fiction

The aim of the article is to analyze a number of indicative and interrelated examples of the reflection and duality motifs used in the novel Dead Bruges (Bruges-la-Morte) by the Belgian symbolist J. Rodenbach. The author offers a few different interpretations of these examples connecting them with the artistic and ideological horizon of art nouveau style, with its various genre manifestations, as well as in terms of the realization of its characteristic themes – femininity, death and the afterlife, water, and the urban theme.

The article addresses the peculiarities of Yu. Buida’s autobiographical novel «Thief, Spy, and Murderer». The author arrives at the conclusion that the genre of this novel synthesizes the features of an autobiography, memoirs, artistic commentaries, thus becoming a kind of an artistic prism through which the main regularities of Buida’s artistic world are refracted.

The article regards how the fantastic constituent is revealed on the plot, composition, and image levels of the text of The Tale of Igor’s Campaign.

Ever inclined to teach and preach in literature as well as in life, this famous Russian writer of the 1860-1890s A. K. Sheller-Mikhailov in his fiction and scientific journalism works increasingly focused on the issues of labor and moral education, on the personality formation; he was invariably concerned about crucial problems of pedagogic ethics, about the relationships between school-masters and their charges.

The article deals with the origins of specific features of the US mass fiction - increased didacticism and broad reliance on the traditions of national literature. In the usage of Russian American studies new facts are introduced (popular novel by JR Ridge "The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the famous Californian bandit" (1854), etc.). Fiction of North America, initially oriented to the widest and most democratic audience, since the XVII century. worked out original techniques and principles of the most effective impact on the reader.

The article considers posthumous novels by Jules Verne only recently published in the original author’s versions. Despite the abundance of genre models, themes and intonations, they constitute a certain unity. Motives and characters, well known to the readers of Verne’s‘classical’ works, mix well with original narrative solutions.

The article updates the issue of theoretical and practical understanding of how the reading activity is transforming these days. The author proves the necessity of developing an in-depth content of the questionnaire technique in order to study reading due to its social and cultural value and the current agenda of modern literary education.