Imagologiya i Komparativistika-Imagology and Comparative Studies最新文献

{"title":"Pechorin and “mirages of the West”","authors":"E. Belikova","doi":"10.17223/24099554/18/3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17223/24099554/18/3","url":null,"abstract":"The article compares the image of Pechorin (A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov) and his possible French prototypes: Franjois-Rene Chateaubriand’s Rene, Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe, and Alfred de Musset’s Octave. The protagonist of Chateaubriand’s Rene - the novel that stands at the origins of psychological prose of the 19th century - is typologically related to the image of Pechorin. The common fate of these characters is dissatisfaction, emotional draining, and inner emptiness. Structurally the images share such typological features as “intimations of passions” and mingled, indefinite, incomprehensible feelings. Pechorin as well as his French “prototype” lives an abundant life, full of energy and passion, worthy of a better cause. However, Pechorin, unlike Rene, neither renounces an earthly life nor wants to retire to a monastery. The religious theme in Lermontov’s novel is not as significant as in Chateaubriand’s, who considers Christianity the only salvation from the “intimations of passions.” Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe and Pechorin share romantic perspective: motifs of loneliness, alienation from society, and immersion in the inner world. Yet Pechorin’s outlook is wider than Adolphe’s, the latter being obsessed with the slightest impulses. Pechorin’s journal contains not only reflections on psychology, but also an outline of other characters and actions, magnificent landscapes, and philosophical reflections. It is obvious that the “Princess Mary” section from A Hero of Our Time is most closely related to Constant’s Adolfe through the themes of a love affair, seduction and play of feelings. Alfred de Musset’s novel Confession of a Child of the Century is primarily related to A Hero of Our Time through the title, which declares the typicality of the characters epitomizing the entire “timeless” generation. The novels by Musset and Lermontov are adjacent to psychological realism, depicting a person through society, time, and history. Pechorin, as well as the French “child of the century”, typifies the entire generation. The similarity of the images of Rene, Adolphe, Octave, and Pechorin, on the one hand, has a general romantic character, while on the other, is probably generated by the works of George Gordon Byron, who was a poet-mediator of French influence for Lermontov. However, Byron failed to provide Lermontov with the most subtle introspection and intense reflection French romatic prose was renowned for. The search for these features may have led Lermontov to the French “reflectors”: Rene, Adolphe, and Octave. The author declares no conflicts of interests","PeriodicalId":55932,"journal":{"name":"Imagologiya i Komparativistika-Imagology and Comparative Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67585676","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}

{"title":"Ivan Bunin’s Middle East and Nikolay Gumilyov’s Africa: Travels Through the “Map” of Literary Techniques","authors":"K. Anisimov","doi":"10.17223/24099554/17/12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17223/24099554/17/12","url":null,"abstract":"The article traces a number of links between two relatively different individual poetics. The poetics demonstrate an unexpected proximity in their authors’ lyrical musings and travelogue representations of journeys in the Middle East and in the neighboring North-Eastern Africa. In this spatial perspective the researcher may see how events and realities, very similar at first sight (starting with almost literally coincidental, “ritual”, scenes of sailing off from the Odessa port to Istanbul), can remarkably match or, on the contrary, completely disagree regarding the techniques of their representations, whereas the very set of these techniques turns the journeys not into simple movement on a geographical map but rather into journeys through the figurative “map” of literary techniques and artistic worldviews. From a source study perspective, the researcher must pay attention to the large massifs of Bunin’s and Gumilyov’s lyrical verses that create a context for both eastern travelogues - The Temple of the Sun (1907-1911) by Bunin and The African Diary (1913) by Gumilyov. Landscape-describing narratives written in the first person of the observing I are deeply rooted in the fruitful soil of the lyrical I self-presenting confessional reflections. Two theoretical problems are in the focus of the present paper. The first is the problem of subjectivity, i.e. the attitude of the first person instance, which plays a crucial role in both travelogue and lyrical verses, to the represented or thinkable object. These relations, specifically