semantics of experience and experiment pertaining to natural sciences. This, in turn, makes the genre of opyt particularly symptomatic of the biologist orientation of modern Russian intellectual culture.
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