Literary criticism

The article considers an important problem of the meaning of biographical facts in artistic texts of A. S. Pushkin from the point of view of different ways of its solution. A singular way of tackling the problem offered by S. L. Frank is specified.

The article presents an integral analysis of a set short story by A. F. Pisemsky «The Comic Actor» in correlation to the writer’s poetics and to the ideological and aesthetic framework of the «young editorial staff» of the Moskvityanin journal.

The article investigates strange transformations which occur to the categories of time and space in the story “Nevsky Prospekt”. An attempt is undertaken to explain the concentration of these metamorphoses on the stylistic level of the story and to confirm the psychic nature of the strange as a certain world lookout ingrained in the subject’s consciousness.

Okudzhava’s poem is regarded in the context of the classical poetics of rose, in the background of the traditional situation «farewell to the lira». The parallels with Pushkin’s, Batyushkov’s, Boratynsky’s and Khodasevich’s poetry are drawn.

The article deals with the transformation of Pushkin and Derzhavin myth in two poems by A. M. Gorodnizky; an attempt is made to explain the author’s individual interpretation of the myth (controversial to that established in the mass cultural consciousness) by means of analyzing the autobiographical and autopsychological components of the works under investigation. It is also undertaken to enter those poems in the wider context of the bard’s reflections on the Russian history problems, presented in poetic and memoir texts.

It is the first time when the articles of Alfons Paquet are studied in the Russian academic humanities. The articles were being written in Russia for Frankfuter Zeitung newspaper from July till November of 1918. Paquet was the first German journalist, which was allowed an admission to Russia after the country withdrew from the war. His publications are valuable testimonies of the turbulent period of Russian history, helping to understand the European bourgeois intellectuals’ viewpoint on the radical changes in Russian political and social life.

The article studies the genre of the «Künstlernovelle» drawing on the short story The Prince in the Theatre by Arthur Schnitzler, the Austrian author of the turn of the XIX century. The images of artists are central to the writing of this author. This short story presents the type of a tired, aging, minor artist, who had wasted his talent in vain, the type that the author was very interested in. The article studies the image of the main character, the relationship between the artist and society, the motifs of death and game and their role in creating the image of the artist.

In the article literary life of the Soviet Russia of the years 1920-1922 is analyzed as it was reflected in the newspaper Izvestiya VZIK (All-Russian Central Executive Committee). The main components of this life are investigated, literary soirees, formation of new literary organizations and institutions, literary competitions, and writers’ names among them.

The article presents the analysis of interconnections between the writer’s individual perception of the world and the development of his writing style. It also defines the mutual penetration spheres of social and individual components of the writer’s spiritual vision.

In the article on D.S. Merezhkovsky’s example the question on the nature and appointment of author’s prefaces to lifetime complete works of Russian writers is brought up. The author comes to a conclusion about genre similarity of the considered preface of D. S. Merezhkovsky to a confession and sermon.