Literary criticism

In this article the author talks about the image-motif of the embroidering girl (the girl with the embroidery frame) in the works of A. I. Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago, Cancer Ward, The Red Wheel, Three Brides) and the connections of his work with the texts of Russian writers of the 19th century.

The article considers the functions of the ‘short-sightedness’ metaphor in the metropolitan literature of the 1920–1930s. The author shows how political and cultural context of the epoch influences the comprehension of this metaphor and of the images of the ‘optical prosthetic devices’ (glasses / eye-glasses / lorgnette / monocle) related to it.

The article carries out the analysis of the image of a wasp in an early poem by A. A. Akhmatova. The article shows how the image of an insect penetrates an extended metaphor and becomes an important means of revealing the inner state of the lyrical heroine.

The article considers the works of Vas. Iv. Nemirovich-Danchenko, dedicated to Dagestan. In his works the writer depicts the life and customs, folklore and ethnography of the Dagestan highlanders. Speaking about the transformation of Dagestan folklore in the works of Nemirovich-Danchenko, the author of the article also draws upon the ethnographic data featured in the works of Nemirovich-Danchenko, reflecting Dagestan.

The article compares two novels: The Conquest of Plassans by Emile Zola and The Petty Demon by Fyodor Sologub. The parallels (in the problem range, systems of images, poetics of the plot, in the psychological picture of the characters’ images) give us grounds to consider the novel by Zola to be one of the sources of plot collisions and poetics for The Petty Demon.

The article deals with Russian translations of the famous novel The Wandering Jew (1844) by the French writer Eugène Sue, performed at different times. The brief characteristics of translators are considered. The comparative analysis of translations in the conceptual and cultural context of its era is carried out. The printing features of individual publications are characterized.

The article studies the images of the leading characters in the novels A Raw Youth by Dostoyevsky and Virgin Soil by Turgenev. The main idea of the article is to highlight the image of an illegitimate character as a separate archetype in literature.

The article proposes a reinterpretation of the title of Pushkin’s novel The Captain’s Daughter, different from the traditionally existing in the domestic science. It is shown that the meaning of the novel’s title The Captain’s Daughter in a small degree is related to the heroine Masha Mironova, but it is based on Pushkin’s play poetics, introducing into the novel its two-dimensional quality and two-part structure.

The article discusses a particular type of fragments in the montage composition of Sasha Sokolov’s novel A School for Fools in terms of its structural and semantic specificity, substantiates the principles of the possibility of highlighting it in the text and also reveals a special nature of the montage junction in the novel.

The paper explores the correlation between biography, history and fiction in Saul Bellow’s early works. Regarding the image of Trotsky that persistently appears in his books, the presented analysis identifies a range of narrative devices that help transpose fact into fiction, such as framing (story inside a story), counterpoint construction, and deliberately subjective perception of historical events.