bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
“The Russian Bayonet” in the Russian Literature of the 18th-20th Centuries: The Magic Weapon of the Empire
Authors:   Novosibirsk State Pedagogical University, Maroshi Valerij V.
Published: February 2023

The article deals with one of the most important unofficial imperial symbols of Russia - the Russian bayonet. For quite a long historical period, 1790-1945, the bayonet remained a metaphor for military, state, and national power. In the historical perspective, it had three main meanings: 1) the glory of the Russian Army, and then the Red Army; 2) the greatness and strength of the Russian Empire; 3) courage, determination, and the Russian man’s contempt for death. The cult of Suvorov and the myth of the Russian bayonet were formed in Russian poetry at the same time - at the end of the XVIII century, and they supported each other. Suvorov’s bayonet charge training remained relevant in the tactics and military theory of the Russian Army until the end of the 19th century. The idea of the mythical Suvorov’s “bogatyr”, a Russian soldier, was poeticized by the commander himself in The Science of Victory (1795) and was continued primarily in the patriotic poetry of the 1830s. The mythologization of the Russian bayonet in Russian poetry and battle prose reached its apotheosis in the early 1830s, at the time of Russia’s confrontation with Europe over the Polish Uprising. The literary myth of the bayonet is presented in its most complete form in Pyotr Yershov’s poem “The Russian Bayonet”. Patriotic lyrics with their collective lyrical subject and nationwide sublime pathos and the battle prose of the 1830s both played a decisive role in the creation of the myth. The hyperbolization of the Russian hero wielding the bayonet in the prose of the 1830s is usually linked with the motif of national superiority. The ideological imperial myth of the invincible and all-powerful Russian bayonet was used primarily within Russia itself. During the Crimean War, the poetical hope that the bayonet would help to win the war with the most well-armed armies in Europe was in vain. In addition, the destruction of the myth was influenced by the spread of the personal point of view in the psychological prose of Leo Tolstoy and Vsevolod Garshin. In Tolstoy’s battle prose, the war rhetoric and the valorization of war are devalued, this “demythologization” also includes an unusual description of the Russian bayonet charge. This trend continues in the prose of Garshin, who gained the experience of an ordinary volunteer soldier in the Russian-Turkish War. In the last third of the 19th century and before the beginning of the First World War, the bayonet in Russian unofficial literature became a metaphor for the repressive state apparatus. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the war, the suppressed national semantics of the bayonet was actualized again. The same thing happened at the very beginning of the Great Patriotic War when the very existence of Russians as an ethnic group was called into question. Soviet poets once again turned to the myth of the all-conquering Suvorov’s Russian bayonet.
(Post)colonial Nationalism or National (Post)Colonialism: 20th Anniversary of Brother 2
Authors:   Tomsk State University, Tretyakov Evgeniy O.
Published: February 2023

The article focuses on Alexey Balabanov’s flagship film Brother 2 (2000), which is devoted to the Russian neo-imperial ambitions and traditionally perceived as a “popular” manifesto of Russian nationalism. The author proposes an approach based on the concepts of postcolonial theory and decolonial thinking (in the Tlostanian sense). Firstly, the creation of a unique author’s style by the “provincial” Balabanov (a native of Sverdlovsk) can be viewed as a contradiction to the postcolonial theory, which says that the “subaltern” (Gayatri Spivak) cannot speak in the face of the metropolis. Of course, this only takes place if we recognize the legitimacy of Alexander Etkind’s concept of a specific “internal colonization” in the Russian statehood. Secondly, the evolution of Balabanov’s hero does not imply any preferences for the Russians and constructs a single paradigm to unite Danila Bagrov - “the first real hero of the post-Soviet cinema” (Vasily Koretsky), the Englishman John Boyle from the film War, the Yakut woman Mergen from the short film River, Major Scriabin nicknamed Yakut (Fireman) ... Thus, Balavanov’s mythology of “brotherhood” is not international, yet it cannot be reduced to Russianness (Andrey Plakhov). Thirdly, the metropolis in Balabanov’s dilogy, be it “not Leningrad, but Petersburg”, the capital Moscow or the gangster Chicago, is losing its status as a stronghold of modernity. Its inviability can be seen in the empty streets of St. Petersburg and Moscow. Danila arrives in St. Petersburg from the provincial Priozersk, where life is marked by the patriarchal humanity (images of his mother, his father’s classmate). The hero epitomizes the power of the national soil. He is an epic Bogatyr who goes back to the idea of heroism. In the finale, Danila leaves his brother in Chicago, having gone through an existential experience and realized that war is not a national clash. Having killed many people, he fails to avenge the death of a friend. He longs for abstract justice, but helps a man who is unworthy of the sacrifice. Danila acquires a real friend - an American named Ben and a brother in arms - a prostitute Dasha, who unexpectedly complements the gallery of seemingly schematic female characters epitomizing all the hypostases of a woman in the logic of imperial / colonial modernity (mother / lover / reborn harlot). All this radically destroys traditional national / gender definitions. Thus, these contaminations form the original paradigm of the author’s view, which critically “explodes” the seemingly self-evident nationalist discourse of the film Brother 2 with its inherent racism, sexism, and other xenophobic features.
Three “Erl-Kings”
Authors:   Tomsk State University, Pavlova Maria V.
Published: February 2023

