Literary criticism

The article analyses the image of Switzerland on the material of the ‘sketches of exile’ Between Two Millstones, episodes of The Red Wheel and A. I. Solzhenitsyn’s opinion journalism. A. I. Solzhenitsyn went to Switzerland to collect the material for the chapters about Lenin. The author of the article shows Switzerland as a key point in A. I. Solzhenitsyn’s worldview geography, alongside France and Japan.

The article shows the social and cultural content of the concept of the hearth on the eve of the Russian Revolution of the 1917. In the novels Suicide by M. Aldanov, Doctor Zhivago by B. Pasternak the hearth entails a complex of motives related to the premonition of the loss of the family well-being.

The article analyses the status of mission statements in the sub-field of avant-garde art. The manifesto of futurism blurs the lines of the aesthetic theory and artistic practice. In the avant-garde discourse text and meta-text are located on one level, and the history of Saratov ‘psycho-futurism’ proves that.

The Neorealist writer Yevgeny Zamyatin held the literary heritage of Anton Chekhov in high esteem, considering him an innovator of Realism in the Russian literature. In this paper we will analyze Zamyatin’s critical articles and notes of his lectures, interpret Chekhov’s poetics through the perception of a writer of the next generation, and thus, elucidate the relations between Chekhov as a prose writer and Chekhov as a dramatist.

The article discusses the features of how the artistic space of Chekhov’s story is organized. Two key chronotopes are identified: Home and Garden. The structural features of the chronotope of the House are analyzed. It is shown how the chronotope of the House exercises the determining influence on the characters, for whom theatricality as an imitation of life becomes their main feature.

The article analyzes the triad fact – pathos – reader from the point of view of how the emotional connotation of the factual foundation of the text impacts the reader. Two texts by M. Gorky are considered; both of them recreate the same event – A. P. Chekhov’s funeral. One of them is imbued with the pathos of invective, the other – with the pathos of irony. Form and content elements of the text affecting the readers’ perception of this text are described.

The article discusses the fate and some characteristic traits of the personality, as well as controversial issues of N. G. Chernyshevsky’s biography, uncovered in the forgotten book by L. B. Kamenev Chernyshevsky (1933), an insightful phenomenon of the Soviet humanities of the 1930s, which allows us to relate the moral experience and the tragedy of the revolutionary Democrat, the deep sense of his aesthetics and ethics to the problems of the Soviet reality the 1920–1930s.

The article examines the features of representing the ‘intimate’ in the French novel of the 18th century. The intimate is considered as a historical category characterized by ‘semantic ambiguity’, expanding and deepening its semantics in the course of the novel’s evolution. By means of analyzing representational texts it is proved that the representation of the intimate is predetermined by the distinctive nature of the genre and literary trends.

The paper explores the genre and compositional features of Paul Auster’s 4321 being the fusion of Bildungsroman, family сhronicle, social and psychological novel, love story, as well as Kunstlerroman and non-fiction. The analysis of the central aspects of poetics and the problems raised in the book reveals the ways of actualization and parodying the traditional genres in a postmodern novel.

The article describes oppositions of spatial code and shows the ways of its representation in the poems of Elena Shvartz. Special features of how the spatial code functions in the author’s artistic world are also considered. The correlation between the poet’s choice of a particular spatial opposition and the artistic message is identified.