Literary criticism

The article is devoted to Mandelstam’s unfinished cycle of goldfinch and its diverse connections to poems of the Second Voronezh Notebook. The author of the article reveals some hidden meanings of the goldfinch poems and connections within the central section of Voronezh Notebooks by analyzing the draft manuscript and the final version.

The article introduces new and relatively unknown facts of L. A. Slovokhotov’s biography, of his participation in Saratov literary life.

The article presents a research of the literary and critical material of 1919–1927 related to the perception of the literary group «Imaginists». Critics of different aesthetic views did not believe in the sincerity and depth of the imagininst poets’ emotions. Contemporaries criticized the group members for epatage and experiments in poetry.

M. Prishvin’s sketches from the journal Zavety (Testaments) are republished in fragments containing the reception of the First Balkan war (1912). They in a resourceful and journalistic manner re-create the discussion of the «Slavic issue» actualized by the war in different spheres of the Russian society. It is evident that Prishvin’s images and evaluations sound geopolitically up-to-date.

The article analyzes the features of the historic memory functioning in the creative world of the Little Russia texts of the Arabesques and fragments relative to them. The necessary condition of retaining the memory of the past in these works is the existence of a material object related to the historic events and its commentator.

The article researches how Khlestakov’s image that has become a household name has impacted the oeuvre of the later play writers. The images of the so-called Khlestakov-like characters are considered in the works of Gogol himself, of Sukhovo-Kobylin, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Ostrovsky.

The paper presents materials of the project on publishing the encyclopedia M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin and his contemporaries. Among the project goals is the representation of the writer’s various connections with his contemporaries, particularly not only with those whom he knew personally, but with those who existed in his creative consciousness irrespective of any personal acquaintance and who responded to his works. This approach allows a more objective understanding of the writer’s texts.

The article shows that the journal Podenshchina (Day Labour) published in 1769 is of interest from both formal and information point of view. The peculiarity of its structure lies in the plot unity where the central character is an imaginary journal publisher. The content of Podenshchina magazine is characterized by its educational policy.

The article considers three of four expedition periods of collecting fairy-tales by P. G. Bogatyrev (in Moscow, Arkhangelsk, Saratov regions); the history of the first one is traced on the basis of the archive materials (expedition records, minutes of the Society of Natural Science, Anthropology, and Ethnography at the Imperial Moscow University, folklore specialists’ reviews) and the publications of P. G. Bogatyrev and other scientists.

The article formulates the methodological principles for the identification of the gender constituent in the analysis of literary texts. Four novels by L. Ulitskaya show the dynamics of the actualized discursive gender model of the world and human being. The article focuses on the techniques of feminine consciousness representation in the text, on their dynamics in the process of a female author searching for the type of an ideal hero.