Voprosy LiteraturyPub Date : 2024-06-07DOI: 10.31425/0042-8795-2024-3-105-121
I. Plekhanova
{"title":"The mystical simplicity of Anna Dolgareva’s poetry","authors":"I. Plekhanova","doi":"10.31425/0042-8795-2024-3-105-121","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31425/0042-8795-2024-3-105-121","url":null,"abstract":"The article conducts an in-depth analysis of Anna Dolgareva’s poetic output: a contemporary poet, she has become somewhat of a chronicler of the special military operation. The scholar argues that Dolgareva’s poetics satisfies the needs of the current era: now that the postmodernist and avant-garde potential has been exhausted, the tragic character of history calls not only for a clear stance and unwearied word but also a radical change of tradition. To achieve such an effect with her poetics, Dolgareva opts for straightforwardness of expression and puts the main emphasis on the mission statement of the tragic hero, who is not romanticized but shows awareness of their responsibility. The critic particularly examines Dolgareva’s latest book Red Berry. Black Soil [Krasnaya yagoda. Chyornaya zemlya] (2023). It appears to be a manifesto of the poet’s idea of the protagonist’s direction in life and depicts the lyrical heroine through her various self-identifications – from the long-awaited offspring of a previously childless couple to a jester, the Fool from a tarot deck. In her reconstruction of the heroine’s personality, the critic examines the main motifs of Dolgareva’s lyrical poetry in the philosophical context of Russian poetry in the 2010s–2020s.","PeriodicalId":52245,"journal":{"name":"Voprosy Literatury","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141374496","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Voprosy LiteraturyPub Date : 2024-06-07DOI: 10.31425/0042-8795-2024-3-13-38
V. K. Zubareva
{"title":"The Stone Guest [Kamenniy gost]: Shifting ideals in literature","authors":"V. K. Zubareva","doi":"10.31425/0042-8795-2024-3-13-38","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31425/0042-8795-2024-3-13-38","url":null,"abstract":"The article examines the change of ideals in the metaplot of A. Pushkin’s drama The Stone Guest [Kamenniy gost] through the prism of A. Veselovsky’s concept of ‘counter-current.’ The author shows that the play’s three female characters epitomize an ideal of the respective period. Don Juan’s three muses – Inez, Laura, and Donna Anna – appear in the play as three principal ideals symbolizing the ‘spiritual currents of the epoch’ (in the words of I. Rodnyanskaya). As a result, Pushkin’s metaplot features Don Juan as an embodiment of a wavering ‘literary mind,’ whose constant pursuit of a new ideal in each given period eventually brings him to a deadlock. This is a depiction of literature emerging at the ‘counter-current’ and confronted with the question of ‘Quo vadis?’ The author also demonstrates that the dramatic cycle of Little Tragedies [Malenkie tragedii] centres on the problem of an ideal influencing the development of literature and history. Pushkin views both categories as inseparable as communicating vessels – an approach similar to that expressed by Veselovsky in his Historical Poetics [Istoricheskaya poetika].","PeriodicalId":52245,"journal":{"name":"Voprosy Literatury","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141374658","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Voprosy LiteraturyPub Date : 2024-06-07DOI: 10.31425/0042-8795-2024-3-39-59
E. Abdullaev
{"title":"Did Pushkin write a review of Baumeister’s Metaphysics?","authors":"E. Abdullaev","doi":"10.31425/0042-8795-2024-3-39-59","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31425/0042-8795-2024-3-39-59","url":null,"abstract":"The article deals with the problem of the authorship attribution of the anonymous review published in Literaturnaya Gazeta on 2 March 1830 in response to a revised edition of the Russian translation of F. C. Baumeister’s Metaphysics [Institutiones Metaphysicae]. The hypothesis that names the author as A. Delvig (V. Vinogradov, S. Kibalnik) is criticized for its lack of proof. The scholar argues in favour of Pushkin’s authorship. The review is considered in the context of Pushkin’s ‘indirect polemic’ with the book’s translator Y. Tolmachev, a prominent figure of the Russian national education system in the 1810s–1820s. Pushkin’s possible authorship is revealed in the stylistic features of the review as well as parallels between the poet’s own works (A Scene from ‘Faust’ [Stsena iz Fausta], Mozart and Salieri [Motsart i Salieri], and the so-called ‘Objections to Küchelbecker’s articles published in Mnemozina’ [‘Vozrazheniya na statyi Kyukhelbekera v Mnemozine’]) and selected paragraphs from Baumeister’s Metaphysics. Nearly all those texts relate to the period of Pushkin’s exile to his Mikhaylovskoe estate, when the poet had the opportunity to familiarize himself with Baumeister’s book.","PeriodicalId":52245,"journal":{"name":"Voprosy Literatury","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141374267","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Voprosy LiteraturyPub Date : 2024-06-07DOI: 10.31425/0042-8795-2024-3-180-185
I. Shaytanov