The scholars of Russian literature are very well aware of V Zhukovsky’s translation of Goethe’s “Erlkonig” (1782), published as “Lesnoy tsar’ ” (1818). However, none of the studies of Zhukovsky’s literary works mentions that Zhukovsky presumably used the English variant of the ballad by W. Scott for his translation of “Lesnoy tsar’ ”. W. Scott’s “The Erl-King” (1797) was written fifteen years after the original and almost twenty years before Zhukovsky’s translation. Thus, it can be assumed that V Zhukovsky, who was acquainted with W. Scott’s, couldn’t ignore the English translation of “Erlkonig”. If we compare V Zhukovsky’s and W. Scott’s tranlsations in terms of their closeness to the original, we can see that the former is significantly far from the original than the latter. Zhukovsky is faithful to the original in terms of the content, but he completely abandons the folklore stylistics of the original and traditionally organizes his text according to the ballad principles, which have already been developed in his original works. However, in his evolution, V. Zhukovsky follows W. Scott and draws on not only W. Scott’s early ballads but also his later narrative poems. By the moment when V. Zhukovsky starts translating Goethe’s ballad, he must have been acquainted with W. Scott’s narrative poems and other poetical pieces, which results in a difference between the original, English, and Russian translations. The closeness of Zhukovsky’s and Scott’s translation strategies can be seen not only on the level of content but also on the stylistic level. When creating “The Erl-King”, W. Scott focuses on the literary form of the ballad: even though his translation is quite close to the original, he transforms the poetical semantics and ballad form in the vein of sentimentalism, which can be also seen in his translation of Burger’s “Lenore”. The comparative analyses of the original and two translations by Zhukovsky and Scott allows making a conclusion that W. Scott’s translation of “Erlkonig” can be “interposed” between Goethe’s text, which is close to folklore ballad traditions, and Zhukovsky’s literary variant. If we take into account the undeniable fact that V. Zhukovsky looked to W. Scott’s ballads, we can say that early W. Scott’s literary pieces vector Zhukovsky’s translational creative works and play the role of a transition stage for Zhukovsky’s development as a poet and translator. It should be noted then, that later W. Scott returns to folklore variants of the ballad, while Zhukovsky remains faithful to the previously developed course to create his own philosophy of the genre.
Mikhail Lermontov and Nikolay Nadezhdin: Creative History and Sources of the Poem “The Sail”
Authors:   Tyumen State University, Komarov Sergey A. , Lagunova Olga K. ,   Tyumen State University
Published: February 2023

The article offers a new version of the concept and figurative nature of the well-known poem “The Sail” by Mikhail Lermontov. A set of subject lexemes from two articles written by Nikolay Nadezhdin based on the materials of his dissertation is considered as the source of most of the semantic signs of this text. The articles were simultaneously published in two magazines (Ateney [Athenaeus] and Vestnik Evropy [Herald of Europe]) and contain the conception of the phase development of world poetry. In the articles, Nadezhdin outlines the presence of two - classical and romantic - phases and proved that the latter expressed a crisis state of consciousness and is, in its then contemporary form, a forerunner of the transition to new forms of consciousness and the art of words. The task of these forthcoming new forms was to combine two complementary principles that structurally characterize the classical and romantic phases of poetry - oriented towards the outer and inner worlds, respectively. Nadezhdin is a recently hired professor of the language arts department of Moscow University where Lermontov also transfers. Lermontov publishes his debut poem in the same magazine as Nadezhdin, but chronologically later. Getting acquainted with the professor’s articles and his conception, Lermontov undertakes the mission of a qualitative renewal of poetic art that Nadezhdin declared. The poem “The Sail” embodies this decision of the young poet, that is why he is consistent as an author in extracting Nadezhdin’s figurative signs-concepts from the articles in addition to the initial emblematic line from Bestuzhev-Marlinsky’s poem. Thus, the reference to the famous Russian romantic acquires a motivated meaning within the framework of Nadezhdin’s general conception. The conception also explains the stanza-based division of the text into into descriptive and reflexive segments, which are analogs of of orientation towards the outer and the inner world. Lermontov demonstrates that his authorial consciousness overcomes the crisis of the romantic phase. He depicts the romantic character and his dialogue with a different, external subject objectively, in an estranged manner. As a result, the reader understands that the author, as a third consciousness, in his expression and values, is outside the framework of the designated problems of the dispute between the character and the sail, that is, between the real bearer and the actor of new poetry. Associated with this is the special position of this text in Lermontov’s transition from poetry to prose, as well as its inclusion in the famous letter of Lopukhina in September 1832. All this taken together makes it possible to speak about the need to consider the Lermontov / Nadezhdin plot as promising, although absent in Lermontov Encyclopedia.
“Diary in the Literal Sense” or a Subtle Literary Game? Dostoevsky on His Way to a Monojournal
Authors:   Higher School of Economics, Khachaturian Liubov’ V.
Published: February 2023

