Literary criticism

The article analyzes the motive of madness in V. Nabokov’s prose. The role of this motive in the writer’s visual experiments is investigated. The portrayal of mental disorders is considered as an ‘estrangement’device, destroying the automaticity of perception.

The article is devoted to one of the difficult problems in the study of Mandelstam’s lyrics, namely the problem of distinguishing different versions and cyclic structures based on repetition and variations of poetic fragments. The author offers the criteria of distinction, analyzes several controversial cases, shows the importance of presenting different versions of text as a dynamic unity.

The paper considers the transformation and functioning of the plot about Pygmalion and Galatea in the story written by A. V. Chayanov. The story is a multidimensional play with myths (of Aphrodite, Medusa, Isis), and with the literary traditions represented by G. Casanova, J. W. Goethe, L. Tieck, E. T. A. Hoffmann, H. Heine, A. Blok, etc. The structural levels of the text are subject to the principle of mirror doubling. The well-known idea of O. Freidenberg that “the idea of a doll is parallel with the idea of a deity-actor-corpse” is manifested in A. V.

The article discusses the critical responses of N. Ya. Abramovich devoted to the work of the brightest representative of the Russian female poetry of the 19–20th centuries, M. A. Lokhvitskaya. Deep and extraordinary assessments of the critic seem to be a significant milestone in the comprehension of her lyrics, and play a significant role in determining the place of the poetess in the literary space of the era.

The article explores V. P. Burenin’s parodies of plays and prose by Leonid Andreev in the first two decades of the 20th century. The article lays bare the mechanism of Burenin’s identifying literary modernism with the ‘corruption’ of the Russian language by Jewish Russian writers. The author of the article elucidates why the Russian writer Leonid Andreev is dethroned in Burenin’s parodies as a manifestation of ‘kikeness’ in the literature of the beginning of the century.

The article presents an unknown episode from the biography of the Russian writer, collector and performer of folk pieces, B. V. Shergin. Here is shown a variant of a spiritual poem The Dream of the Mother of God recorded by Shergin in his native Arkhangelsk province in 1917 and published in 1919 in the newspaper Vozrozhdeniye Severa (Revival of the North). The characteristic features of the poem’s composition and stylistic structure and its role in the writer’s establishment are considered.

The article presents the results of studying F. M. Dostoevsky’s novel’s Notes from Underground from the point of view of researching the issue of another’s view in the writer’s creative oeuvre.The evidence obtained from the text analysis allows to single out some characteristic features of the visual behavior of the ‘underground man’, as well as to expand the interpretation of the novel.

The article analyzes the motive of fear in Aleksey Slapovsky’s novel Encoded. This motive permeates the whole novel and essentially becomes the key one for the plot development. The struggle with the subconscious fears of the character and of the author is considered. This struggle results in a multiple re-writing of the selfsame story.

The article attemps to sum up the results of the national theoretical reflection on the nature of the lyric. The author considers the question whether such characteristics as enhanced emotionality, musical sense, subjectivity, ingenuousness, traditionally attributed to the lyric, are its specific features.

The article considers the place, role, functions, forms of final scenes in the structure of the novel March 1917 by A. I. Solzhenitsyn on the level of the chapter final scenes, ends of days, book closings and the final of the Node, which helps to imagine more intensely and to comprehend the author’s concept of the third Node of the Red Wheel.