Literary criticism

The article contains the analysis of German children’s and young adult fantasy authors sharing a common interest to books as an important plot device. The focus of interest is on a considerable number of common themes, problems, character types and values that appear in the works of all the three authors, which allows to offer for these works such catch-all terms as ‘book text’ and ‘books about books’, and consider them as parts of a unique trend in German fantasy literature.

The article deals with the poetic cycle by Alexander Revich Son of man. It is shown that the poet comprehends his own existence through the prism of Evangelical good tidings. The earthly life and suffering of Jesus Christ is the ‘archetype’ for a man who has embarked on the path specified in the New Testament. The meaning of it all is ‘iconically’ revealed as the man’s realization of his godliness: from birth to death and resurrection into eternal life.

The article considers different techniques of constructing the image of Ioann Antonovich in V. Sosnora’s essay Two Masks. The article mainly analyzes the principles of how the author transforms historic and historiographic sources, presented by the works of the second half of the 19th century scientists V. A. Bilbasov and S. N. Shubinsky.

The article considers the teleological structure of A. I. Solzhenitsyn’s novel Cancer Ward. The combination of the social teleology polemic towards the Soviet novel and the transcendental teleology is analyzed on the level of the system of images-worldviews, on the levels of composition and language.

In the 1930s N. Ognev, the author of Kostya Ryabtsev’s Diary, takes part in the activities of the Union of Writers, reviews the manuscripts of emerging authors, hosts a literary club, develops ideas on how to restructure the work of the writers’ union. In the records and marginal notes a didactic intonation is discernible. For the first time the materials of N. Ognev’s archive are introduced into scientific discourse.

The article considers the history of A. P. Platonov’s screenwriting in 1927–1930s, the writer’s relationships with the leading cinema organizations of those times; for the first time new archive documents and materials of cinematic publications related to Platonov’s screenplays are introduced into scientific discourse.

The article considers the problem of realization of the sacred sense in verbal and pictorial still lifes. The affinity of the creative method of the 16th–17th century Dutch painters and that of N. Zabolotsky of the Columns period is shown, this method being based on a special spiritual and aesthetic feeling of the world. With the help of this method, a kind of spiritual and semantic metathesis is carried out: the profane becomes sacred, and the sacred is profaned, but the primary meanings shine through the outer shell of the work.

The article gives an overview of the uncollected love cycles of O. Mandelstam. The emphasis is placed on such problems of studying them as determining the addressee and the composition, analyzing their artistic integrity. A more detailed analysis of the semantic structure of the cycle dedicated to Olga Vaksel is given.

The object the article is to study the parallels between E. Zola’s novel La Curee and F. Sologub’s novel The Petty Demon. In the author’s opinion the similiarity of the plot collisions and techniques of depicting a person’s unity with the ‘environment’, which characterize the two novels’ poetics, is indicative of the unquestionable impact of the naturalist writer’s creative experience on Sologub’s seeking.

The paper considers the bipolar racial model representing African Americans in tragic and / or comic modality in American literature and culture (18th – the beginning of the 20th century). This model was formed in the 18th – beginning 19th century, continued to exist in American abolitionist writings, minstrelsy and plantation novel during the 19th century; having been absorbed by the Black American literary tradition, it underwent a considerable change especially in the Harlem Renaissance period.