In February 1876, the first issue of A Writer’s Diary, one of Dostoevsky’s most controversial works, was published. Manifesting the future as a “diary in the literal sense of the word”, the author was not entirely sincere. Already in April of the same year, in a letter to Kh. Alchevskaya, he remarked that he was too naive to think that this would be a real diary, and that a real diary was almost impossible, so there was only an ostentatious one, for the public. The ambivalent position of the writer himself gives researchers a reason to call this work the “object of a subtle literary game”, which imitated the properties of the diary genre. If we turn to the original notebooks with diary entries, we will be disappointed. Dostoevsky’s personal records are surprisingly sparse. As a rule, he makes them for practical reasons. Accuracy and convenience are much more important than analyzing what is happening. Most often, entries are lists of mortgaged items, which contain the number, cost, and terms of the mortgage. Dostoevsky writes down epileptic seizures just as carefully, probably trying to keep a “medical history”. It seems that Dostoevsky forced himself to make notes. He wrote out dates in calligraphy, built a hierarchy of titles, but stopped keeping the “diary” after the first two or three entries. The only exception was his Journal of Treatment in Bad Ems, which meticulously reflects the entire monthly course of procedures - from Thursday, June 25, to Saturday, July 25, 1874. But these records are extremely concise. There is no internal dialogue: no reflection, no assessment of events; moreover, there are no traces of work on the records. It seems that the diary of the writer Dostoevsky interests Dostoevsky the writer least of all. Among the several thousand hand-written pages of worksheets only a few pages contain a private record. Only the most intense experiences (the death of his wife, serious financial problems, a series of epileptic seizures, the death of his brother, the fear of his own death) make Dostoevsky break through a certain prohibition he himself set. The works that came out of Dostoevsky’s workbooks - novels, novellas, articles, and notes - had a long way to go: all of them except the diaries. Apparently, the subconscious feeling of this impasse is connected with Dostoevsky’s persistent unwillingness to keep a diary. A diary that would make him use up in writing notebook after notebook. Workbooks show that Dostoevsky made himself keep a diary and constantly refused to do it for almost fifteen years until he was able to treat the diary as if it were a fiction text: to put the diary in quotation marks, to make the diary of Dostoevsky A Writer’s Diary by Dostoyevsky thus making the diary а monojournal. Dostoevsky’s brilliant imitation changed the attitude to the diary as a genre. Several decades later, the diary further expanded its genre boundaries - the ability to be both personal records and a work of art at the same time.
The Poetics of the Carnation: The Word and the Image in Russian Poetry From Trediakovsky to Brodsky (In the Context of European Tradition). Part One
Authors:   Lomonosov Moscow State University, Polilova Vera S.
Published: February 2023

The research outlines the use of the word gvozdika (Eng. ‘carnation’, a species of Dianthus) in Russian poetry. The author takes the European tradition as a framework to describe and analyse diverse representations of the carnation in Russian, mainly poetic, texts of the 18th through 20th centuries, tracing the development and expansion of “carnation-driven” contexts and associations. Part One opens with a retrospective insight into the history of the carnation in European culture, debunking several popular misconceptions, related to the flower’s history and name, which had been uncritically repeated over many decades. The ubiquity of wild carnations has contributed to the belief that, like the rose and the lily, the carnation has a two-thousand-year cultural history. Thus, it might be assumed that the carnation’s beauty and spicy aroma should have set it apart from other flowers, so that it might gradually acquire various symbolic meanings. Indeed, researchers and writers have often noted the ancient symbolism of the carnation. Moreover, both popular and academic writings place the carnation in the limited and well-defined set of plants cultivated in Antiquity. The research into the historical significance of the carnation shows that its oft-postulated antiquity is nothing but wishful thinking: the cultural history of the carnation as well as its symbolic meanings cannot be traced back as a single process from Antiquity to the Present. Until the 14th century, the carnation was referred to by many different names; its literary and symbolic genealogy can only be traced back to the 15 th or 16th century, i.e. when it was introduced into horticulture and when stable designations for it appeared in the new European languages. Our analysis draws on comparative material from Spanish, Italian, French, German, and English poetry (poems by Luis de Gongora y Argote, Francisco de Quevedo, Joachim du Bellay, Remy Belleau, Pierre de Ronsard, and others) and employs numerous multilingual sources to shed light on the history of the carnation in European languages and literatures. In addition, we briefly trace the horticultural history of the carnation in Russia. The garden carnation, or the clove pink, has been known in Russia at least since the 17th century. It was among the plants bought in Holland by the Flower Office of Peter the Great. In the 18th century, the carnation was already widespread in Russian gardens: numerous detailed articles about the carnation, its varieties and cultivations are found in botanical directories and various indexes of the late 18th century. The Alphabetical Catalogue of Plants <...> in Moscow in the Garden of the Active State Councillor Prokofy Demidov, published in 1786, lists 52 varieties of the carnation. Yet, however popular the carnation was in everyday life, it rarely appeared in Russian literature of the 17th and 18th centuries.
On the Demarcation Between Attitude and Poetics (On the Example of Marriage by Nikolai Gogol)
Authors:   Russian State University for the Humanities, Ivanitskiy Alexander I.
Published: February 2023

