Literary criticism

During the years of the revolution and the Civil War S. L. Frank, G. P. Fedotov, N. S. Arseniev were professors at Saratov University, but this is not all that unites them. In emigration these religious thinkers taught at various research-training, cultural-educational and spiritual centers of Europe, both Russian and foreign. The article reveals their personal experience of referring to the Biblical Word, exegesis of biblical texts based on Orthodox theology and biblical criticism. Frank wrote about the Word that created the world and the incarnate Word.

The article presents a comparative analysis of the materials of the critic, philologist and literary historian Andrey Nemzer, published in political and social, as well as literary and art journals of the 1990s. Structural and content features and self-editing are brought under close scrutiny.

The article proposes an approach to consider modern mass literature portraying doctors in line with the revival of the tradition of the occupational novel. There are traces of similarities with the genre canon at the plot-compositional, figurative and stylistic levels of the text. The differences between contemporary works and the established Soviet model of the genre are also highlighted.

The article considers a matter of current issue: studying ekphrasis within one piece of literature. The problem of a controversial approach to the definition of ekphrasis underpins the article. The prospective interdisciplinary solution of this problem is connected with the interpretation of the image of the artist Picasso by the playwright O. Bogaev. The intermedial component, the key image of Minotaur, and individual references to paintings are taken into account.

The article considers the image of the Virgin, presented in the poetic world of one of the greatest poets of the second half of the 20th century, Semyon Lipkin. The organic religious commitment inherent in his poetry is realized, first of all, in the cultural space of the Holy Scripture. Being, in a way, in between the two Testaments, the poet in his worldview is rather inclined to favor the New Testament understanding of suffering and sorrow, life and death. The image of the Virgin becomes one of the bearers of the New Testament gospel.

The relevance of the topic is determined by the interest of modern humanities to the myth-making aspects of the Soviet culture, including the interpretation of Decembrism. The purpose of the article is to review the main stages and patterns of the literary realization of Decembrism from the beginning of the Soviet era to the moment of the final separation of the two versions of the Decembrism myth (official and oppositional).

The paper analyzes the complex relationship between becoming American and keeping up ethnic and religious traditions in immigrant  families as portrayed in the works of leading American Jewish novelists who entered the literary scene after the Second World War when the back-to-the-roots sentiment was on the rise driven by the expanding multiculturalist discourse. The writings of Saul Bellow, Alan Lelchuk and Philip Roth are discussed to illustrate the different stages in the reassessment of Jewish identity.

The article analyzes the book by B.K Zaitsev Chekhov (1954) as a novelized biography, a ‘life story’. The author’s concept and composition of the book, consisting of 15 chapters with titles, 54 subchapters / fragments, are given a special emphasis; the artistic meanings and originality of the narrative of a complete biography are considered.

The article discusses some issues of creative history and the conceptual meaning of M. Gorky’s understudied short story A Sky-blue Life, the last one written in the landmark cycle Stories of 1922-1924. Relying on new documents from the writer’s biography, his correspondence and available scientific comments allow us to clarify the leitmotif of the work, its place in the writer’s creative biography.

The article describes the image of the city in the literary texts comprising 20 issues of the literary digest Zemlya (Moscow Publishing House, 1908–1917). Various city images (buildings and surrounding nature, urban dwellers) are analyzed in the literary works (both prose and verse) by the authors of Zemlya (M. Artsybashev, A. Kuprin, F. Sologub, V. Vinnichenko, N. Krasheninnikov, E. Chirikov, etc.). The analysis is accompanied by the journal and newspaper reviews of popular literary critics of the beginning of the 20th century.