Published in 1946, the short stories ‘Telegram’ by K. Paustovsky and ‘Homecoming’ [‘Ivanov’s Family’] by A. Platonov marked a brief period of spiritual enthusiasm in Soviet society. Both stories are characterized by profound psychologism, unpredictability, and somewhat ‘un-Soviet-like’ behaviour of their protagonists, which made the two works stand out among the typical prose of the day and naturally triggered an angry critical response. Analyzing these short stories in comparison to 1940s prose, the author points out similarities in their poetics — a forerunner of the poetics of late Soviet literature — such as the determination to describe human distress, the depth of soul-searching (the characters often suffer an internal conflict and are driven to contrition by their own bad conscience), the absence of a happy future, the characteristic features of artistic time and space, etc. The author identifies such common traits of Platonov’s and Paustovsky’s short stories as psychologism, used to depict the protagonist’s internal struggle, and emotions of grief and compassion, as well as the topic of stirring conscience. These traits would typify ‘Thaw’ prose years later.

The article discusses the contemporary prose writer and essayist Ilya Kochergin against the background of his main works — from the earlier (Assistant to a Chinese [Pomoshchnik kitaytsa], 2007) to the more recent (Appropriation of Space [Prisvoenie prostranstva], 2022; Emergency Exit [Zapasniy vykhod], 2024]) oeuvre. According to Kochergin, emotional interaction with space has as much impact on an individual as their relationship with their closest circle of people. The critic examines Kochergin’s identity as a writer in various capacities, already mythologized in the contemporary literary process: an author of semi-documentary short stories about Altay, where Kochergin was employed as a forester for several years; an essayist; and a mentor to young writers and poets. The article suggests that Kochergin’s objective in writing is to reorient people from the city to the world and push them to enrich the system of human-to-human relations with relationships to non-urban space and its inhabitants. Kochergin’s works are studied in the context of contemporary prose and essays, including Z. Prilepin’s Dogs and Other People [Sobaki i drugie lyudi] (2023).

Kochergin’s essay is devoted to the author’s personal interpretation of Prishvin’s works in preparation for the writer’s new biography to be published in the series ‘Lives of  Renowned People’ [‘ZhIL,’ or ‘Zhizn izvestnykh lyudey’] recently launched by Shubina Books Publications [Redaktsiya Eleny Shubinoy]. Detailing his belated encounter with Prishvin, Kochergin focuses on the themes common for his and Prishvin’s oeuvre: man’s relationship with landscape, a discovery of nature, and the ‘appropriation of space.’ Perceiving a certain   creative and biographical affinity with Prishvin, Kochergin asks what appears to him to be extremely poignant questions: What is it like to start writing in your thirties and find yourself snubbed by people engaged in literary work as if by birthright? Should one get involved in any sort of groups or movements?  What can we gain in communication with nature? How does it feel to hear the latest reports from the frontline in the comfort of your cottage? How can one build up a relationship with the authorities without losing one’s self-respect? Kochergin suggests that the answers in Prishvin’s texts are still relevant to us and therefore worth searching for. He personally is eager to learn the answer to Gorky’s nearly one-hundred-year-old query of Prishvin’s work: ‘How is your living at a hamlet related to literature?’

In her conversation with the writer I. Kochergin, the critic T. Veretyonova tries to determine what the topic of nature means to people today, and discover what kind of relationship contemporary urban residents have with the space outside the city and its inhabitants — birds and animals. Both the interviewer and the interviewee define this as an ‘eco-identity,’ or a search for one’s own ‘ecological soul’ responsible for the connection between man and nature. The interview contains a detailed discussion of the characters in Kochergin’s prose, horses Fenya and Styopa and a dog called Kuchuk among them. Kochergin argues that the ability to see nature is rapidly vanishing from contemporary literature, a process that calls for exploration and contemplation. It is essential that a new language is forged to describe the world, which is not limited to humans and the results of their activity. The writer and the critic agree that human exploration of the space we live in is a topos not yet fully shaped in contemporary literature. Therefore, an opportunity has opened up for writers  to discover it.

The article considers Jerome David Salinger’s short stories written and published in the years from 1940 to 1943, during his time in army training camps ahead of combat deployment. Using archived materials, the author cites letters and reminiscences of Salinger’s contemporaries, reconstructs the history of his early publications, and seeks to define their place in the writer’s oeuvre. In the early 1940s, Salinger was honing his writing style in the early works that channelled his personal preoccupations and anxiety, often related to his army experience (‘The Last and Best of the Peter Pans,’ ‘Personal Notes of an Infantryman,’ ‘The Hang of It,’ and ‘Soft-Boiled Sergeant’). The early short stories talk about the dashed ideals of youth, attempts to resist corruption in the face of unspeakable hardship, and the fear of the looming war. The article examines the genesis of Salinger’s early prose, which, despite its commercial expectations, provided a foundation for the characters of Holden Caulfield and Seymour Glass in the writer’s mature works.