emphasized in the post-classical epoch, affect the motif-semantic level of the text structure as well as the genre poetics of this text. The second problem is the genre poetics. They are traced using the distinctive examples of verses by Bunin and Gumilyov and fragments of their travelogues. Thus, against the background of the western travelogue, which, since Karamzin’s times, signified for the Russian author a penetration into a space of high canon, Bunin’s trips to Palestine seem to be an inversion since in the Middle East Culture has crumbled under the pressure from the inexorable Nature. However, Gumilyov’s experiment is even more radical. Regarding all the relative advantages of sovereign Abyssinia, which in this respect differed so much from almost all the other African lands controlled by the world empires, the Abyssinian history and current life were anyway extremely distant from the experience of a European - so that they consequently provoked different, as compared to Bunin, principles and techniques of writing. In particular, this refers to shortages in a personal actualization of the cultural trace and hence to the conspicuous deficit of elegiac forms of self- and world-perception. The analysis is based on a number of diagnostically important coincidences in both poets’ representations of their artistic objects - the mental image of life as a unified whole, the nature-describing image of a leopard (a panther), s","PeriodicalId":55932,"journal":{"name":"Imagologiya i Komparativistika-Imagology and Comparative Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67584758","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}

{"title":"Christian Monasteries of the East of the 6th-7th Centuries in the “Sacred Space” of The Ladder of Divine Ascent by John Climacus","authors":"Tatiana G. Popova","doi":"10.17223/24099554/17/7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17223/24099554/17/7","url":null,"abstract":"The article studies the translation of The Ladder of Divine Ascent by John Climacus with the aim to name historical evidence and facts about the life in Eastern monasticism of the 6th-7th centuries, described in this work of literature. The author uses the term “sacred space” to define the residences of Egyptian monks described by John Climacus. In total, The Ladder names four Christian monasteries (St. Catherine’s Monastery of Sinai, the Raifa Monastery, the Lavra of St. Savva the Sanctified, and the Tavennisi Monastery), Scetis, five places of monastic seclusion near St. Catherine’s Monastery of Sinai (Fola, Siddin, Arsilaia, and two unnamed places: the residence of St. Stephen on Mount Sinai and the residence of Isychii on Mount Khoriv). The names of three monasteries included in the “sacred space” are not given, though The Ladder contains vivid pictures of the life there. These are: 1) a monastery in Asia, where St. Acacius of Sinai lived; 2) a monastery in Pontus, where St. John the Silent lived; 3) a monastery near Alexandria, which plays the key role in the “sacred space” of The Ladder. This monastery owned a lavra and a metochion, used a prison. The name of the hegumen of this monastery is also unknown, though The Ladder presents him as an ideal collective vision of a senior priest: a sheperd, father, teacher, judge, doctor, helmsman, and artist. The symbolic key to understanding The Ladder is the Parable about the Good Shepherd and the Mercenary. The traits of a “good shepherd” The Ladder are epitomized by an anonymous hegumen of an anonymous monastery. Concealing the name of the hegumen, John Climacus names the monks who lived in this monastery (Isidore, Lawrence, Avvakir, Macedonian, Mina). In total, there were 330 monks, besides those were in the lavra or metochion. John Climacus privides a vibrant description of the life in this monastery, which he observed for two month, paying special attention to the description of the monastery prison. The monks voluntarily doom themselves to suffering in the prison, with their torments making the deepest impression on the medieval reader. These images can be found in various types of fine arts, in Byzantine hymnography and in other literary monuments, for example, in the “Testament” of the Kiev Metropolitan Constantine I, who ordered not to bury his body after death, but to drag it out to the wasteland and leave it to be torn apart by the street dogs. The question remains why the name of a huge monastery near Alexandria, whose hegumen enjoyed undoubted spiritual authority, has not been mentioned in The Ladder. Probably, the monastery was the spiritual center of Monothelitism, so that it was cursed and deleted from all sources, including The Ladder. The author declares no conflicts of interests.","PeriodicalId":55932,"journal":{"name":"Imagologiya i Komparativistika-Imagology and Comparative Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67585289","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}

