FRENCH LITERATURE

«Paul Claudel interroge le Cantique des Cantiques» («Paul Claudel questions the Song of Songs») is a landmark work in the oeuvre of Paul Claudel (1868-1955), it is one of the largest artistic and exegetic commentaries in the collection of prose «Le Poëte et la Bible» («The Poet and the Bible») (1998, 2004). The writer creates a new «Claudelian novel» in Bakhtin’s understanding of the novelistic word, based on the centuries-old tradition of multiple interpretations, on the one hand, but built into a work of art, on the other.

The article presents a review of a three-day conference session “French lectures: teachers and students” (“Lectures françaises: maîtres et disciples”) as part of the 50th International  scientifi c philological anniversary conference named after L. A. Verbitskaya, which took place on March 15–23, 2022, at St. Petersburg State University. The work of this session was dedicated to the memory of its founder, Tatyana Solomonovna Taymanova (1954–2020), who made a signifi cant contribution to the development of the Russian and French literary and intellectual ties.

The article examines underexplored aspects of the famous German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s journalism. Nine interviews in the newspaper «Die literarische Welt “ have been chosen to show how Benjamin’s experiments with the genre of interview contributed to the development of his dialectic materialism and, at the same time, updated the poetics of the dialogue of the early twentieth century.

FRENCH LITERATURE, Romanticism, SHATOBRIAN, memoirs, autobiography, THEME OF DEATH