Volume 16, 2018 year

The legends of etiological character are an essential part of mythological ideas of different peoples. Folktales are devoted to the origin of properties and qualities of the world surrounding the person, the structure of public institutes, including the bans and regulations related to a traditional calendar. A part of them appeal to religious authorities, thus, Gods and Saints act as their characters. This occurs, for example, in apocryphal legends of the so-called “Folk Bible” in which Jesus Christ or the Virgin (as well as Saints) accomplish some “primordial deeds”, thus, consecrating the established order of things. However, along with such stories, there are earlier, pre-Christian legends too, which may be known in different continents. The Karelian legend about a bird a hazel grouse (Bonasa bonasia) belongs to the latter ones. In Karelia it was represented by two main plots: in the first one the main character is the Virgin (it describes a hazel grouse resuscitated and flying off from a boiler, resembling the Resurrection of Christ on Easter; the legend is the basis of the ban to roll dough for pies and to cook meat on Easter day. The second motif is more ancient existing within the territory of the most part of Northern Eurasia. The legend tells about an enormous hazel grouse as a mythical primordial bird, whose meat was shared between other animals or spread out in nature by gods or spirits at the beginning of times, that was connected with creation of other living beings. The second plot is likely to have Ural-Siberian origins. It is confirmed not only by the fact that it exists among a lot of Siberian ethnic groups, but also by an archaic character and the variety of details in the narration, by the tendency to complication of a plot by means of a motif of the creation of the world.

Keywords: comparative studies, Karelian mythology, Karelian folklore, mythopoetics, etiological legends, image of a hazel grouse, plot, motif

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Among the “cross-cutting” and “core” themes of Gogol’s creative work, which for a long time did not attract attention to itself, is the attitude of the writer to “opposition”, anti-government trends. This theme is key for a number of artistic and publicistic works of N. V. Gogol. For the first time, Gogol’s typology of the “distressed man” — the literary contemporary of the “superfluous people” Onegin and Pechorin, the “new people” N. G. Chernyshevsky, the “underground man” F. M. Dostoevsky and others. Gogol’s views on the relationship between liberalism and conservatism are analyzed, in particular, the “paradox” that has been in the field of invariable attention of the writer is considered, that hypocritical conservatism always contains the beginnings of liberalism, while the “liberals” accused of being pseudo-conservatives sometimes in fact are carriers of protective values. A detailed account is given of the autobiographical character of certain motifs of Gogol’s works connected with the theme of state service. The authorship of the memoirs of an unknown person about Gogol’s stay in Mannheim in 1844 is established. A memoir note belongs to Grigory Mikhailovich Tolstoy (1808—1871), a rich Simbirsky and Kazan landowner, familiar to Karl Marx. Personality is an outstanding, well-educated representative of a well-known noble family, a “Oneginsky” type person, a gypsy song lover, a theater, a liberal, a player and a hunter. Tolstoy was distinguished by his unessentialness and, as one might judge, “ease in extraordinary thoughts”, so that he could very well serve Gogol in the replenishment of his gallery of “dead souls”. The episode from Gogol’s biography is examined on a broad cultural and historical background. The history of acquaintance of Tolstoy with Gogol in Moscow in 1840 and communication with the writer, four years later, in Mannheim, the circumstances of Tolstoy’s rapprochement, on the eve of his arrival in Mannheim, in Paris with K. Marx, are being studied. Reported information opens a new page in the biography and creativity of Gogol.

Keywords: N. V. Gogol, conservatism, liberalism, typology of the hero, “superfluous people”, “grived people”, polemic, parody

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The article is devoted to the images of troika and railway in Russian literature of the 19th century. Russia began to develop rapidly after Peter the Great’s reforms. The question of the country’s development vector became particularly relevant in the 1840s. It caused the controversy of Westernizers and Slavophiles. In literature Russia’s path began to be related to the metaphor of a fast movement. Gogol created the symbol of Russia as a rushing troika in the finale of the poem “Dead Souls”. This symbol refers to the idea of Holy Russia. Slavophile K. Aksakov gave an enthusiastic assessment of the final lines of the poem. Westernizer Belinsky did not agree with Aksakov’s interpretation. He proposed an alternative symbol of Russia as a progressive country whose symbol was a railway. V. Sologub in his story “Tarantas” ridiculed on Gogol’s and Slavophiles’ views on the assumption of the common sense based on which the current dispute about the choice between the Russian ways of development is speculative and unreliable. Later, Dostoevsky entered into polemics refreshing the images of a Living Troika and a Mechanic Railway. Through lens of his realism these two symbols become larger and mean not just the ways of development of Russia, but two principles of beingness — the organic, striving for the holiness, and the infernal ones. Nevertheless, Dostoevsky and Gogol coincide in the main thing — the Easter archetype is fundamental for both of them.