{"title":"Shapiro, J. (2022). 1599, A year in the life of William Shakespeare. Translated by E. Lutsenko. Afterword by E. Lutsenko. Ed. by Y. Fridstein. Moscow: Tsentr knigi Rudomino. (In Russ.)","authors":"I. Shaytanov","doi":"10.31425/0042-8795-2024-3-180-185","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31425/0042-8795-2024-3-180-185","url":null,"abstract":"Since its original publication in 2005, the book by James Shapiro with the date ‘1599’ in its title has won the reputation of one of the foremost original works of research on Shakespeare. Its factuality is based on a scrupulous reconstruction of the context of one year in which Shakespeare’s work was created and received. Every play comes up, focused at the crossroad of the events where English history involves the everyday life of London theatres, Shakespeare’s Globe newly built among them: Julius Caesar with the Globe carpenters as its first audience; Henry V and its reaction in the Prologues and Epilogue to the Earl of Essex failing in Ireland and falling out with the Queen; how chivalry was dead and empire emerged as a background for Hamlet being written. Shapiro does not insist on dealing in poetics (though a subtlety of penetration is among his qualifications), but his reconstruction of pragmatics in all the variety of events confidently paves the way to pass from the poetics of culture to the poetics of the text.","PeriodicalId":52245,"journal":{"name":"Voprosy Literatury","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141370751","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Voprosy LiteraturyPub Date : 2024-02-05DOI: 10.31425/0042-8795-2024-1-13-34
K. Sultanov
{"title":"Unisolated locality, or A cultural universal in action","authors":"K. Sultanov","doi":"10.31425/0042-8795-2024-1-13-34","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31425/0042-8795-2024-1-13-34","url":null,"abstract":"The author assumes that the former idea of the cultural universal implied the danger of unification for a national and cultural identity associated with something conventional, virtual, essentially spurious, and thus divorced from the national-literary discourse. The exaggerated identification of tradition and the universal blocked a further extension of the semantic space of literature. The article considers the mutually complementary nature of tradition, on the one hand, and novelty, singularity, and a consolidating supra-ethnic idea, on the other: to preserve itself, individuality needs communicativeness, whereas ‘the force of universality,’ according to Hegel, ‘contains particularity.’ The unique and individual qualities of each national literature suggest unisolated locality and, therefore, the universality of the particular. In the specific literary work (A. Kim’s prose) the article traces the author’s predisposition for a holistic worldview that combines a national mode and a universalization paradigm.","PeriodicalId":52245,"journal":{"name":"Voprosy Literatury","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139863815","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Voprosy LiteraturyPub Date : 2024-02-05DOI: 10.31425/0042-8795-2024-1-180-185
I. Shaytanov
{"title":"The aftertext phenomenon","authors":"I. Shaytanov","doi":"10.31425/0042-8795-2024-1-180-185","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31425/0042-8795-2024-1-180-185","url":null,"abstract":"A new collective monograph (this is an important generic definition for the authors), brought out by the Ural State University in cooperation with a St. Petersburg press Aleteya, is their fourth publication devoted to the ‘marginal issues.’ The first three dealt with the ‘author’s crisis,’ ‘author’s failure,’ and ‘the unfinished.’ In the present book a collective effort is aimed at the analysis of the generic forms considered as ‘aftertexts.’ They range from the author’s inscription on the book to various personal documents, critical reaction, and in the broadest sense up to the whole cultural tradition dependent on the text. Most of the papers are devoted to Russian literature in the 20th c. and include a random selection of Bunin’s inscriptions, his marginalia on the book of Blok’s verse among them, Zoshchenko’s letters to his readers, the brothers Strugatsky’s reputation as a myth, etc. The collective theoretical effort does not help much to clarify the term, or to locate it with any precision in the contemporary scholarly discourse, but it wittily chooses it as an umbrella to cover the papers collected in book and considered as variations of the ‘aftertext.’","PeriodicalId":52245,"journal":{"name":"Voprosy Literatury","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139864361","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Voprosy LiteraturyPub Date : 2024-02-05DOI: 10.31425/0042-8795-2024-1-198-203
M. V. Markova
{"title":"Georgette Heyer, history, and historical fiction","authors":"M. V. Markova","doi":"10.31425/0042-8795-2024-1-198-203","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31425/0042-8795-2024-1-198-203","url":null,"abstract":"The review discusses a volume of scholarly articles edited by Samantha Rayner and Kim Wilkins that sets out to present a comprehensive body of research into the oeuvre of the English novelist Georgette Heyer. The book comprises several sections: gender, genre, sources, and circulation and reception. Heyer is the renowned founder of Regency romance, whose work is noted for exceptional attention to historical facts and reconstruction of the aristocratic slang of the period. Her novels, however, remained largely ignored by scholars. The volume’s editors succeed in producing an invaluable compilation enriching the studies of 1920s English genre literature by considering Heyer’s work in the context of post-war culture, with its heightened interest in the Napoleonic era, as well as in relation to literary tradition, especially Jane Austen’s works, but also referencing adventure novels of Heyer’s older contemporaries Baroness Orczy and Rafael Sabatini.","PeriodicalId":52245,"journal":{"name":"Voprosy Literatury","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139802815","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Voprosy LiteraturyPub Date : 2024-02-05DOI: 10.31425/0042-8795-2024-1-192-197
