Literary criticism

The article examines the facts of Nikolai Gogol’s biography and his several works which shed the light on the author’s early acquaintance with Ivan Krylov’s works. The material from Dmitry Troschinsky’s library has been used for a detailed study for the first time. An epigraph to the fable The Eagle and the Bee for Gogol’s handwritten journal Meteor literatury (The meteor of literature) has been analyzed. It is assumed that Krylov’s oeuvre may have influenced the early Gogol.

The article considers the aesthetic value of the Almanacs Aglaya and The Aonides predetermined by the worldview core linking the publications – the personality of Karamzin emerging in different externalizations: as a publisher, an author of novels, a poet, a critic and an opinion journalist. The ‘many faces’ of N. M. Karamzin under consideration allow to draw the conclusion on the almanac’s being multitargeted, as well as to reveal the mechanisms of readers’ reception.

The article analyzes different aspects of the epistolary interaction in F. M. Grimm’s correspondence with N. P. and S. P. Rumyantsev, the dialogue role in the written communication and the impact of the courteous tradition on the development of the intimate principle in a pri vate correspondence which facilitated the genre evolution at the turn of the XVIII–XIXth centuries.

The article reveals the artistic meaning and functions of the miracle in two Old Russian military novels: Chronicle Novel on the Kulikovo field and Novel on the Stand on the Ugra River.

The article considers the techniques of translating a biographical text into the language of the cinema which have been used by the director A. Khrzhanovsky in the film A Room and a Half. Visual and textual quotes from the poet’s essays, interviews and poems have been analyzed, as well as the contemporaries’ reminiscences.

The article considers montage as a major means of developing compositional text structure in the novel by an Irish-English writer E. Bowen (1899–1973) Eva Trout or Changing Scenes. Isolated instances of montage are analyzed as well as its meaning on the scale of the whole novel.

The article offers the analysis of the language of Cancer Ward novel as a significant component of the writer’s creative method, which was formed in the 1950–1960s. The article considers ways of ‘recreating’ the ideologically colored word in Solzhenitsyn’s prose.

The article deals with the interaction of humourous and frenetic motives in Fantomas novel cycle by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain (1911–1913). It shows how the book reflects, on the one hand, a certain predilection of the ‘belle époque’ for a demonstration of repulsive aspects of death and, on the other, the influence of Grand Guignol theatre aesthetics. Fantomas novels are thus juxtaposed with Gaston Leroux’s prose.

The article considers the image of the sky as a key element of the verbal landscape of V. G. Korolenko’s Siberian cycle of stories and essays. Its main functional features defining plot and compositional integrity of the works, folk-mythological origins of components of the figurative system of landscape paintings and artistic potential of ‘celestial’ symbols are identified.

The article presents a systematic analysis of A. P. Chekhov’s early stories (1880–1884) in which the topic of medicine in the contemporary society is featured, as well as the images of doctors and patients, motives of illness and treatment. It is shown how Chekhov’s personal experience as a general practitioner influenced the problem range and poetics of the stories with this topic. Their genre and idea evolution has been traced in the author’s movement towards maturity.