Literary criticism

The article addresses the peculiarities of Yu. Buida’s autobiographical novel «Thief, Spy, and Murderer». The author arrives at the conclusion that the genre of this novel synthesizes the features of an autobiography, memoirs, artistic commentaries, thus becoming a kind of an artistic prism through which the main regularities of Buida’s artistic world are refracted.

The article dwells upon the antiquity as one of the most important components M. Amelin’s poetry. The Russian contemporary poet and well-known interpreter of Pindar’s and Catullus’s poems, Maxim Amelin is known for his passion for the classical culture which as well as the Russian verse tradition of the XVIII century is a basis of his creative work. The article analyses the specifics of the poetic theory and practice of Horace in the first Amelin’s book «Cold Odes».

The article consistently traces the actualization of the fate motive in four novels by Ch. T. Aitmatov; his semantic key points are analyzed in each work and the evolution of this text element is revealed.

This article explores the image of London in the works of London artist-visionaries – the subjects of Peter Ackroyd’s biographies. The goal is to trace the evolution of the city image in the course of the English literature development from XIV th to XXth centuries.

The article deals with the issues of cyclization in Mandelstam’s poetry of the beginning of the 1930s, based on the materials of the «First Moscow notebook». The object of study is the hierarchy of different types of lyrical entities and some tendencies in the formation of the book of poems in the late works of Mandelstam.

The article deals with the development of Slovak spiritual poetry as an independent genre that has undergone a complex literary transformation: the first cantionals are created via the Gregorian choral, later they are elaborated into lyric song-prayers, driving the formation of a poetic religious movement Slovak Catholic Moderna in the XXth century.

The article reveals external and internal factors contributing to the formation of an integrating context of the third book of Shipovnik Publishing House Literary-Artistic Almanac (1908): the design of the book and composition are being examined, the motives of the almanac’s texts are analyzed.

The article considers the attitudes of N. M. Sokolov and N. Ya. Stechkin – the leading critics of the journal Russkiy Vestnik in 1902–1906 – to the oeuvre of Leonid Andreev and to its place in the readers’ minds. The article shows to what extent the critical evaluations depended on the topics unfolded in the author’s works.

The article emphasizes how the participation in Russkoye Slovo impacted the writer’s creative personality, mindset, spiritual and moral as well as aesthetic notions being formed. The writer was in the center of the literary events of the 1860s and he held responsible posts at the editorial board.

The article considers Gogol’s letters of his school years in which the German topic is mentioned, as well as contemporaries’ reminiscences complementing the picture with the biographical facts of the future author.