Literary criticism

The article analyzes the circumstances of fiction and theoretical works by S. D. Krzhizhanovsky being banned for publication at the end of the 1950s due to censorship. For the first time unpublished internal reviews of the author’s works from the archives of the publishing house «Sovietsky pisatel» are drawn on, as well as the materials of the committee on the writer’s literary legacy, and the letters of his friends (RGALI – Russian State Archive of Literature and Art).

The article considers Mlle de Montpensier’s approach to depicting childhood on the materials of her «Memoires». The viewpoint of the memoire writer is analyzed as compared to the image of the protagonist; the significance of the ‘childhood’ piece in the context of the whole book is determined.

The article offers formal criteria of differentiating the military poetry of N. Gumilev from the opinion journalism poetry of G. Ivanov (collection «Fame Memorial»): communicative structure of the poem; the image of the speaker – the image of the rhetorician; tropes preferred; the system of metaphoric models and the ingenuity of their content; figures of speech; the degree of speech being clichéd, etc.

The article deals with different instances of Germany being mentioned in Gogol’s cycle «Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka», as well as the issue of the author’s understanding of the word «German» while working on his stories, and some parallels with the works of other writers.