Literary criticism

In the article the role of the picturesque ekphrases in the novel by A. I. Solzhenitsyn «The First Circle» is researched; the principles of the writer’s work with real visual objects are identified; abundant data has been gathered about the artist and graphic painter S. M. Ivashеv- Musatov, the prototype of the hero – artist Kondrashov-Ivanov; previously unattended ekphrasis variants in the early versions and the final version of the novel are studied in the paper.

The issue of the point of view in the composition of A. I. Solzhenitsyn’s novel «The First Circle» is regarded in the article by means of the structural analysis of its components based on the methodology by B. A. Uspensky.

The article analyzes the rhetoric roots of A. I. Solzhenitsyn’s novel «The First Circle». It is proved that the rhetoric nature of the novel as a genre – as described by M. M. Bakhtin and Yu. M. Lotman – is characteristic for Solzhenitsyn’s novel. Research of the rhetoric «sources» of the novel together with other roots of large epic genres in Solzhenitsyn’s oeuvre is an important route to the comprehension of both the nature of the writer’s artistic method and the genre of the Russian novel of the XXth century in general.

The article dwells on Solzhenitsyn’s lexical preferences, on what words he considered «unbearable» and why. In Solzhenitsyn’s attitude to the word aesthetic aspects (meaning, sound, color, smell) and ethic ones (belonging to the rogue or slaughterer world, being Russian, a possibility of coming from Christ’s lips) can be singled out.

In the article the author regards the personality and oeuvre of A. I. Solzhenitsyn («Gulag Archipelago», «Red Wheel», «Russia in Collapse») from the perspective of the unity of Russian spiritual culture in relation to two political philosophies: conservatism and radicalism. Ideas of the Russian religious philosophy expounded in the works by S. L. Frank underlie the theoretical foundation of the paper. A special role is dedicated to the polemic judgments of the writer.

The history of the two writers’ interaction is traced on the material of K. I. Chukovsky’s diaries and letters.

Based on his own recollections and on documented sources the author reconstructs the history of how A. I. Solzhenitsyn’s short novel «One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich» was perceived by the members of Saratov University literary club of the first half of the 1960s, under the supervision of a wonderful philologist T. I. Usakina, Assistant Professor of the Chair of the Russian literature of Saratov State University.

Based on his own recollections and on documented sources the author reconstructs the history of how A. I. Solzhenitsyn’s short novel «One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich» was perceived by the members of Saratov University literary club of the first half of the 1960s, under the supervision of a wonderful philologist T. I. Usakina, Assistant Professor of the Chair of the Russian literature of Saratov State University.

The article deals with J. M. Coetzee’s Boyhood, focusing on the author’s experiments with the autobiography in the context of traditional genre conventions. Boyhood, the first part of Coetzee’s autobiographical trilogy, is analyzed as a deconstruction of the childhood autobiography (the absence of autobiographical agreement, third-person present tense narrative, a combination of multiple points of view: those of a child-protagonist and an adult author).