{"title":"Turandot by Carlo Gozzi in the Russian theatre reception of the 1910-1920s","authors":"Nazrin R. Afandiyeva","doi":"10.17223/24099554/18/8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17223/24099554/18/8","url":null,"abstract":"The article discusses the staging of the play Turandot by C. Gozzi in Russia in the 1910-1920s. The reasons why Russian directors turned to the play of C. Gozzi at that time were determined by the theatre aesthetics of the Silver Age, when the plots of the Italian comedy and its characters were perceived as a manifestation of a pure comedy aesthetics. The author analyses the productions by Fyodor Komissarzhevsky in 1912 and Evgeniy Vakhtangov in 1922 and concludes that Komissarzhevsky brought the comedy of masks closer to the comedy of characters, which resulted in an aesthetically contradictory rendition, while Vakhtangov rendered Turandot as an ironic fairy tale, in which actors did not play the characters, but the actors of a Venetian theatre troupe who played the comedy. Vakhtangov’s rendition of Princess Turandot premiered on February 28, 1922 at the Third Studio of the Moscow Art Theater. The author describes the cast, analyses the specificity of literary and stage interpretation of the play and reflects on Vakhtangov’s concept of the theater-holiday, the methods of “detachment”, stage grotesque, self-parody, and modernizing the improvisational text. The article also shows the critical reception of the production, drawin on the memoirs of the actor Boris Zakhava, who performed the role of Khan Timur in Vakhtangov’s production. In concludion, the author speaks about the influence of Vakhtangov’s production on the work of Evgeny Schwartz and directing of Svetlana Obraztsova and Georgy Tovstonogov. The author declares no conflicts of interests.","PeriodicalId":55932,"journal":{"name":"Imagologiya i Komparativistika-Imagology and Comparative Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67585365","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}

{"title":"Sleep of Reason: Existential Motifs in Vasily Shukshin’s Story “Thoughts”","authors":"A. Kulyapin","doi":"10.17223/24099554/17/15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17223/24099554/17/15","url":null,"abstract":"Shukshin’s characters tend to reflect on problems that cannot be called otherwise than philosophical. For example, in the film There Is Such a Lad, the characters indulge in arguments about death, love, and the meaning of life more than once. So, already in Shukshin’s early works, two poles - love and death - that determine the themes of his characters’ philosophical reflections were identified. Despite the abundance of thanatological motifs and symbols in the film, the director rejects the philosophy of pessimism. The final phrase of the film is permeated with a life-affirming pathos: “So, we will live!” Later, Shukshin became less optimistic. The feeling of the total loss of meaning, characteristic of the heroes of Shukshin’s stories of the late 1960s -early 1970s, turned out to be akin to an existentialist experience of the absurdity of being. Night memories and reflections of Matvey Ryazantsev, the protagonist of the story “Thoughts”, provoke the accordion of the enamored Kolka Malashkin. The completely non-melodic sounds of Kolka’s accordion are functionally akin to the alarming hum of the alarm bell with the invariably accompanying screams. Kolka Malashkin not only violates public order, he also breaks the unconsciously automatic order of existence of his fellow villagers. The radical change in the outlook of Matvey Ryazantsev, who has followed social rituals all his life, begins with surprise, with the discovery of the strange in the usual. Matvey Ryazantsev’s nocturnal thoughts about love and death are close to the philosophy of Nietzsche and Camus, and also organically correlate with the concept of Shklovsky. The most important semantic core of the story “Thoughts” is the motif of haymaking. Three scenes of haymaking simulate three types of attitude to life. It is senseless to hope to continue to exist in the memory of descendants. Human life is like a fleeting footprint on the grass. A purely utilitarian approach to absolutely everything is absurd. Matvey Ryazantsev appears in the story as a modern Sisyphus with his meaningless work. And only the “wild delight” of the memorable night, when the thirteen-year-old Motka reaches the Nietzschean “Dionysian ideal”, is able to justify the absurdity and tragedy of human existence. Without waiting for Kolka’s accordion on one of the nights, Matvey falls into despondency, returns to a boring routine. If in the film There Is Such a Lad death is reincarnated into love, in the story “Thoughts” everything is the other way around, love turns into death. For Kolka, marriage, in his own words, is not the beginning of a new life, but a stop, the end of the road. The final “terrifying silence” is the silence of death. The author declares no conflicts of interests.","PeriodicalId":55932,"journal":{"name":"Imagologiya i Komparativistika-Imagology and Comparative Studies","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67584878","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}

