Volume 17, 2019 year

The article considers the mythological sources of Pohjola image and contains a holistic description of this locus based on all available versions of epic runes. The Kalevala metric runes (234 texts) gathered in different years in Karelia and published in several collections, are used as a research material. The history of studying of the storyline of the trip to Pohjola, in one way or another touched upon in the works of foreign and Russian researchers, is described in the article. The textological and structural-semantic analysis of folklore texts, some of which form part of Lönnrot’s Kalevala, made it possible to reveal the entire polysemy of the image under consideration. The study indicated that Pohjola is identified with a far, transcendental world, the realm of the dead and the land of exuberancy. The talent of the mistress of Pohjola to become a bird alludes to her connection with the animal world, as well as the connection with the image of a shaman who in the likeness of a bird is able to travel from one world to another. The female nature of the main character of Pohjola reflects the matriarchal tribal system of society, and the motif of giving her daughter in marriage to a representative of another world — reveals the echoes of exogamous relations. Pohjola is localized in the spatial plane mainly separated by the watershed that fits into the concept of a horizontal arrangement of the Universe.

Keywords: karelian epic, mythology, the other world, image of Pohjola, sampo, Väinämöinen

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The paper states the hypothesis, according to which the formation and establishment of the new Russian literature does not occur as a result of a unidirectional but a bi-directional cultural impact on the formation of the original new Russian literature. Medieval genre forms well known in Russia (hagiographies, pilgrimages, etc.), by no means complete their functioning under the conditions of a “new” Europeanization (there was never a complete cultural isolation of Russian culture), but also, first, continue to exist, along with new genres, and, second, have an influence on the new Russian literature itself, the role of which is still largely underestimated. The concept of paraphrasis, which was previously attributed primarily only to a particular episode, although important in the historical-literary sense, are now generalized. This term quite successfully conveys not only the “transpositions” of a local fragment of the Christian tradition, which historically has an Old Testament origin (Psalter), but also the “translation” of the existing Orthodox cultural model as such into the “language” of the New Time, as well as the parallel “translation” of the new European cultural forms into the emerging Russian literature. Literature material (Cantemir, Trediakovsky, Radishchev, Krylov, and other) illustrates this hypothesis.

Keywords: Paraphrasis, Enlightenment, discreteness, continuality, cultural tradition, rationality, ecclesiastical and secular, secularization

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The article is dedicated to the problem of the sources of a brief notice about the death of A. S. Pushkin, released on January 30, 1837 in the 5th issue of “Literary Additions” (“Literaturnye Pribavleniya”) — a supplement to the newspaper “Russian Invalid” (“Russkiy Invalid”). It is proved that the semantics of the figurative definition of the importance of Pushkin as “The sun the Russian poetry” according to V. F. Odoevsky goes back to the Bible, in which the sun’s symbolism is equivalent to the connotation of the necrologic notice. A significant source of the image of “the sun of poetry” in Odoevsky’s obituary is the creative heritage of Pushkin in which the sun appears as a majestic, sacral source of life, full of true, Divine wisdom, giving people the joy and happiness and pointing at a saving way. This semantics of the image can be seen in the poems “Bacchanal Song”, “From Barry Cornwall” (“I Drink to Mary’s Health”), in the critical essay “The Triumph of Friendship, or Acquitted Alexander Anfimovich Orlov” and the last lifetime publication of the great poet in “Literary Additions” — the poem “Aquilon”. The textual convergence of the definition of the significance of Pushkin given in his obituary by Odoevsky with the words of Metropolitan of Kiev Cyril “the sun of the fatherland set below the horizon” from the “History of the Russian State” by Karamzin, going back to the “Power Book” (“Stepennaya Kniga”), is explained by a common biblical authentic source.

