novel

The article deals with the analysis of the author’s artistic and philosophical idea of the European situation of the 1930s and with the forms of its actualisation in the novel «The Beginning of the End».

The article deals with the interaction of humourous and frenetic motives in Fantomas novel cycle by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain (1911–1913). It shows how the book reflects, on the one hand, a certain predilection of the ‘belle époque’ for a demonstration of repulsive aspects of death and, on the other, the influence of Grand Guignol theatre aesthetics. Fantomas novels are thus juxtaposed with Gaston Leroux’s prose.

The article considers Number 11 by Jonathan Coe as an example of the postmodern language play with textual and extratextual reality and determines the role and functions of game practices employed.

The article deals with different aspects of morbidity problem range in M. A. Aldanov’s historic novels. The author analyzes both traditional literary functions of the illness motives (their important role in unfolding the characters’ portraits, in plot development) and those peculiar for Aldanov’s oeuvre, where the medical discourse becomes one of the languages to describe the catastrophic epoch of the end XIXth – beginning XXth centuries.

The author continues to investigate those artistic devices of Turgenev as a novel-writer which acquire special significance for the authors of symbolic novels. The subject of analysis is the technique of ‘partial duality’ and the ‘paired’ scenes, as well as the folklore allusions in Turgenev’s novel Smoke: their features and functions.

The article considers self-referential items in the oeuvre of Gaston Leroux – the master of a popular novel – particularly on the example of the Rouletabille cycle. The author pays closer attention to the novel Rouletabille and the Tsar in which Leroux inserted the data from his earlier articles and sketches about Russia.

The issue of the point of view in the composition of A. I. Solzhenitsyn’s novel «The First Circle» is regarded in the article by means of the structural analysis of its components based on the methodology by B. A. Uspensky.

The article deals with J. M. Coetzee’s Boyhood, focusing on the author’s experiments with the autobiography in the context of traditional genre conventions. Boyhood, the first part of Coetzee’s autobiographical trilogy, is analyzed as a deconstruction of the childhood autobiography (the absence of autobiographical agreement, third-person present tense narrative, a combination of multiple points of view: those of a child-protagonist and an adult author).

The article compares the variants of Pushkin’s autograph of the novel Dubrovsky concerning the images of the elder representatives of the nobility. Variants’ textual analysis allows to reveal the process of artistic idea implementation.

The article studies genre strategy in «Daniel Stein, Interpreter» by L. Ulitskaya. The genre of the novel enables the author along with the third-person narrative to apply stylization of different forms of everyday life narration and records, to introduce the writer’s letters into fiction. Blurring the boundaries between fictional and factual principles in her work, L. Ulitskaya expands the range of reader’s interpretations.