{"title":"Between Dostoevsky and Thomas Mann: Saint Petersburg-Venetian Texts of Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski’s White Night of Love","authors":"Leonid A. Maltsev","doi":"10.17223/24099554/17/17","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17223/24099554/17/17","url":null,"abstract":"The author explores the architectonics of Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski’s novel White Night of Love. The author addresses complex research problems related to the system of intertextual correlations between the novel as such and the internal structure of the text. In the first part of the novel, Herling-Grudzinski converses with the 19th-century Russian literature, primarily with Dostoevsky and Chekhov. Herling-Grudzinski creates intertextual links when reflecting on the moral and psychological conceptions of Russian literature: “No other literature has such a strong belief in the power of love as a cure”. The author establishes correlations between the interpretation of this idea in Herling-Grudzinski’s text and the concept of the “sacred”/“healing” Russian literature formulated by Thomas Mann in his Tonio Kroger. The author holds that the interpretation of Dostoevsky’s White Nights in Herling-Grudzinski’s White Nights of Love served as a basis for the transformation of the Saint Petersburg text of the latter. In White Nights, the image of time is created by the Dreamer’s ideas about the fleetingness of happiness, whereas in White Night of Love the protagonist Lukasz Kleban professes total happiness. Psychological contradictions of Dostoevsky’s characters, most accurately expressed, according to Herling-Grudzinski, in the novels White Nights and Notes From the Underground, are projected on the existential psychology of the protagonist, whose happiness is overshadowed by the feelings of guilt and fear of death. The intertextuality of the second part of the novel is achieved by the artistic interpretation of the Venetian text presented by Urszula Kleban, one of the characters of the novel. She reflects on Venetian motifs in the works of Henry James and Hugo von Hoffmannsthal, as well as on the painting The Tempest by the Venetian painter Giorgione. Although Herling-Grudzinski considered Mann’s Death in Venice to be overrated, the texts of Herling-Grudzinski’s and Mann’s novels are indispensable parts of a complex dialogue. In both works, Venice is the topos of the liminal test, reflecting the mythological universality of Venice as a city located between land and sea, East and West, life and death. The main difference between the two compared texts is the image of Venice and Venetians. In Mann’s novel, the protagonist Gustav von Aschenbach obscures the image of Venice, portraying the city as if seen by a tourist and based on stereotypes. In Herling-Grudzinski’s text, the comic Tonino Tonini personifies the spirit of Venice. Tonino’s image is psychologically complex because of the coexistence of two egos - the carnival mask of Harlequin and the underlying introspective self. A combination of these two personalities is the epitome of a universal metaphysical metaphor of Venice as a theatre city. The author concludes that the dichotomous structural principle of Herling-Grudzinski’s text is revealed by the system of binary oppositions: Saint Petersburg - V","PeriodicalId":55932,"journal":{"name":"Imagologiya i Komparativistika-Imagology and Comparative Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67584955","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}

{"title":"The Kingdom of Naples and Russia at the Beginning of the 19th Century: Based on the Correspondence of the Bulgakov Brothers","authors":"I. A. Poplavskaya","doi":"10.17223/24099554/17/9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17223/24099554/17/9","url":null,"abstract":"The article examines the activities of the Russian diplomatic mission in Naples in 1802-1808 based on the correspondence between brothers Alexander and Konstantin Bulgakov. In accordance with the tropological methodology of the historian Hayden White, tragic and novel metanarratives are distinguished in describing the relationship between the Kingdom of Naples, Russia, and the countries of Western Europe at the beginning of the 19th century. The narration of the events in accordance with the tragic plot reveals the confrontation between the hero and the world, Napoleon and the coalition of European states led by Austria, Britain, and Russia. At the same time, the transformation of the tragedy into the novel in historical terms presupposes a change in the established world order after the end of the era of the Napoleonic Wars, which the decisions of the Congress of