Literary criticism

The article deals with the image of Lydia Cheboksarova, the heroine of the play by Alexander Ostrovsky Money to Burn, in the context of the implementation of the game motives in the text. The author focuses on behavioral strategies of the character, its world outlook, stylistic range.

The article considers indirect plot allusions, V. Nabokov’s explicit and disguised references to the topic related to the terrible characters of Dostoyevsky, to the new embodiments of Pushkin’s and Dostoyevsky’s images.

‘Insulted and humiliated’ is one of F. M. Dostoyevsky’s recurrent themes. It remains up-to-date in the last period of his creative work related to Staraya Russa. This town became the prototype of Skotoprigonievsk from The Brothers Karamazov and the small town Afimievsk from the novel The Adolescent. In Dostoyevsky’s letters, in his wife’s memoires, in the reports of the writer’s friends from Staraya Russa there crop up the recollections of the citizens, who can be considered the prototypes of the ‘insulted and humiliated’ in these novels.

The article considers the aspect, heretofore disregarded by the literary critics, of how the road motive functions in prose fragments by Pushkin, as well as determines aesthetic and world view fundamentals of why this motive is included in the text.

Researching the reasons of Zakhar Prilepin’s interest to Leonid Leonov’s oeuvre, the author of the article proves that by experiencing the difficult way of an eminent writer’s formation, the features of his artistic world, Leonov’s biographer acquires an opportunity to look more closely into himself, into his own style, to realize the correction of his own creative search.

The article researches the meaningful components of V. Sorokin’s artistic world picture: the idea of the ‘Russian metaphysics’ and ‘historic trauma’. The universal mythologem of oprichnina serves as the main means of their artistic representation.

The article offers the analysis of narrative strategies in the novel Cancer Ward as a significant component of the author’s creative method, which was being formed in 1950-1960s. The idea of A. I. Solzhenitsyn’s prose being polyphonic is considered controversial.

The second part of the article is dedicated to the analysis of the key motive and thematic complexes together determining the peculiarity of the ‘soviet’ reality as artistic unity, actualized in the works by A. I. Solzhenitsyn and V. P. Aksyonov (written and published at the turn of the XX–XXIst centuries). The phenomenon of fear is considered in the line of the ideological foundation of the ‘soviet’ system.

The article substantiates the conclusion that the basis of the psychological portraits of many characters, as well as of the composition of the novel Doctor Zhivago, contains parallelism and isomorphism; and their compositional unity allows the author to reveal the family and spiritual affinity of the characters, as well as to express his position.

The article analyzes an early play by Evgeny Schwarts Adventures of Hohenstaufen. The text poetics features are distinguished on the levels of the action development, character images, language humor. The genre dominating idea is identified. The author reveals how the vaudeville, the fairy-tale, and fantastic, and the satiric elements in the text interact. In the focus of the author’s attention is the motive of a ‘usual’ miracle/magic reflecting the aesthetic principle of the playwright.