The article sets out to explain the complex subtexts of Celan’s ‘Death Fugue’ by analyzing the poem’s artistic history, poetics, style, leitmotifs, and reminiscences. Protagonists of the lyrical plot stand out as the ‘chorus’ (‘we’) of singing and dancing Jews and a ‘master,’ or ‘capellmeister,’ (‘he’), recognizable as the commandant of an extermination camp as well as the ‘death, a master from Germany.’ ‘He,’ ‘death master,’ whose whim decides the fate of the chorus, is portrayed as a typical Aryan: he has blue eyes, writes letters to  a golden-haired Margarete in Germany, and, just like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, plays with snakes. A fine connoisseur of music, ‘he’ orders the chorus to ‘play death more sweetly.’ In the German historical-cultural context, the word ‘master’ is associated with honest mediaeval artisans and denotes the ultimate praise of their excellent craftsmanship. From a Bach fugue to a death fugue — such is Celan’s aesthetic-philosophical description of the monumental spiritual degradation suffered by the great German culture under the Nazis. Also in focus are the poem’s biographical allusions, including a reference to the name of the poet’s mother, shot in transit to a concentration camp.

The article analyzes the portrayal of V. Shukshin in A Night in Barnaul [Barnaulskaya noch] (2023), a play by the Russian playwright Oleg Maslov. This dramatic work is a product of the dramaturgical lab ‘Shukshin. Myth and reality,’ a project run by V. M. Shukshin Altay Regional Drama Theatre in 2022–2024. The author points out that the heuristic potential of the traditional Shukshin biography as a genre has been exhausted. Biographers behind the latest books on Shukshin’s life and work merely compile known facts to the best of their abilities and in reliance on their own taste, and often choose to focus on selected aspects of the writer’s biography. The story of Shukshin’s life is generally well reconstructed. What holds the promise of interesting development is the genre of fictional biography fragmentarily represented by Maslov’s play A Night in Barnaul. The author examines the character of the Writer, establishing parallels with Shukshin’s actual biography and myths around his persona, and intertextual links with Shukshin’s own works, and discovers that the Writer’s ‘odyssey’ in Barnaul was explored in his later prose.

The article details the subtext of V. Shukshin’s shorts story ‘Gena Proydisvet.’ The story centres around yet another weird and amusing character —  a frequent type in Shukshin’s novellas. The protagonist seems constantly preoccupied with soul-searching, while his behaviour is depicted as complex and ambiguous, indicating inner duality. This duality becomes a driving force for the poetics of the short story. The text emphasizes the ‘us-and-them’ dichotomy. In this regard, the ‘ours’ is described through traditional Christian imagery, folklore symbolism, and mythological bestiary motifs. The ‘theirs’ is represented by images of the ‘bard’ culture and songs by author-songwriters. The story sees explosive and destructive trends clash with their conservative opposites, deemed to safeguard traditional culture and society. The former are shown through an allusion to V. Vysotsky’s song ‘Fastidious steeds’ [‘Koni prive redlivye’]. The latter are traced in S. Esenin’s poetics, including his contrasting of two bestiary symbols: a steed and a cow.

The article reconstructs Bakhtin’s concept of carnival laughter with reference to two turn-of-the-century authors: L. Andreev and K. Sluchevsky. The latter was described as ‘a voice outside the chorus’ by Bakhtin in his Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity [Avtor i geroy v esteticheskoy deyatelnosti]. This formula is projected onto the protagonist of Sluchevsky’s cycle Mephistopheles. Andreev’s short story ‘Laughter’ [‘Smekh’] shows Christmas carolling turning into a tragedy of solitude: the hero cannot share in everybody’s joyful festivities. Laughter becomes a destructive force devoid of the usual rejuvenating purpose. The two writers demonstrate a crisis of carnival laughter: it loses its relatability because of the censoring of the traditional culture of laughter. The comparison between Sluchevsky’s and Andreev’s texts illustrates the transformation of the mediaeval concept of a carnival in the literature of decadence.

One of the defining characteristics that separate humans from animals is the number of legs. The ‘all fours’ motif receives an original interpretation in Leonid Andreev’s oeuvre. The artistic realization of this motif is found in the depiction of Doctor Kerzhentsev’s anguish and temptation (in the short story ‘A Thought’ [‘Mysl’]), the Tsar’s ‘intentional beastliness’ (‘From Centuries Ago’ [‘Iz glubiny vekov’]), and the reverse evolution of the beast and the man in the play A Thought. The vestiges of the motif are found in the hero’s handstand in ‘The Red Laugh’ [‘Krasniy smekh’], the scene of the whipping of peasants (‘The Governor’ [‘Gubernator’]), the manifestation of the underworld (‘Sashka Zhegulyov’), and the metamorphoses of the man and the beast in ‘The Curse of the Beast’ [‘Proklyatie zverya’]. The author draws attention to the frequent use of the terms ‘bipedal’ and ‘quadrupedal’ in Andreev’s diaries and correspondence. Standing on all fours, his characters demonstrate various degrees of quadrupedalism — from momentary abandonment of bipedalism to deliberate and provocative violation of the bodily canon.

