Literary criticism

In this article we are considering the poetics of the spatial image – the provincial town – in the plays by Gorky and Chekhov. The context of the XIX century classical drama enables to determine the new content of the province image, to reveal common features of the «new drama» poetics and author`s individual peculiarities as well, and to confront the world outlook positions of its two creators – Chekhov and Gorky reflected in the failing – to – coincide appraisals of the perspectives in the development of the Russian provincial life in the early XX century.

The single sentence by Mikhail Bulgakov about the final of Nikolay Gogol’s play «Revizor» provokes the author of this work to contemplate the finals of Bulgakov’s plays as well. The researcher suggests that Bulgakov considered the Gogol’s final an excellent example of a grotesque («thunderous», as Bulgakov himself called it) end of action. He proves that such type of an unnatural, unexpected denouement distinguishes many Bulgakov’s works.

Post-Soviet dystopia’s construction of the future out of the national past is analyzed as culturally-conditioned complex reaction to utopian temporality of the method of Socialist realism and treatment of time in folklore.

In the article Blok’s tradition is revealed in the image of the Beautiful Lady in Bulat Okudzhava’s poetry (an early poem by Okudzhava “You’re Not Drunkards, You’re Not Vagrants…” is taken as an example). Kipling’s motives in the poem also add to the recognition of Blok’s tradition.

In the article the time structure of the novel Doctor Zhivago is examined in the context of Pasternak’s idea of imaginative reality. Time in the novel is presented as a row of interlacing mutually defining layers: the author’s time, the time of lyrical affection, the time of the characters, the reader’s time, breakthroughs to the Eternity create a complex unity of the narrative structure.

The author of the article singles out the main problem of Bulgakov’s tragedy which is a distinctive feature of his plays as well as of epic compositions and of his personal world-view. The author claims that the main profound conflict in Bulgakov’s works turns to be the collision of fortune and fate generally presented in the world literature from Ancient Greeks to our days. The researcher emphasizes some special traits of Bulgakov’s stories of 1930s such as deceptiveness of fortune, prediction of the denouement in action.

The article studies the problem of Petersburg text of the Russian literature in the literary works by Konstantin Vaginov, its correspondence to the classical Petersburg text of A. Pushkin, F. Dostoevsky, N. Gogol.

The article studies inter-textual links of comediography of A. V. Sukhovo- Kobylin with N. V. Gogol’s literary legacy, the functions of Gogol’s allusions used by Sukhovo-Kobylin in the context of the formation of Russian realistic drama are being researched.

The article considers the debut novels by A. F. Pisemsky and Ye. E. Driansky, which defined the development direction for the prose department of Moskvityanin journal during the ‘young editorial board’ time under the supervision of A. N. Ostrovskiy. Specific features of the individual styles of both writers and the closeness of their aesthetic positions to the program of the journal have been defined.

The article dwells on the problem of narrative structure in an aesthetic journalism work. The author proves that, contrary to the traditional views on the speech structure of aesthetic journalism, the narrator, the hero, and the author-creator of such works aesthetically do not correspond. The speech subject of aesthetic journalism is a special type of narrator, whose peculiarity is made up of the structurally manifested unmerging and inseparable bond with the author-creator.