Vienna consolidated in 18141815. The basis of the plot in the selected metanarratives is the life of Ferdinand IV, the king of Naples, and his family; Napoleon’s military actions in Italy; diplomatic and military assistance to Naples from Russia and the life of Russians in Naples and Palermo; the events of the Patriotic War of 1812; the messianic role of Emperor Alexander in the victory over Napoleon’s army. The influence of the actions of the allied forces in 1813-1815 and the decisions of the Congress of Vienna on the emergence of national liberation movements in Italy and the subsequent unification of the country is revealed. The spatial centers of the Bulgakovs’ epistolary works are Naples, Palermo, Rome, the capitals of four empires (Paris, Vienna, London, Petersburg), and related historical figures (King Ferdinand IV and his wife Maria Carolina of Austria (sister of Marie Antoinette, the French queen), Napoleon, Joseph Bonaparte, Joachim Murat, Austrian Emperor Francis II, Russian Emperor Alexander I, Pope Pius VII, Admiral and Secretary of State of the Kingdom of Naples John Acton, Russian envoys in Naples and Rome A.Ya. Italinsky and sine, and others. The article analyzes the conceptual sphere and poetics of the “Neapolitan” text of Russian literature. In the letters, the image of Naples is presented through the situation of a meeting of Southern and Northern Europe, Naples and Petersburg, monarchy and republic, Catholicism and Orthodoxy, history and modernity. Naples is perceived as a special communicative space associated with the diplomatic activities of both brothers, with their circle of communication, and aesthetically with a private letter as a kind of an ego-document. The perception of Naples as an island state, as an “earthly paradise at the foot of a volcano”, as a city of the Lazzaroni and carnival culture brings the correspondence between the Bulgakov brothers close with descriptions of this city in Russian travelogues of the late 18th - first third of the 19th centuries. The author declares no conflicts of interests.","PeriodicalId":55932,"journal":{"name":"Imagologiya i Komparativistika-Imagology and Comparative Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67585346","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}

{"title":"Russian Nihilism as a Source of American Objectivism (Book Review: Weinacht, A. (2021) Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Ayn Rand: Russian Nihilism Travels to America. Lanham: Lexington Books. 167 p.)","authors":"A. Grigorovskaya","doi":"10.17223/24099554/17/18","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17223/24099554/17/18","url":null,"abstract":"The review discusses a monograph Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Ayn Rand: Russian Nihilism Travels to America by Aaron Weinacht, an American scholar, historicist, professor of the University of Montana Western. The book explores the intellectual history of nihilism, important in different periods for both Russia and the USA, by the example of two authors. The attention is focused on the historiographical apparatus of the research, its scholarly relevance and novelty, basic methodological principles in the analysis of the phenomenon. The author declares no conflicts of interests","PeriodicalId":55932,"journal":{"name":"Imagologiya i Komparativistika-Imagology and Comparative Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67585574","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}

{"title":"Motherland in the Philosophy of Eurasianism","authors":"E. Ponomarev","doi":"10.17223/24099554/17/13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17223/24099554/17/13","url":null,"abstract":"The article is dedicated to one of the basic ideas of the philosophic movement of Eurasianism - the idea of the Motherland. Unlike the other philosophical trends of the first wave of emigration, Eurasians were the only ones who understood the Fatherland not speculatively, but geographically. Eurasians could be called the first political scientists of the Russian philosophical tradition: they tried to predict the political situation in the abandoned Russia in order to build a new state on the ruins of Bolshevism in the future. They formed the concept of the Motherland from four components: a historically formed territory, power for possession of the territory, religion (Orthodoxy), and culture (common for the entire middle Eurasia, which was yet to be created on the basis of Russian culture). The author of the article insists on the fact that the idea of a common culture was reduced to declarations and was not developed by the participants in the movement. Besides, the theme of culture exposes some structural contradictions in the Eurasian theory (it contradicts the anti-colonial pathos of some works and looks retrograde against the background of innovative political forecasts). Eurasians’ religious themes were also poorly developed, some participants in