fate

The author of the article singles out the main problem of Bulgakov’s tragedy which is a distinctive feature of his plays as well as of epic compositions and of his personal world-view. The author claims that the main profound conflict in Bulgakov’s works turns to be the collision of fortune and fate generally presented in the world literature from Ancient Greeks to our days. The researcher emphasizes some special traits of Bulgakov’s stories of 1930s such as deceptiveness of fortune, prediction of the denouement in action.

In «The Idiot» by F. M. Dostoevsky we encounter a special genre of an ordeal novel: the hero enters the portrayed world with the mission of salvation. In this article the theme of fate appears of interest for the interpretation, which, being an intermediate concept, has connotations associated with death, chance, freedom, with the theme of the road.

The article consistently traces the actualization of the fate motive in four novels by Ch. T. Aitmatov; his semantic key points are analyzed in each work and the evolution of this text element is revealed.

The article deals with different aspects of morbidity problem range in M. A. Aldanov’s historic novels. The author analyzes both traditional literary functions of the illness motives (their important role in unfolding the characters’ portraits, in plot development) and those peculiar for Aldanov’s oeuvre, where the medical discourse becomes one of the languages to describe the catastrophic epoch of the end XIXth – beginning XXth centuries.