Gogol’s works are very promising for the demarcation between the author’s attitude and the text’s idea and poetics that, usually, successively generate one another. However, Gogol’s attitude came from the archaic and normally could not become the text’s idea - including the motif of a marriage threat. In Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka and Viy, this motif was part of the depicted folklore world and, thanks to it, was detached from the author. The motif spawns new ties between attitude, idea, and poetics in the comedy Marriage (1833, 1842). Here idea (satire on marriage-related estate swagger) is formally given, and so the motif of marriage threat (shown in Podkolesin’s indecision) goes beyond it and approves itself by contradiction. Kochkarev shows unconsciously in his praise of women the infinity of their bodies as the archaic background of Podkolesin’s attraction to and fear of marriage. This infinity comes from the Slavic belief that during menses the female body ties the people’s world with the underground world of the dead and the infinity of the Earth. The kinship between the woman and the animal, which is constantly voiced in the comedy, makes marriage shameful and transforms its diabolic symbolism into “devil’s laughter”. Placing the story of the failed marriage in the “non-Russian” Petersburg world (perceived by the Russian folk mind as a realized chimera), Gogol gives the hidden explanation of his fear of women personified in Podkolesin. At the very beginning of the comedy, the invasion of the real world by the chimeric one is manifested in “new mirrors” that show people their caricatures. The character’s obscene language is the sign of his high position in society (it is legitimated by the “sodomic” names); lies become an unconscious replacement of the truth, and the hyperbole approves the opposite. Zhevakin and Kochkarev reflect the succession of the archaic and laughter worlds in Marriage. The former represents the “alive deceased” and an old-Russian beggar; the latter a joker and a devil-matchmaker. The explicit and banal “idea” in Marriage is the starting point for the poetical expression of Gogol’s attitude. However, personifying it in the comical hero, who lives in a comical world, Gogol, like in Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka and Viy (though in a different way), distanced himself from this attitude. Gogol’s late works show his own and hard-fought ideas. The archaic attitude was a fatal threat for them. The author declares no conflicts of interests.
Motherland in the Philosophy of Eurasianism
Authors:   Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Ponomarev Evgeny R.
Published: February 2023

The article is dedicated to one of the basic ideas of the philosophic movement of Eurasianism - the idea of the Motherland. Unlike the other philosophical trends of the first wave of emigration, Eurasians were the only ones who understood the Fatherland not speculatively, but geographically. Eurasians could be called the first political scientists of the Russian philosophical tradition: they tried to predict the political situation in the abandoned Russia in order to build a new state on the ruins of Bolshevism in the future. They formed the concept of the Motherland from four components: a historically formed territory, power for possession of the territory, religion (Orthodoxy), and culture (common for the entire middle Eurasia, which was yet to be created on the basis of Russian culture). The author of the article insists on the fact that the idea of a common culture was reduced to declarations and was not developed by the participants in the movement. Besides, the theme of culture exposes some structural contradictions in the Eurasian theory (it contradicts the anti-colonial pathos of some works and looks retrograde against the background of innovative political forecasts). Eurasians’ religious themes were also poorly developed, some participants in the movement even ignored the subject. Detailed historical, economic, and national issues did not remove the general “narrowness” of the theory: the Motherland was uniquely defined only as mestorazvitie [local development] (P.N. Savitsky’s term), which created a contradiction Eurasians did not feel: in the domestic policy, in modern terms, they were globalists who insisted on the victory of the centripetal forces in the “Ocean of Eurasia”; in the foreign policy, they were anti-globalists who seriously believed that a closed (but large) economic system is more efficient than a global one. This contradiction brings us to the main semantic gap of the Eurasian theory: all the creators of this doctrine refused to understand that, for the “middle lands” of Eurasia, Russian culture and the Russian language, in one way or another, represented the language and culture of the colonialists. They simply did not see this significant problem, looking at Eurasia with Russian eyes and insisting that the Russian people in Eurasia were then “the first among equals”. In addition, the concept of mestorazvitie created a negative assessment for all who had dropped out of their own “local development”. Emigration, thus, became the periphery of the Russian and Eurasian idea, meaningless from the point of view of the processes taking place in the Motherland. For this reason, in the author’s opinion, Eurasianism was doomed to an early decline: the ideas of Eurasianism lost their vitality as soon as the emigration realized (in the late 1920s - early 1930s) that there was no way back to Russia. The author declares no conflicts of interests.
Russian Nihilism as a Source of American Objectivism (Book Review: Weinacht, A. (2021) Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Ayn Rand: Russian Nihilism Travels to America. Lanham: Lexington Books. 167 p.)
Authors:   Tyumen State University, Grigorovskaya Anastasiya V.
Published: February 2023