Keywords: A. S. Pushkin, V. F. Odoevsky, obituary, dialogue, reminiscences, biblical tradition, semantics, image, metaphor

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Pushkin’s works of different genres have three permanent characteristics. The first one resides in the contraposition of the completeness or incompleteness of the text; the second one concerns a subordinate position of the storyline in relation to the subject (the completeness or incompleteness of the writing) and the third particularity is an open composition. All the three features are three sides of the unique law of Pushkin’s poetics, which manifested a new stage in the development of historicism in the European aesthetic consciousness. Pushkin depicts life as a process; therefore he uses the artistic techniques that help to embody his idea in specifically artistic forms. This made it possible to publish the work by parts without being sure that it will be completed once, and based on it to build a variable composition (“Eugene Onegin”). These peculiarities of Pushkin’s poetics caused difficulties for researchers of his works: publishers attributed unfinished works to completed ones, and scholars and educators analyzed unfinished works as if the author had fully expressed his idea in them (e. g. unfinished novel “Dubrovsky”).

Keywords: A. S. Pushkin, subject, storyline, open composition, finished text, unfinished text, completed work, incompleted work

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The article explores the religious and political transformation of Gogol’s ideas about the “enlightened sovereign”. For the first time, the real phenomena that contributed to the formation of Gogol’s concept are covered, in particular, the pedagogical activity of one of Gogol’s school teachers, director of the Grammar School of Sciences in Nezhin, I. S. Orlaya; mentorship for women’s schools in Russia of their patrons, Empresses Maria Fyodorovna, Elizaveta Alekseevna and Alexandra Fyodorovna; a program of education set before contemporaries by S. S. Uvarov, Minister of Public Education; the article The Empress Maria by P. A. Pletnyov,, published in 1836 in the first issue of Pushkin’s Sovremennik. Gogol’s ideas about the monarch- teacher manifest themselves in his works. Gogol’s reflections on education, on the role of pedagogy in government are compared with the views of A. S. Pushkin, N. V. Pomyalovsky, N. S. Leskov. The autobiographical principle in Gogol’s works is revealed, in particular, the influence of the patriotic education in his alma mater — Grammar School of Sciences in Nizhyn — on the creation of the novel “Taras Bulba”.

Keywords: Gogol, Pletnyov, Pushkin, Leskov, the ideal, the history of Russia, the enlightened sovereign, the problem of a positive hero, patriotic education, mentor, teacher, educator

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On the basis of the concept of “Christian realism” in the works of F. M. Dostoevsky and V. F. Odoevsky the article deals with the biologizing and sociologizing concepts of the human nature since the Enlightenment and their connection with the fragmentation of the completeness and integrity of this nature, its complexity and inconsistency, with the descensive processes in the spiritual and moral world of people and entropy trends in the course of history. It is shown how spiritual laws, that go beyond the field of view of the rationalistic and pragmatic consciousness, transform the social and progressive engineering and planning, bring nihilistic elements into them. It is emphasized that the methodology of Christian realism is universal, associates the “mystery of man” with the mystery of history and becomes one of the fundamental principles for assessing the hierarchy of values in various worldview, ideological and social systems for the disclosure ascending and descending processes in them, the analysis of the elements of utopianism and social Darwinism.

Keywords: Christian realism, the mystery of man, anthropological rationalism, scienticism, historical utopianism, pragmatism, utilitarianism, the law of Self, the law of love, F. M. Dostoevsky, V. F. Odoevsky

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The issue of differentiation between the povest’ and the novel is one of the most difficult problems in Russian criticism. To this day, critics and readers confuse these genres designating the same literary works both as novels and povest’. The discussions are becoming complicated by non-genre meanings of genre definitions. One of the few creators of the theory of the povest’ and the novel was Vissarion Belinsky. In his view, the povest’is a middle genre: shorter than the novel, but longer than the short story, a kind of the novel (its episode). In his late criticism, he considered the novel and the povest’ a “sort of poetry”. This situation was reflected in the discussions of Dostoevsky’s novels and povest’ written in the 1840s. The majority of critics identified Poor Folk as a novel, few considered it a povest’, some of them wrote about the povest’ The Double as a novel. Dostoevsky himself occasionally used to label non-genre categories for his own literary pieces and works by other writers. In his opinion, the povest’ is not only a genre, but a type of narration, the content of a writing, a message, “a tale about the past” (Vladimir Dahl). Any epic work could be called a povest’. As often as not, a mixture of the povest’ and the novel was made intentionally. In the polemics regarding Dostoevsky’s debut, the whole range of genre and non-genre definitions can be found. Their consideration helps to solve the problem of differentiation between epic genres such as the povest’ and the novel.