Keywords: N. V. Gogol, F. M. Dostoevsky, V. A. Sologub, V. G. Belinsky, symbols of the path and movement, historiosophy, Westernizers and Slavophiles

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In the archive of Shmelev’s documents are kept the materials of two versions of the story “The Small Shelf” (1909). Their comparative analysis allows disclosing the genesis of the artistic structure of the writing. The first draft is structured around the characters of a teenage boy and his boss, an old man obsessed with the hunger for power. The old man is striving to subject the boy spiritually and possess him like a thing. This is the core of the psychological conflict of the work. The character of the old man has the features of the image of the Baron in A. S. Pushkin’s tragedy “The Miserly Knight”. The motif of the “power of gold” is transformed into the “power of knowledge” in the story. The idea of the first edition to show a spiritual crisis of a contemporary obsessed with aspiration for knowledge and power was not implemented in the final edition of the work. In the second edition the author showed the idea of the story through the affirmation of a transformative power of knowledge. He complicates a narrative structure of the text, changes the images of the main characters and transforms the idea of spiritual obedience into the idea of spiritual kinship in which appear evangelistic connotations. The author contrasts the main characters to “patronymic” ambience under the principle of binary opposition such as the “spiritual — materialistic”, the “learned man and the man obsessed with thirst for profit”.

Keywords: I. S. Shmelev, character, image, book, word, creative history, edition of the work, printed text, poetics of genre

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The article explores the genesis of the technique of stylization of foreign language in the poetics of I. S. Shmelev’s early prose based on the story “Hassan and his Jeddy”. Making a representative of the Turkish people the main character, the writer pays special attention to the peculiarity of his speech, which not only becomes the key to understanding Hassan’s character, but also diversifies the problematic of the writing. The comparison of the last lifetime edition of the story with the existent manuscript reveals the stages of literary work over a speech portrait of the hero-Turk at the phonographic and lexical-grammatical levels. The pronunciation defects introduced by the author into Hassan’s speech are non-systemic and inconsistent, that underlines the writer’s intention not to imitate the speech of a foreigner, but to create a speech portrait of the non-native speaker. The stylistic corrections spotted due to the comparative analysis, on the one hand, testify that Shmelev was honing his writing style, but on the other hand, they disclose the transformation of the ideological content of the story, in which the social component is getting weaker, while the philosophical one is getting stronger.

Keywords: I. Shmelev, “Hassan and his Jeddy”, neorealism, stylization, contaminated speech, ethno-verbal portrait

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The urgency of the work lies in the fact that English culture and literary tradition were significant in the life and creative development of Pasternak. The article is devoted to the problem of interaction of Russian and English literatures in the Boris Pasternak’s works. It deals with the facts of direct appeal of the poet to the creative heritage of English poets and playwrights, special attention is paid to the images of Shakespeare’s tragedies, which manifested not only in the poet’s correspondence with his relatives, but also in the poems (The Decade of Presny, Shakespeare, English Lessons etc.) and in the novel Doctor Zhivago. The images of Shakespeare’s tragedies (Macbet’s witches, Ophelia, Desdemona, Birnam forest) allow Pasternak to describe the events taking place in the family and in the country in whole. They become the topic of Pasternak’s literary-critical articles (Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (on behalf of the translator), Notes on Shakespeare, etc.). They express not only the understanding of the main images of his works, the interpretation of their conflicts and Pasternak’s observations on Shakespeare’s style, but also the reasoning about his own method of translating. Thus, the Pasternak was under the influence of Shakespeare’s style long before working upon the translations of his plays. From 1940 to 1949 Pasternak translated Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Anthony and Cleopatra, Othello, etc. Shakespeare’s images and the problems touched upon in his tragedies, as well as the stylistic and genre features of his plays, gradually penetrated into life and, as a result, Pasternak’s writings. The study tested that the interest in foreign culture contributed to the enrichment and expansion of the ideological and aesthetic worldview of the poet, actively mastering the artistic discoveries of the past and adopting them in the present.

Keywords: B. Pasternak, Shakespeare, biography of the poet, Macbeth’s witches, Hamlet, Birnam Forest, eternal images, plot’s transformation.

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The present research paper is dedicated to the problem of differentiation between Tolstoy’s texts and intertextual elements in Solzhenitsyn’s “Cancer Ward” by means of revealing the frequency and relevance of an appeal to the ideas of Tolstoy as well as Stalin, Gorky, Bacon, Pushkin, Herverg. In “Cancer Ward” Tolstoy’s ideas put forward in the story “What Men Live by”, in the short novel “Cossacks” and in the novels “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina”, engender disputes between their characters about the meaning of life. These ideas serve as a rate scale of the events, set the highest religious and moral objectives, influence reflecting characters thus, leading some of them to the adoption of his ideas and spiritual resurrection whereas others to the search for their own answers to the question of being. In Solzhenitsyn’s short novel the title of Tolstoy’s story “What Men Live by” serves as an epigraph; the system of characters is built in accordance with the person’s integration into the dialogue with Tolstoy’s ideas and the cultural heritage. Oleg Kostoglotov bearing in mind Tolstoy’s lessons does not take anyone’s opinions on trust. He develops his own attitude to everything that is happening and becoming spiritually transformed he triumphed over death. The quoted opinions of the philosophers, political leaders and writers about “social” behavior of the Man are “secondary” compared with the ontological values presented in Tolstoy’s works and do not play a determinative role in the formation of Solzhenitsyn’s characters’ worldview. In terms of genre composition, the “Cancer Ward” is a philosophical and publicist short novel. The predominance of Tolstoy’s text over the intertextuality is an additional evidence of the timeless significance of his ideas for people of the following centuries.

Keywords: intertexuality, predetermining role, ontological values, “social” behavior, system of characters, spiritual resurrection, Solzhenitsyn, Tolstoy’s text

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