The review discusses a monograph Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Ayn Rand: Russian Nihilism Travels to America by Aaron Weinacht, an American scholar, historicist, professor of the University of Montana Western. The book explores the intellectual history of nihilism, important in different periods for both Russia and the USA, by the example of two authors. The attention is focused on the historiographical apparatus of the research, its scholarly relevance and novelty, basic methodological principles in the analysis of the phenomenon. The author declares no conflicts of interests
The First Translations of Aleksandr Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin Into Italian
Authors:   Tomsk State University, Tik Natalia A.
Published: February 2023

The article analyses two early translations of Aleksandr Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin into Italian. The first Italian critics of Eugene Onegin in the 19th century (Cesare Boccella, Enrico Montazio, Carlo Tenca) were convinced that the novel was weak and did not deserve to be translated. However, two translations appeared in the 19th century. The first translation of 1856 belongs to Louis Delatre, a Frenchman who assimilated in Italy. Delatre visited Russia, where he met Pyotr Vyazemsky, whose stories about Pushkin inspired Delatre to translate five of Pushkin’s works, including Eugene Onegin. The second translation was published in 1858 under the pseudonym A. B., currently attributed to A. Besobrasoff - Anna Ivanovna Bezobrazova, a Russian noblewoman. Comparing the original and the translations, the author identifies and describes the aspects of the original subject to translation shifts (genre definition, structure, lexical and stylistic levels) and determines the specificity of the early Italian reception of the novel. Louis Delatre. The translation of poetry into prose, the rearrangement of fragments within the text, the reduction of “useless details” (including significant structural elements of the original), the addition of notes, the replacement of Russian realities with Italian equivalents reveal an orientation towards greater clarity and ease of perception. The change in the style of the original and the focus on the Italian literary tradition indicate the identification of a foreign work through the prism of Italian culture. The factors stated above are indicative of the adaptation and orientation towards an unprepared reader, who is not familiar with a foreign culture. Delatre acts within the framework of the historically conditioned norms of translation practice, whose task at this stage is to bring the original closer to the reader, to facilitate his acquaintance with a foreign text. Anna Besobrasoff. On the one hand, the focus on the “plot”, the search for Italian equivalents, the addition of notes and descriptions are also characteristic of a historically conditioned adaptive translation strategy. On the other hand, literal translation, style neutralization, elimination of a specific group of “useless details” are rather typical of the translator’s individual reception, probably a consequence of the student’s goal of translation, the translator’s desire to “practice the beautiful Italian language.” Both translations did not attract the attention of literary criticism and did not significantly influence the formation of the idea of Eugene Onegin in Italy at an early stage. The first Italian translations were more an accident rather than a regularity, since they stemmed from the translators’ personal interest in the novel, rather than a request from the recipient culture. This can be confirmed by the date of the next translation - it appeared only in 1906. The author declares no conflicts of interests.
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Gambler in Hungarian Translations: The Interpretation of the Concept ‘Passion in Love’ (‘Lyubovnaya Strast’)
Authors:   Tomsk Polytechnic University, Shatokhina Anastasiia O. , Banchenko Aleksandra V. ,   EotvosLorand University
Published: February 2023

