Izvestiya of Saratov University.
Philology. Journalism
ISSN 1817-7115 (Print)
ISSN 2541-898X (Online)

Literary criticism

Illness as a Social and Political Metaphor in Literature and Journalism of the ХХth Century

The article is dedicated to the analysis of the morbid metaphors employed in depicting social and political events of the Russian history of the XXth century on the material of literary and journalistic texts. Aesthetic and pragmatic functions of these metaphors are researched.

Raseya by Boris Grigoriev (the Context of Motives)

The poem Raseya is regarded as a projection of intellectual, creative and biographical experience of B. Grigoriev. It accumulates the thoughts expressed earlier in articles and letters of B. Grigoriev to Maxim Gorky, E. Zamyatin, V. Kamensky and others. His painting’s peculiarity influenced the style of the poem. Its heterogeneous language combines classical and avant-garde poetics, spoken language and inner speech.

P. A. Katenin and A. F. Pisemsky. Continuity and Polemic

The article considers A. F. Pisemsky’s continuing classicist tradition represented by P. A. Katenin and overcoming it in the course of developing his unique writer’s and playwright’s poetic language on the model of a specific drama technique (deus ex machina). It has been established that Pisemsky reconsidered the key figure of classicist theatre from different perspectives: gender, age, space and time, but first and foremost from moral and didactic point of view.

N. V. Gogol’s First Acquaintance with the Works of I. A. Krylov

The article examines the facts of Nikolai Gogol’s biography and his several works which shed the light on the author’s early acquaintance with Ivan Krylov’s works. The material from Dmitry Troschinsky’s library has been used for a detailed study for the first time. An epigraph to the fable The Eagle and the Bee for Gogol’s handwritten journal Meteor literatury (The meteor of literature) has been analyzed. It is assumed that Krylov’s oeuvre may have influenced the early Gogol.

To the Issue of Forming the Reader’s Reception in N. M. Karamzin’s Almanacs

The article considers the aesthetic value of the Almanacs Aglaya and The Aonides predetermined by the worldview core linking the publications – the personality of Karamzin emerging in different externalizations: as a publisher, an author of novels, a poet, a critic and an opinion journalist. The ‘many faces’ of N. M. Karamzin under consideration allow to draw the conclusion on the almanac’s being multitargeted, as well as to reveal the mechanisms of readers’ reception.

A Dialogue in F. M. Grimm’s Correspondence with N. P. and S. P. Rumyantsev: between the Intimate and the Private

The article analyzes different aspects of the epistolary interaction in F. M. Grimm’s correspondence with N. P. and S. P. Rumyantsev, the dialogue role in the written communication and the impact of the courteous tradition on the development of the intimate principle in a pri vate correspondence which facilitated the genre evolution at the turn of the XVIII–XIXth centuries.

A Miracle in the Old Russian Military Novels of the XIV–XVth Centuries

The article reveals the artistic meaning and functions of the miracle in two Old Russian military novels: Chronicle Novel on the Kulikovo field and Novel on the Stand on the Ugra River.

Postmodernist or Neorealist? Literary Criticism of the 1990s of A. Slapovsky’s Oeuvre

A. Slapovsky’s prose cannot fit the clearly defined frame the critics and literary scholars try to set. The article considers their attempts to characterize the writer’s oeuvre, special emphasis is placed on the arguments about the author belonging to the postmodern or neorealist movements.

Culture as a Value in D. Markson’s Novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress

The problem of culture and its purpose is the focal point in the ideology of Wittgenstein’s Mistress, D. Markson’s philosophical novel. The main character overcomes her initial pragmatic approach to culture as a sequence of objective facts in L. Wittgenstein’s manner, and heads towards the discovery of its spiritual significance that helps one to realize oneself as M. Heidegger’s Dasein.

Autobiography or Autopsychology? To the Issue of the Author’s Presence in the Fiction Narration

The article sums up the literary experience of studying the autobiographical and auto-psychological principles in a work of fiction; the borders between the well-studied technique of authobiographism and a more complex phenomenon of auto-psychologism are defined. V. Astafiev’s, A. Solzhenitsyn’s Z. Prilepin’s artistic paradigms are reviewed from the perspective of auto-psychology.

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