Keywords: Dostoevsky’s debut, Belinsky, criticism, genre, povest’, novel, differentiation of genres, non-genre meanings of genre definitions

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The article envisages the thanatological discourse in Dostoevsky's novel: analyzes the binary oppositions on eschatological themes; describes the artistic images of the heroes of the novel, acquiring unique mythological features during their earthly ordeals; allusions to the images of another world presented in the text are studied; the accent elements of the circular composition of the novel are examined, emphasizing the inability of the heroes to get out of the locus infernus (hell — Lat.), where they are consistently led by their earthly path. In the novel, which reveals the crisis of modern civilization, the search for the ideal and the topic of the inevitability of the Resurrection becomes an axiological task, that is expressed not only in the plot and image system of the main characters, but also in the eschatological discourse of characters that seem secondary at first glance: the interpretations of the Apocalypse by Lebedev, Ippolit Terentyev's reasoning about the inevitability of symbolic anthropophagy and engaged in the search for salvation. Despite the spell of Nastasya Filippovna, personifying the image of the beauty suffering from the imperfections of the world, the final of the novel is optimistic, as far as it brings the good news of the Resurrection.

Keywords: thanatological discourse, poetics, binary oppositions, hermeneutical analysis, allusions, eschatological intertext

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The article describes a number of methodological problems in the study of Dostoevsky’s biographical narrative and his receptive tradition as a whole: the subjectivity of traditional research approaches, the receptive conflict between the biographical myth and negative “doubles” of the writer, the contradictions of mass and individual perception. The author, in search of the most common elements of Dostoevsky’s biographical narrative, turns to pre-revolutionary encyclopaedic articles about the writer. It is presumed that the genre itself, in which the biographical narrative exists here, excludes subjective distortions of the image, represents Dostoevsky in the most generalized, “common” version. This image of Dostoevsky is emphasized literary-centered, at the same time grotesquely simplified and equipped with a parodying double. At the same time, the structure of these articles is inherently contradictory: it faces the author’s subjective assessment, which penetrates even into informational and encyclopedic editions, and the logic of the formation and development of Dostoevsky’s image in the space of the “cultural unconscious”. In other words, the mythological perception of the writer cannot be defeated by any bright critical reflection, nor by the official fixation and propaganda of the historical and literary canon. Finally, the mythological image of the writer, unconsciously created by the mass reader, is in some aspects more dependent on the logic of Dostoevsky’s life and literary text, and therefore sometimes more accurate.

Keywords: biographical narrative, biographical myth, receptive tradition, “Kumanin Case” anti-Semitism of Dostoevsky, Belinsky, Pushkin

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The article deals with the ties between Vladimir Solovyov’s religious philosophy and poetry, his understanding through the conceptual and figurative creativity of what he himself defined as the “explicit” and the “real”. First of all, such comprehension is based on the balance between space and time, on the possibility or impossibility of overcoming them both on the way to the unitotality. The author refers to the theoretical propositions of V. N. Toporov, who regarded space, in contrast to M. M. Bakhtin, as a poetic category as important as time. The article asserts that the poet, who at the same time was a philosopher, in his work intentionally resorted to a technique called by a modern scholar “minus” space, and that to his artistic work as well as to philosophy Solovyov attributed a prophetic importance. The author proves that a theological concept of the unitotality in a poetic aspect occupies a central place in the poet’s aesthetic system that later, without essential modifications was taken by Neosymbolists, the poets-theurgists. A special attention is paid to the variable symbolism of the poet in his figurative opposition to all that is considered earthly and transcendent, temporal and eternal, profane and sacred.