E. M. Belavina
{"title":"An unknown Voltaire and Maya Kvyatkovskaya’s other French translations","authors":"E. M. Belavina","doi":"10.31425/0042-8795-2024-1-192-197","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31425/0042-8795-2024-1-192-197","url":null,"abstract":"Kvyatkovskaya has published an anthology of her poetic translations from French: her book covers works by 23 authors written in the period from the 16th to 20th cc. The collection is divided into three different genres: ‘Poems,’ ‘Fables,’ and the first ever Russian translation of Voltaire’s tragedy Les Guêbres. The latter is supplied with texts related to the play’s reception and the polemic it incited (Voisenon’s remark in verse). Voltaire’s play is devoted to the ever-relevant topic of tolerance and castigation of hate-mongering against cultural or religious diversity. In her anthology, Kvyatkovskaya demonstrates a profound understanding of the original, and a poetic skill in perfect keeping with the principles of the Leningrad school of poetic translation. The choice of authors and their works is guided by the translator’s personal taste and the strategy of discovery: the book features relatively unknown pursuits of renowned authors, such as Racine’s epigrams and Les Cantiques Spirituels, Perrault’s fables, and Artaud’s Sonnets Mystique.","PeriodicalId":52245,"journal":{"name":"Voprosy Literatury","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139803851","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Voprosy LiteraturyPub Date : 2024-02-05DOI: 10.31425/0042-8795-2024-1-116-146
E. Y. Vinogradova
{"title":"Text gravitation, or Once more about A. Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter [Kapitanskaya dochka] and W. Scott’s novels","authors":"E. Y. Vinogradova","doi":"10.31425/0042-8795-2024-1-116-146","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31425/0042-8795-2024-1-116-146","url":null,"abstract":"Walter Scott’s Rob Roy and Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter [Kapitanskaya dochka], similar in plot, could not be more different in speech organization. Pushkin’s speech genre is unique as a lightly gravitating text: short and verb-dominated sentences, compressed action, and a fast-paced narration that avoids lengthy descriptions of material objects. The implied reader’s role in both authors’ novels also differs. While Scott’s reader experiences the events in progress, Pushkin’s ‘incomplete present’ (Bakhtin) does not take shape. The reader of The Captain’s Daughter does not live the time through with its characters but uses their analytical skill to relate symmetrical episodes and images. The light gravitation of the text prevents the reader from immersing themselves into the novel’s progress, but allows to conceptualize the philosophy of history. Part of the article is dedicated to French translations of English novels in Pushkin’s days. The statistical data of the average sentence length in Pushkin’s works and other writers’ output demonstrates that The Captain’s Daughter holds a truly unique place.","PeriodicalId":52245,"journal":{"name":"Voprosy Literatury","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139806014","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Voprosy LiteraturyPub Date : 2024-02-05DOI: 10.31425/0042-8795-2024-1-147-159
A. V. Golubkov
{"title":"‘Anecdotes of bygone days:’ N. Leskov, A. Pushkin, and G. Tallemant de Réaux’s Historiettes","authors":"A. V. Golubkov","doi":"10.31425/0042-8795-2024-1-147-159","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31425/0042-8795-2024-1-147-159","url":null,"abstract":"The article analyzes an episode from N. Leskov’s novella Iron Will [Zheleznaya volya], whose sequence of events resembles a particular anecdote from Historiettes by the French memoirist Tallemant de Réaux. Both stories concern the character’s prodigious linguistic skills: having learned a foreign language in total secrecy, he shocks his audience by an unexpected display of total fluency. The scholar investigates the possibility of Leskov directly borrowing the plot: hand-copied manuscripts of Tallemant de Réaux’s stories circulated in Russia well before their publication in 1834, and as such provided inspiration for one of Pushkin’s epigrams. The study sets out to establish Leskov’s logic in portraying a stereotypical German (based on strong will) and Russian (based on indolence) national character; notably, contemporary critics have repeatedly described Leskov as a master of narrative paradoxes. For this purpose, the article also analyzes extracts from Historiettes devoted to the manners of French courtiers, largely shaped by Castiglione’s famous courtesy book. It appears that the French stand in stark contrast to both Russians and Germans alike, since they typically disguise their true intentions and efforts in achieving a goal.","PeriodicalId":52245,"journal":{"name":"Voprosy Literatury","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139864248","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}