Literary criticism

In the article the proverbs and sayings applying to the categories of harmony and discord are analyzed. The basic semantic focuses related to these categories are singled out. The collection Proverbs of the Russian People by V. I. Dal has served as the main source of proverbs and sayings.

The article compares the variants of Pushkin’s autograph of the novel Dubrovsky concerning the images of the elder representatives of the nobility. Variants’ textual analysis allows to reveal the process of artistic idea implementation.

In the article the correlation of the private and the public in the French court society of the second half of the XVIIth century is considered; the changes in the share of the themes touching upon private life are traced; the means of its depiction are analyzed.

The article investigates the genre of V. Pelevin’s novel «S.N.U.F.F.». The main criteria for determining it are the author’s idea of history and his view of the future, which are analyzed on the basis of the text of the book аnd critical reviews.

The paper formulates methodological principles of the gender component identification in the process of the artistic image analysis. It clarifies the scope of the notions «feminine style» and «feminine literature». The focus is on such a specific feature of feminine writing as gender «bilingualism». The latter is interpreted as a basis for the gradually emerging feminine dominance in contemporary culture.

The article is dedicated to the poetics of a historic work by V. Sosnora Derzhavin before Derzhavin. The main focus is on the potential of the genre foundation (a cycle of essays) and composition meaning. Those are viewed as ways of creating a subjective author’s image of a historic figure – a poet and a statesman.

In the article Saint Petersburg’s cultural life is represented on the example of theater, cinema and home salons functioning in the period of the «shaking revolution», the history of which is recreated in detail in the Red Wheel by A. I. Solzhenitsyn.

In the article an attempt is made to describe the range of contemporary studies dedicated to the problem of Petersburg’s text of the Russian literature; directions are outlined alongside which the study of Petersburg’s text was developing after the fundamental researches on the semiotics of the city by V. Toporov and Yu. Lotman were published.

The article offers an analysis of literary critics’ attitude towards Evelyn Waugh’s biography «Ronald Knox» as well as reasons for it being unsuccessful among its contemporaries.

The features of visual poetics of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky are considered in the article. The technique of «estrangement» as described by the Russian formalists is traced in the writer’s prose.