Keywords: Vladimir Solovyov, poetry, poetics, artistic space, artistic time, unitotality, tradition, symbolism

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The article shows the semantic and semiotic dynamics in Russian literature of the 19th—20th centuries of the locus of alley as an element of an “estate topos” associated with love between a man and a woman. If the summer “dark alleys” were a place of romantic dates and clarifications in the Pushkin-Turgenev tradition, dating back to the European discourse of the 18th century, the autumn alleys, having something in common with famous Zhukovsky’s and Lermontov’s elegies, constitute a part of the Silver age literature as the idealization of the “Onegino-Larin” estate in the context of its irreparable loss (N. S. Gumilev, etc.). In the post-revolutionary works by I. A. Bunin the estate culture is seen as the apogee of Russian history, which has maintained, despite the loss of empirical existence, the status of an unfading timeless standard. The cycle of stories “Dark alleys” (1937—1953) — a monument of Russian estate culture — presents the seasonal completeness of the alleys; their symbolism extends to the entire past Russian and present emigrant life, overpassing thematic, time and even national bounderies. The “Estate topos” and its elements assume unexpected modifications and undergo deep, almost unrecognizable transformations, up to a Bedouin tent in the Judean desert and an extinct town in the south of Spain. The unusual dynamics of the image of the alley in the story “Muse”: from spring directly to winter is a symptom of the shift and break in the estate topography of both the Golden and Silver ages in Russian literature. Discreteness, an internal breach, a terrifying proximity of death brings it back to the origins of the Renaissance (“Decameron” by G. Boccaccio), actualizes its specific universal character. Therefore, a scientific originality of the article consists in revealing of the dynamics of the “estate topos” in Russian literature of the 19th—20th centuries, related to the change of the modes of its representation: from the ”summer” completeness of existence to the “autumn” decline; in the proposal of the term “estate habitus” that explains the capacity of the “estate topos” for new modifications; as well as in the display of an all-European substrate of the estate image in Russian literature of the middle of 20th century.

Keywords: alley, garden, park, locus, “estate topos”, estate culture, Russian literature of the 19th — 20th centuries

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The article analyzes the images of foreigners in I. S. Shmelev’s early prose using the examples of the stories “Hassan and his Jeddy” and “On the Seashore”. The originality of the study is due to the appeal to the handwritten and typewritten materials, which have been neither published yet, nor subjected to a textual analysis. Meanwhile, the existing draft materials make it possible to reveal the stages of Shmelev’s work on the texts, and his careful stylization, numerous author’s edits and elaborated versions of the plot and images indicate, among other things, the spiritual and moral search of the young author, whose mature work became a model of spiritual realism. The use of a comparative method showed that while working upon the images of non-Russian heroes (the Turk Hassan and the Greek Dimitraki), Shmelev, on the one hand, tries to accurately reflect their ethnic and confessional affiliation, and, on the other hand, makes their appearances, lifestyles and tragic destinies look alike. The conceptual similarity can be seen in the foreign heroes’ attitudes to life: to make an honest living by the fruits of their labor, to endure hardship, not to respond to the evil with the evil. Both the Muslim Turk and the Greek Christian become a figurative and semantic embodiment of the universal spiritual values concentrated in the biblical commandments addressed to all humanity.

Keywords: Ivan Shmelev, neorealism, impressionism, ethno-poetics, “one's own”—“alien”, the image of a foreigner

