Literary criticism

In the article the contours of “Griboedov’s text” are outlined as a range of quotations and reminiscences from “Woe to Wit”; their literary and sense correlations as well as characteristic functioning in M.A. Bulgakov’s works are also touched upon.

Such epic experiments of Ye. P. Lyutsenko as «Cheslav», «Burivoy and Ylmila» are analyzed in the article; their sources are established, they are «The Russian Primary Chronicle», «Joachim’s Chronicle»; the peculiarity of the pre-Romantic historicism is revealed.

In the article the history of the memoirs genre formation is considered; and its peculiarities in the XVIIth century French literature are defined against the background of the political and spiritual situation development, as well as historic thought and the aesthetics of the period.

Genre defi nition of Timur Kibirov’s The General and His Family caused disagreement among literary critics. The range of opinions concerning the defi nition of the novel’s genre include historical novel, family saga, cento novel, the novel about psychology and morality of the late years of the USSR. This article is concentrated on the novel’s genre defi nition. The genre framework of the text is the epoch-standard local family story depicted against the background of massive Soviet history.

In the article the publications of the literary critic and historian Andrey Nemzer which appeared in the 1980s in the journal Literaturnoye obozreniye (Literary review) are analyzed. The articles of this period dealt more with historical and literary works and to a smaller degree with literary-artistic ones. The aim of this work is to identify the author’s status. A range of arguments is off ered proving that Nemzer’s contributions on the pages of the journal are strictly of literary-critical nature. The key feature is the evaluative statement which is most pronounced in negative comments.

John Woolman, an 18th century Quaker preacher, is known in the history of American literature for his spiritual autobiography titled The Journal (1774). The 1850–1940s is a period when Woolman’s autobiographical character attracts the attention of British and American critics and essay writers. They publish a signifi cant number of non-fi ction texts, which contain numerous elements of hagiography in Woolman’s portraiture, depicting him as a saintly proto-abolitionist fi gure.

The article deals with the identifi cation of semantic constants in the corpus of the texts of Protopope Avvakum, which manifested themselves as a characteristic feature of his worldview with the help of certain resources of the language system. In this regard, the main attention is paid to the substantives “the sun”, “the moon” and “stars” as the external outlines of associative links that arise in a number of works. At the same time, the article considers only those cases where the indicated lexical units are part of a syntactically built sequence.

The attention of the playwrights and theatre to Gogol’s prosaic text opens new forms of understanding of the classical text, and allows to find in it both deeply personal author’s content and something relevant to the society of a diff erent time. In the plays Pannochka by N. Sadur and Viy by V. Sigarev, the transformation of Gogol’s motives reveals the deep meanings of the story. These are Gogol’s favorite motives of a vague fear of women, eschatological forebodings, the fear of oblivion.

The subject of this work is the main themes and ideas of Russian country prose – the school that most fully refl ects the essence of the Russian national mentality. Ethical issues are an integral part of the works of Vasily Shukshin. V. Shukshin’s novellas represent the wisdom, virtue and life experience of a Russian villager, an attempt is made to identify the spiritual foundations. Writers strive to fi nd the foundations of the peasant world. Vasily Shukshin’s works are known not only in Russia, but all over the world. At the end of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, V.

The autobiographical character of Solzhenitsyn’s oeuvre, inseparable nature of ethical and aesthetic views, have shaped the author’s unique aesthetics. From the point of view of the author of this article, eliciting the meta-poetic principles defi nes the way of comprehension of Solzhenitsyn’s artistic world, of his ‘phenomenon’. The article presents the analysis of two of Solzhenitsyn’s signifi cant meta-poetic principles: self-meta-description and self-psychologism.