the movement even ignored the subject. Detailed historical, economic, and national issues did not remove the general “narrowness” of the theory: the Motherland was uniquely defined only as mestorazvitie [local development] (P.N. Savitsky’s term), which created a contradiction Eurasians did not feel: in the domestic policy, in modern terms, they were globalists who insisted on the victory of the centripetal forces in the “Ocean of Eurasia”; in the foreign policy, they were anti-globalists who seriously believed that a closed (but large) economic system is more efficient than a global one. This contradiction brings us to the main semantic gap of the Eurasian theory: all the creators of this doctrine refused to understand that, for the “middle lands” of Eurasia, Russian culture and the Russian language, in one way or another, represented the language and culture of the colonialists. They simply did not see this significant problem, looking at Eurasia with Russian eyes and insisting that the Russian people in Eurasia were then “the first among equals”. In addition, the concept of mestorazvitie created a negative assessment for all who had dropped out of their own “local development”. Emigration, thus, became the periphery of the Russian and Eurasian idea, meaningless from the point of view of the processes taking place in the Motherland. For this reason, in the author’s opinion, Eurasianism was doomed to an early decline: the ideas of Eurasianism lost their vitality as soon as the emigration realized (in the late 1920s - early 1930s) that there was no way back to Russia. The author declares no conflicts of interests.","PeriodicalId":55932,"journal":{"name":"Imagologiya i Komparativistika-Imagology and Comparative Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67584770","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}

{"title":"Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club: Reconsidering the Image of China within Chinese American Discourse","authors":"Tatyana V. Vechorynska","doi":"10.17223/24099554/17/16","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17223/24099554/17/16","url":null,"abstract":"The article discusses the image of China as an integrant part of Amy Tan’s writings. The imagological approach to the study of Chinese American discourse, as well as discussion of the semantics and poetics of hetero-images and auto-images of Chineseness, American Chineseness, Ameri-canness, provides a comprehensive understanding of the writer’s artistic concept in representing the changing nature of the Chinese American identity. At the same time, the article seeks to open new vistas in Chinese American discourse, to focus on intrinsic textual peculiarities beyond the extrinsic ethnocentric concepts of cultural hybridity and Orientalism, which have been prevalent in academic literary surveys during the latter half of the twentieth century. A comparative approach based on imagology theory allows investigating the multiple dimensions of the ambivalent Chinese American identity through revealing the core images implicitly present in all Amy Tan’s novels. Within American circumstances, the problem of the other cultural background for Chinese American writers constitutes an essential part of their creative quest. The article thus highlights the mechanisms of literary representation of the image of China and explores the ways of artistic literary textualization of Chinese cultural facts. By considering such categories as Chineseness, American Chineseness, and Americanness through the lens of literary imagology, the article provides an interpretation of the Self and the Other distinction in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. It is argued that the image of China in this novel cannot be viewed as otherness, but as the other Self. The Joy Luck Club is not just a family saga on the life of people of Chinese origin in the American circumstances but also a true representation of a conflict between the knowledge about the world possessed by Chinese mothers and the “American knowledge” of their American-born daughters. The novel represents mutual self-reflected images of the East and the West. The imagological analysis provides grounds for concluding that the novel is not about the distinction between the Self and the Other, but about a world that protagonists can no longer consider either own or alien since it is both for them. In The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan considers problems that reveal the fundamental issues of Chinese American literary and critical discourse: the role of Chinese culture within Chinese American identity, the Self versus the Other, the national and the transnational. The author declares no conflicts of interests.","PeriodicalId":55932,"journal":{"name":"Imagologiya i Komparativistika-Imagology and Comparative Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67584946","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}