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The biblical themes and motifs found in the early works of Boris Zaytsev have not been completely studied by the literary scholars. Different researchers (E. F. Dudina, N. A. Ivanova, O. G. Knyazeva and others) analyzed the presence of the New Testament motifs in the story “Agrafena” and the novel “The Distant Land”, but did not relate them to the context of a country estate through which they were conveyed. That makes the study of these works a priority from the Christian point of view. This article studies these two works: a novel and a short story — and demonstrates the presence of the motif of returning to an estate after an ordeal, or suffering, or delusion, which is shown like the return of the prodigal son to the father's house; the motif of gaining the faith conveyed as the opportunity to hear and understand oneself, to get into harmony with nature after returning home; the motif of humility, acceptance of the fate, bearing one’s cross. Orthodox symbolism (the chalice of sorrows, the stormy sea of life, a stone as the foundation for a new faith) is seem as an important sign for the characters on their way, indicating the right choice, helping them to realize their mission. The motif of a miracle seeing, a dream in “Agrafena”, taken by the main character as a divine revelation, is of great importance. In these texts, the country estate becomes a topos the spiritual evolution of characters is closely related to.

Keywords: allusions to the Bible, “estate text”, short story “Agrafena”, novel “The Distant Land”, motif of bearing one’s cross, motif of the return of the prodigal son

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The analysis of the artistic originality of V. G. Rasputin’s novel “Farewell to Mаtyora” in the aspect of ethnopoetics reveals the ideas of “soil-bound” tradition that became the basis of the aesthetics and axiology of his works. The spatial and temporal coordinates and loci of the story present the essence of the global conflict: eternity and modernity, culture and civilization, nature and man, the good and the evil. The chronotope of the story as an expression of the national picture of the world is presented in the conflict of the sacral and profane spaces in modern times. The sacral space and time are a synthesis of natural and human existence and has corresponding coordinate axes: the vertical one is the “Royal listven” and a church, the horizontal one is Angara and Matyora. The name of the island and the village has several semantic meanings: mother, mother-lend, mother-homeland, omnipotent, continent, spiritual continent, peasant Atlantean. Matyora as part of the national Cosmo-Logos is presented in a mythopoetic perspective as a living, intelligent, sensitive being, whose soul is the zoomorphic image of the “Owner of the island”. The image of the Angara river as the most important horizontal sacred topos, organizing the chronotope of the story, incorporates the national archetypal connotations of the river-life, the river-road, the river-movement, acquires the strongly marked symbolic semantics of time, which is associated with the tragic collision of the onset of the “last times”. The image of the “Royal listven”, that organizes the vertical axis of the chronotope, incorporates the features of the archetype of the world tree and the national totem, symbolizing the indestructibility of eternal nature, the short-term “Pyrrhic victory” of man. The profane space is marked by images of the “lower”, infernal world and a binary opposition “Owner/time-traveler”. The poetics of the story has a strongly-pronounced Orthodox code, which gives to the finale of the story a truly apocalyptic sound.

Keywords: Valentin Rasputin, ethnopoetics, national picture of the world, chronotope, space, time, archetype, image, sacred, profane

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The image of Anna Grigorievna Dostoevskaya, one of the best wives in Russian literature, has been repeatedly embodied in works of art. It helped represent better the personality of the Russian writer and appeared before readers and spectators as an ideal of the female devotion and selfless service to the husband. One of these works is the play by Edvard Radzinsky “An Old Actress in the Role of Dostoevsky's Wife”, the interpretation of which is given in this article. Radzinsky with the help of the motif of the game and the reception of “the play in the play” masterfully connects the fate of two women of different epochs, Anna Dostoevskaya and an old actress performing her role. The last one thanks to her fervent acting rebuild the reality of the past, the life that disappeared, but recorded in the memoirs of Dostoevsky's wife. For the actress herself, the role of Anna Grigorievna, performed without the presence of spectators and without using a recording film is a desperate attempt to escape from her loneliness, to overcome the tragedy of aging and uselessness. Comprehending the nature of Anna Grigoryevna's character and her great love for Dostoevsky, the actress returns to life through creativity, the play-acting for her becomes life, wins the decline of life and death, saves from emptiness and aimlessness of the surrounding reality. The metaphor of play-acting is put into practice, the boundaries between art and reality disappear. The play “An Old Actress in the Role of Dostoevsky's Wife” with its deep content has an extraordinary emotional power of influence on the reader and viewer.

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