Literary criticism

The article analyses the units of time code, shows the ways of their representation in the poems by Elena Shvarts. Special aspects of how this code functions in the author’s artistic world are considered. A correlation is established between the choice of a particular option of the time code and the poet’s artistic task.

The paper explores the genre and compositional features of Paul Auster’s 4321 being the fusion of Bildungsroman, family сhronicle, social and psychological novel, love story, as well as Kunstlerroman and non-fiction. The analysis of the central aspects of poetics and the problems raised in the book reveals the ways of actualization and parodying the traditional genres in a postmodern novel.

The article studies how the artistic works of A. G. Bitov are perceived by the Russian and German criticism. The approaches of postmodern and postcolonial theories to the awareness of the author’s contribution in the development of the Russian literature are considered on the material of the works representing the ‘Caucasus text’. The history of A. G. Bitov’s texts being translated into German is addressed.

The article considers Inferno by Dante Alighieri as one of the precedent texts for the novel The Petty Demon. The author supposes that Dante’s‘infernal’ connotations transform in the novel into the motive of deception which forms the plot of the novel. The motives that go through the whole novel (of mud, swamp, blindness and madness) as well as zoomorphic comparisons and allusions to the first cantos also reveal other aspects of Sologub’s plan and the distinctness of the poetics of the novel.