The article presents the first attempt to study the Hungarian translations of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Gambler. The research aims at determining the completeness of the translation of sensemaking elements in the two most popular Hunagarian translations by Endre Szabo (1900) and Erzsebet Guthi Devecserine (1957) to assess the impact of the translation shifts on the preservation of the novel’s idea. The method of studying the original and the translations is based on the concept analysis. Studying the original, the authors have revealed that the concept of passion (composed of such concepts as passion in love, passion for gambling, greed, and pride) is one of the sensemaking elements in the novel. The article focuses on passion in love in three episodes of the introduction which verbalise this concept in the image of Alexey Ivanovich, thus establishing his psychological portrait and describing his attitude to Polina. The worldview in Dostoevsky’s novels is built upon the orthodox values, which define the dominants of the novel axiology. The Hungarian culture is catholic. The contradictions between the Orthodox and Catholic interpretation of passion in general allow hypothesizing that the reproduction of some features of passion in love in translation may be challenging. The analysis of the translations has revealed that the translators rendered some features of the concept practically without loss (appetence, hatred, murder, jealousy, desire, appetite, agony / excruciation, suicide, disease). Theidentified losses (pleasure, extinction of appetence, loss of control) do not distort the sense of the episodes studied as well as the portrait of the character. The authors believe that it was possible to preserve the concept due to a number of factors. Firstly, the translators focused on the similarities rather that differences in the Orthodox and Catholic interpretations of passion. Secondly, the approach of the Hungarian translators is distinguished by an extremely careful attitude to the original: Szabo adheres to the literal reproduction of the original style and Devecserine aspires after the balance between the original and the Hungarian linguistic norm. Contribution of the authors: the authors contributed equally to this article. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.
The imaginal-geographic space of East Prussia (based on Andrey Bolotov’s memoirs)
Authors:   Siberian State University of Geosystems and Technologies, Zhdanov Sergey S. ,   Novosibirsk State Technical University
Published: February 2023

The article deals with various types of the imaginal-geographic space of East Prussia, represented in Andrey Bolotov’s memoirs Andrey Bolotov ’s Life and Adventures, Written by Himself for His Descendants. These space types are structured according to their relations with the elements of the oppositions “center - periphery” and “adventurous-mortal - idyllic.” The center of the “Prussian” space in the text is Koenigsberg with its surrounding grounds, and the periphery is the rest of the East Prussian loci - natural, demi-natural-rural and urbanistic. In this logic, both peripherical and central local images can be connected with the adventurous-mortal and the idyllic space, though to a different extent, which makes the “Prussian” space images of the memoirs ambivalent. The adventurous-mortal space consists of the loci of war (enemy border, battle field, ravaged villages and towns, etc.) as well as territories connected with the narrator’s leaving the center (sailing far, going to a secret mission, traveling home through the Curonian Lagoon), which actualizes motifs of danger, doom, mischief, death. The adventurous and mortal features are essentially “softer” in the frames of Koenigsberg. Firstly, the unrest of Bolotnov’s life in the Prussian capital is connected with the danger of coming back against his will to the space of war, which can result in death, mutilation, etc. Secondly, there are some spaces in the city that can cause his spiritual death. On the one hand, these are “tavern” loci connected with motifs of venal love, excessive drinking, gambling games. On the other hand, the potential danger can come from the University of Koenigsberg and some books in local bookstalls. This danger is connected with the motif of a “wrong” philosophy that leads to libertinism and atheism. Finally, the “softest” danger can come from the inconvenient space (uninhabited, almost scary storage blocks as well as medieval buildings negatively marked with motifs of narrowness, darkness, crookedness of streets and bad smells from the dropped litter). The idyllic spaces are some loci of Prussian villages and towns untouched by the war and characterized with motifs of peaceful life, abundance, order, cosiness, petiteness, and a high density of population. The point of the concentrated idyll in Bolotov’s text is Koeningsberg as the center of the “Prussian” chronotope. The descriptions of Koenigsberg actualize the motifs of visual beauty, order, cosiness, abundance and splendor, but at the same time of some harmonic avoidance of extremes. In addition, the image of the Prussian capital contains features of a city of gaieties, the historical locus and the “initiating” place of knowledge. The author declares no conflicts of interests
Travel notes Russia and Russians by Victor Tissot in the context of Russian-French relations at the turn of the 20th century
Authors:   Moscow State Pedagogical University, Trykov Valeriy P.
Published: February 2023

For the first time in the national literary studies, the article examines the book of travel notes Russia and Russians (1882) by the French writer Victor Tissot (1845-1917). Tissot’s travel notes on Russia are considered in the context of Russian-French relations at the turn of the 20th century, Russia’s growing interest in France on the eve of the conclusion of the Russian-French alliance. The article proves that the basic opposition constructing the image of Russia in Tissot’s book is the opposition of Russia and Ukraine. Tissot poetizes the image of Little Russia (which is understood not without the influence of ideas of Adam Miczkevich and Cyprien Robert) as the custodian of the original “Slavicness.” Despite the poetization of Ukraine, Tissot considered Moscow the true center of the Russian Empire, the city expressing the spirit of the country. The influence on Tissot’s travel notes about Russia by Theophile Gautier, impressionism, the traditions of Germaine de Stael is shown. Tissot sought to contrast the tradition of Gautier’s “aestheticized” discourse about about Russia with a more “realistic” image of Moscow and Russia by expanding the scope of the depicted, by describing not only the ceremonial, but also the shadow life of Moscow and Russia. The characteristic feature of Tissot’s poetics is the combination of aesthetics with macabre and gothic elements in the structure of the image of Russia. The article concludes that Tissot made a significant contribution to the destruction of the myth of Russia’s closedness, created by Custine and the Paris press, and to the generation of a generally positive image of Russia on the eve of the conclusion of the Russian-French alliance. The author declares no conflicts of interests.
A “sick man” on a sinking ship: The image of Turkey in the Russian press during the First World War
Authors:   Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Bogomolov Igor K.
Published: February 2023

