Literary criticism

The article considers well-established approaches to genre as a category of literary studies; alternative approaches to its understanding are revealed, methodological principles of genre identity of historic and philosophy of history novels are defined.

The paper deals with modern literary historical discourse, its contents, boundaries, intentions, and genres. The material under study spans the works of Russian literature created in the late XX and early XXI century. The main tendencies of the discourse evolution are revealed and methods of its further investigation are suggested.

The image of the city often becomes a subject of literary studies. The article aims at expanding the issue of urbanism poetics and city influence in literature. The author investigates key aspects of the city as a socio-cultural phenomenon with the help of the works by Western and American urban theorists.

The article offers an analysis of the main character in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Helena as a representation of one of the key ideas for Catholic Waugh – the idea of a personal calling.

The article analyzes the metareflection on Cervantes’s Don Quixote in Nabokov’s Lectures, draws an analogy between Nabokov’s Despair, Pnin and Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Such a form of Nabokov’s literary criticism as playing Don Quixote is considered.

In the article the concept of «foolishness for Christ’s sake» is analyzed in the light of socio-cultural tendencies of the beginning of the XXth century. The legitimacy of regarding V. V. Rozanov as one the «foolish» of his time is established. The fact is that Rozanov’s «foolishness» was defined by a behavioural stereotype of the beginning of the XXth century culture according to which he «was creating» a personal myth.

The article analyzes external and internal conflicts of Oscar Wilde’s drama Salom. The external conflict reveals Wilde’s idea of the destructive role of human infatuation. The internal conflict presents Wilde’s views connected with his ‘philosophy of the unreal’.

The article demonstrates on the material of the Soviet Plekhanov studies that the taxonomic problem of exact methodological definition of text interpretation is far from being solved. The absence of typology criteria for existing methods inevitably hinders the work of literary scholars and interferes with the proper systematization of the material.

Tolstoy’s poetics has never been studied in the combination of the «image of home» with the «thought of family». The relationship between these two categories is clearly visible, especially in the novels War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and Resurrection. Having considered these works by Tolstoy, written in different periods of his creative work, we can unwittingly notice the obvious relationship between the «image of home» and the «thought of family».

The article is dedicated to the history of the biography genre and to its theoretical realization, as well as to the current theoretical issues of the genre.