Literary criticism

The article explores the historic and literary context of Pearl Buck’s oeuvre, particularly the influence of Chinese literature and folklore on the thematic, genre and stylistic features of her novels, as well as the place of the 20th century Chinese history in her novels.

The article considers the spiritual experience of everyday life perception reflected and imprinted in the diaries and memoirs of the Russian writers Boris Shergin and Sergey Durylin. A Christian outlook and perception of the world endows the writers with a special organ of vision, which transforms the fabric of everyday life, making it a true being, rooted in eternity and in God.

The article discusses the dramatic works of the French writer Jean Cocteau, namely the pieces of the so-called ‘Boulevard theatre’ period, written from 1927 to 1941. The analysis of the author’s metatext allows to reveal the ideological explanation of Cocteau turning to new genre models. The intertextual analysis also clarifies the place of the ‘Boulevard’ plays in the evolution of Cocteau as a playwright.

This article is devoted to one of the understudied aspects of M. Tsvetaeva’s prose – the study of the image semantics of windows and doors in the mythopoetics of the house. In the study of the poet’s autobiographical myth it is necessary to take into account that the house, as an archetype, correlates with the inner world of the person; it is the center of the human universe.

Spatio-temporal structure of S. E. Neldikhen’s poem-novel Holiday (Ilya Radalyet) is in the centre of the research. Space and time are examined in the aspect of mythopoetics: paradise allusions define the character’s spatial location, the mythopoetic cycle ‘coming into being and disappearance’ forms the temporal model of the work. In the course of the analysis it becomes obvious how the poem-novel poetics is linked with the distinctive features of the author’s worldview

The principle of uniting stories within a collection of stories is viewed as the composition center. The paper deals with the problems of trespassing the borderlines established by culture, the character’s self-knowledge and poetics of radically broadening the meaningful volume of an image by means of developing the plot and particular motives that create the framework of world culture spiritual values.

The article presents a wide panorama of consistent types of readerscharacters (in V. G. Belinsky’s terminology – shallow people and Old Believers, people of action and children of a certain doctrine), who on the pages of A. P. Chekhov’s prose and drama works with a different degree of expertise (affectedly, presumptuously, in a silly way, artlessly, passionately) judge the characters, works, literary craftsmanship of I. S. Turgenev, whose life has already expired.

The article analyzes the principles of space and plot interaction in Lermontov’s Taman. The author examines the features of mythologizing space. The plot roles of the characters and the paradoxes of Pechorin’s behavior are studied. The correlation of the incident and destiny in the development of the plot is specified. A special place of the story in the semantic structure of Pechorin’s Diary is revealed.