The article examines the development of the image of Turkey in the Russian press in 1914-1918. Perceiving the Ottoman Empire as a minor power with a weak army, Russian newspapers and magazines took into account the great strategic and political significance of the new Russian-Turkish war in solving Russia’s “historical tasks” in the Black and Mediterranean Seas. Periodicals of different orientations assessed the significance of the new Russian-Turkish war in different ways. For the conservative press, this was primarily the return of the “cross to St. Sophia”, the return of the Orthodox tsar to Constantinople. The liberal press paid more attention to the economic opportunities from the capture of the Straits. However, for both of them, the victory in the war was perceived as a natural result of the Russian-Turkish confrontation and symbolized the final “expulsion” of Turkey from Europe. In a broader sense, this meant the expulsion of Aziatchina [Asianism] from the “civilization” area. This reasoning was facilitated by major victories on the Caucasian Front (as opposed to the main front in Europe) and regular reports from official sources (Petrograd Telegraph Agency, General Staff) about the socio-economic and political crisis in the Ottoman Empire. The condescending attitude, the underestimation of the combat capability of the Turkish army and Turkey’s resistance to a protracted war prevailed. In many ways, therefore, the Caucasian Front remained secondary, although victory in this theater made it possible to open the Straits and receive large consignments of weapons and ammunition from the Western allies. In 1917, the “dream of Tsargrad,” tacitly proclaimed as the main goal of Russia in the world war, became one of the key factors in the political crisis. In the socialist press, Constantinople and the Straits became the personification of Russian imperialism and the cause of the deaths of millions of soldiers, the impoverishment of the people, and the depletion of the economy. Against this background, the image of Turkey underwent tangible changes. The conservative press developed the image of Turkey as an “Eastern despotism,” a historically doomed autocracy. In fact, it became a new ideological frame for the old military goals of Russia in the world war. The social democratic press turned more to the suffering of ordinary Turks, who were forced to shed blood for goals they did not know. The commonality of the fate of the Turkish and Russian peoples in their long and difficult struggle with the autocracy for the establishment of democracy was emphasized. The economic and political crisis in Russia actually led the second point of view to victory, which influenced the general course of the Russian Revolution. The author declares no conflicts of interests.
North as West: The literary image of Karelia and the late Soviet outsideness practice
Authors:   Petrozavodsk State University, Shilova Natalya L.
Published: February 2023

The article examines the peculiarities of the literary representation of Karelia in the late Soviet literature. The research involves texts by Yury Kazakov, Andrey Voznesensky, Bella Akhmadulina, Lev Ozerov, Viktor Starkov, and others, which were written based on trips to Karelia in the period from the 1960s to the 1980s. The historical and cultural features of the area often became significant for writers and poets who came from other regions. These features (bilingualism, dialogue of cultures, historically and geographically determined European influence) emphasized the region’s uniqueness against the background of other territories of the North of Russia. Reflection of the specificity of the region - both natural and cultural - forms the general tone of the essays and lyrics of the late 1960s - early 1980s, realistic in their poetics. Some details of the literary image of Karelia that developed during this period (including the motif of travel, Finno-Ugric and Scandinavian realities and toponyms) reflect the late Soviet practices of “outsideness” (Rus. vnenakhodimost’, a term by Alexei Yurchak), in addition to the development of earlier post-romantic topics. In Ozerov’s, Voznesensky’s, Starkov’s prose and lyrics, the representation of a journey to Karelia acquires the features of time travel, the character’s contact with antiquity/eternity. This position of the character in relation to their time correlates with the mechanisms that developed during that period of the Soviet people’s escape from the haunting day-to-day reality without direct resistance or opposition to the ideological system. In Kazakov’s and Akhmadullina’s Karelian plots, due to the introduction of Finno-Ugric place names, motives, vocabulary, the image of the place sometimes acquires the features of “our abroad,” the “imaginary West.” Unlike the West itself, Karelia was not exclusively imaginary: one could visit it and see it with one’s own eyes, just like the Soviet Baltic states. A trip to Karelia was at the same time consistent with the ideologically acceptable and approved practices of domestic tourism and literary exploration of the North. The features of the “imaginary West” in this case were organically included in the general tendency of romanticizing and mythologizing Karelia in its literary representation of the late Soviet period, developing and complicating the image that had formed back in the 19th century. The cultural multilayeredness of Karelia is obviously attractive for the generation of authors of the Thaw with its heterogeneous culture, which sometimes combined opposite tendencies (interest in the West and the East, in the past and the future, physics and lyrics, socialism and the human face, etc.) and shaped the practice of outsideness. The literary texts of popular authors widely broadcast this image, spreading it among readers. The author declares no conflicts of interests.
Translated libretto of Joseph Haydn’s oratorio The Seasons -an unknown work by Vasily Zhukovsky
Authors:   Tomsk State University (Tomsk, Russian Federation), Berezkina Svetlana V.
Published: February 2023

