Literary criticism

A. Slapovsky’s prose cannot fit the clearly defined frame the critics and literary scholars try to set. The article considers their attempts to characterize the writer’s oeuvre, special emphasis is placed on the arguments about the author belonging to the postmodern or neorealist movements.

The problem of culture and its purpose is the focal point in the ideology of Wittgenstein’s Mistress, D. Markson’s philosophical novel. The main character overcomes her initial pragmatic approach to culture as a sequence of objective facts in L. Wittgenstein’s manner, and heads towards the discovery of its spiritual significance that helps one to realize oneself as M. Heidegger’s Dasein.

The article sums up the literary experience of studying the autobiographical and auto-psychological principles in a work of fiction; the borders between the well-studied technique of authobiographism and a more complex phenomenon of auto-psychologism are defined. V. Astafiev’s, A. Solzhenitsyn’s Z. Prilepin’s artistic paradigms are reviewed from the perspective of auto-psychology.

The motive of a person’s self-destruction is analyzed in the article on the material of V. Rasputin’s late short stories. These works show the signs of the anthropological crisis which is perceived by the writer not just as a threat of a distant future but as a danger hanging over humankind in the here and now.

The author studies Solzhenitsyn’s understanding of the ways and logic of the development of the Russian revolution expressed in the novel August 1914, the writer’s interpretation of its key stages and important episodes, and the principles of depicting the types of revolutionaries.

The article shows how the fates of Yu. G. Oksman and O. E. Mandelstam intercross, it also dwells on Oksman’s part in preparing the American version of the poet’s collected works. This topic is revealed in the context of the ХХth century history of national culture. Epistolary, memoir and biography sources are used widely. Oksman’s part in the process of reuniting different Russian literature branches is specially highlighted.

The article is dedicated to the analysis of the morbid metaphors employed in depicting social and political events of the Russian history of the XXth century on the material of literary and journalistic texts. Aesthetic and pragmatic functions of these metaphors are researched.

The poem Raseya is regarded as a projection of intellectual, creative and biographical experience of B. Grigoriev. It accumulates the thoughts expressed earlier in articles and letters of B. Grigoriev to Maxim Gorky, E. Zamyatin, V. Kamensky and others. His painting’s peculiarity influenced the style of the poem. Its heterogeneous language combines classical and avant-garde poetics, spoken language and inner speech.

The article considers A. F. Pisemsky’s continuing classicist tradition represented by P. A. Katenin and overcoming it in the course of developing his unique writer’s and playwright’s poetic language on the model of a specific drama technique (deus ex machina). It has been established that Pisemsky reconsidered the key figure of classicist theatre from different perspectives: gender, age, space and time, but first and foremost from moral and didactic point of view.