Literary criticism

The article proposes a reinterpretation of the title of Pushkin’s novel The Captain’s Daughter, different from the traditionally existing in the domestic science. It is shown that the meaning of the novel’s title The Captain’s Daughter in a small degree is related to the heroine Masha Mironova, but it is based on Pushkin’s play poetics, introducing into the novel its two-dimensional quality and two-part structure.

Spatio-temporal structure of S. E. Neldikhen’s poem-novel Holiday (Ilya Radalyet) is in the centre of the research. Space and time are examined in the aspect of mythopoetics: paradise allusions define the character’s spatial location, the mythopoetic cycle ‘coming into being and disappearance’ forms the temporal model of the work. In the course of the analysis it becomes obvious how the poem-novel poetics is linked with the distinctive features of the author’s worldview

The article presents a wide panorama of consistent types of readerscharacters (in V. G. Belinsky’s terminology – shallow people and Old Believers, people of action and children of a certain doctrine), who on the pages of A. P. Chekhov’s prose and drama works with a different degree of expertise (affectedly, presumptuously, in a silly way, artlessly, passionately) judge the characters, works, literary craftsmanship of I. S. Turgenev, whose life has already expired.

The article discusses a particular type of fragments in the montage composition of Sasha Sokolov’s novel A School for Fools in terms of its structural and semantic specificity, substantiates the principles of the possibility of highlighting it in the text and also reveals a special nature of the montage junction in the novel.