The article attributes the work as to be created by Vasily Zhukovsky - the fact that was doubted by researchers for many decades. The article publishes an excerpt from a letter from Dmitry Bludov to Zhukovsky, which is the only surviving evidence in Zhukovsky’s epistolary about his translation of Godefridus Bernardus van Swieten’s libretto to Joseph Haydn’s oratorio The Seasons in 1802. The translation was commissioned to Zhukovsky by Ivan Kerzelli, the brandmaster of the Petrovsky Theater, for the premiere in Moscow in February 1803. The article highlights the history of the anonymously published translation of the libretto entitled Four Seasons, later included in the bibliography of Vasily Sopikov with the translator’s surname and an error in the year of publication. The article gives a detailed stylistic analysis of Zhukovsky’s translation. The author is grateful to K.Yu. Lappo-Danilevsky for participating in the discussion of the results of the work on Zhukovsky’s translation considered in the article. The author declares no conflicts of interests.
Pechorin and “mirages of the West”
Authors:   Dostoevsky Omsk State University, Belikova Ekaterina V.
Published: February 2023

The article compares the image of Pechorin (A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov) and his possible French prototypes: Franjois-Rene Chateaubriand’s Rene, Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe, and Alfred de Musset’s Octave. The protagonist of Chateaubriand’s Rene - the novel that stands at the origins of psychological prose of the 19th century - is typologically related to the image of Pechorin. The common fate of these characters is dissatisfaction, emotional draining, and inner emptiness. Structurally the images share such typological features as “intimations of passions” and mingled, indefinite, incomprehensible feelings. Pechorin as well as his French “prototype” lives an abundant life, full of energy and passion, worthy of a better cause. However, Pechorin, unlike Rene, neither renounces an earthly life nor wants to retire to a monastery. The religious theme in Lermontov’s novel is not as significant as in Chateaubriand’s, who considers Christianity the only salvation from the “intimations of passions.” Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe and Pechorin share romantic perspective: motifs of loneliness, alienation from society, and immersion in the inner world. Yet Pechorin’s outlook is wider than Adolphe’s, the latter being obsessed with the slightest impulses. Pechorin’s journal contains not only reflections on psychology, but also an outline of other characters and actions, magnificent landscapes, and philosophical reflections. It is obvious that the “Princess Mary” section from A Hero of Our Time is most closely related to Constant’s Adolfe through the themes of a love affair, seduction and play of feelings. Alfred de Musset’s novel Confession of a Child of the Century is primarily related to A Hero of Our Time through the title, which declares the typicality of the characters epitomizing the entire “timeless” generation. The novels by Musset and Lermontov are adjacent to psychological realism, depicting a person through society, time, and history. Pechorin, as well as the French “child of the century”, typifies the entire generation. The similarity of the images of Rene, Adolphe, Octave, and Pechorin, on the one hand, has a general romantic character, while on the other, is probably generated by the works of George Gordon Byron, who was a poet-mediator of French influence for Lermontov. However, Byron failed to provide Lermontov with the most subtle introspection and intense reflection French romatic prose was renowned for. The search for these features may have led Lermontov to the French “reflectors”: Rene, Adolphe, and Octave. The author declares no conflicts of interests
The protagonist and his country: A comparative reading of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and Jose Rizal’s Noli me tangere
Authors:   St. Thomas Institute, Lipke Stephan M.
Published: February 2023

This essay investigates the parallels between Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and Jose Rizal’s Noli me tangere. The focus is typological parallels: authors living in Europe describe a character returning from Europe to his own country. In both novels, the protagonist’s love for his country leads him on a saving mission, which ultimately fails, due to the overwhelming power of death and violence. For both Dostoevsky and Rizal, it remains open whether there could be salvation. Therefore, they use carnivalesque polyphony as their means of expression. The author declares no conflicts of interests.