The article is devoted to a ‘ballad’ / ‘small epic poem’ (in the author’s definitions of the genre) of Fortinbras, the most detailed and conceptually relevant Shakespearean text penned by Shalamov in 1954–1955 with a clearly drawn parallel between Fortinbras and Stalin. Shalamov may have been familiar with Pasternak’s translation of Hamlet, the article therefore relates Olga Freidenberg’s perception of the tragedy and the character of Fortinbras gleaned from her correspondence with Pasternak. Shalamov views Fortinbras as a ruler who has triumphed in his pursuit of power and to whom everybody still standing pays obeisance — in other words, Shalamov may have alluded to Stalin. The original documentary quality of Shakespearian allusions is further developed by Shalamov’s metaphysical subject. Had ‘Fortinbras’ been published in the 1950s or 1960s, it would have easily resonated with the readers, who were quick to pick up on a Stalin subtext. Shalamov intended to include the ballad in his first volumes of collected works as early as in 1961, but the only publication during his lifetime happened much later, in the last collection of poems The Boiling Point [Tochka kipeniya] (1977), with 10 out of the original 36 stanzas.

Yury Dombrovsky’s critical legacy is relatively small — at least, judging by the materials available or known to exist to date. This publication, then, appears all the more important: following almost 90 years of oblivion, it reprints his review of a seminal novel of the 1930s, Yury Tynyanov’s Pushkin. Dombrovsky’s review appeared under the pen name D. Yuriev. It is inexplicably missing from all of the writer’s collected works. While not offering truly eye-opening observations, the review is nonetheless of interest because it features Dombrovsky’s ideas about the Soviet historical novel and gives insights about his views of literature and reading list of the day. It seems that, at the time, Dombrovsky the critic was guided by a set of ideologically charged premises he must have believed to be the epitome of historical philosophy. It is also noteworthy that, along with the review, the same issue of the journal Literaturniy Kazakhstan contained Dombrovsky’s first historical novel Derzhavin. The publication of his novel and review heralded the first serious literary ambitions of the future author of The Keeper of Antiquities [Khranitel drevnostey] and The Faculty of Useless Knowledge [Fakultet nenuzhnykh veshchey].

The review concerns an encyclopaedic project that discusses notable 20th-c. literary movements and groups in a vast majority of European and American countries. The first such dictionary in the Russian language, the book has no precedent among international literary studies due to the vastness of material described in utmost detail and conceptually examined. Its articles cover both international and exclusively national literary groupings. Summarizing extensive and often virtually unexplored material, the dictionary offers a new and deeper insight into the artistic life of the past century. Additionally, it draws scholarly attention to the need for a more comprehensive discussion of the contemporary problems of literary encyclopaedias. The reviewer agrees with the editors’ verdict of the futility of archaic and pedantic discussions of terminology and recognizes a nominal character of the laws that the compilers of the book agreed to follow — with these assumptions, he sets out to show the project’s relevant and indisputable achievements.

The review is devoted to a co- authored monograph on F. Dostoevsky’s poetics published to mark the bicentenary of his birth. It includes chapters on the problems and characteristic features of realism, subjects, and genre and the most representative motifs in the writer’s oeuvre. The reviewer finds that of the most interest are chapters that attempt to study Dostoevsky’s novels in the context of science (the chapters on the polemic with I. Sechenov’s theory and the  reception of G. H. Lewes’s ideas), ideology (the chapters on the structure of Dostoevsky’s novels with reference to the imperial ideology of autocracy), or economy (the chapter on female capitalists in Dostoevsky’s works). The methodology of the book will be equally useful to Dostoevsky scholars and researchers specializing in 19th-c. literary realism. The chapters that discuss the motif of a duel and the gothic narrative in Dostoevsky’s books and offer an original interpretation of famous texts unaffected by the historic context and the established scholarly tradition, while providing a fresh perspective, indicate certain limitations.

Olga Voronina’s book offers  a close and careful analysis of Nabokov’s works created during a momentous period of his life. The scholar has outlined the routes of her research in the book’s title: they point to the riddles planted by Nabokov in his novels. Armed with the method of archival search, Voronina combs through the writer’s discarded drafts, letters, and notes scribbled on the margins.  In her book, she demonstrates the transformation of Russian and foreign literary tradition in Nabokov’s novels and explains the function of allusions and reminiscences in his works. Voronina’s meticulous study of initial drafts resulted in the discovery of an alternative ending to Laughter in the Dark [Camera obscura], which throws light on the depth and controversy of the character of Kretschmar. The scholar also invites readers to puzzle over Vera Nabokov’s presence in the writer’s novels as well as letters. Following the author across the chapters of Cryptogram and piecing together extracts from manuscripts, the reader may get closer to solving the riddle of Nabokov’s art.

The review is devoted to M. Stroganov’s latest installment in his series of folklore studies, which discusses the problems of genre-specific characteristics and classification of Russian counting-out rhymes. The first part of the book contains a monographic study with a conceptual argument in favour of the scholar’s unique function-based classification of the rhymes. In offering his reasons for the approach, Stroganov calls into question several premises made by the eminent 1920s scholar G. Vinogradov, which underlie modern folklorists’ ideas of the genre and classification of counting-out rhymes. Stroganov challenges the concept of an accidental relation between a verbal text and a children’s game, arguing a substantial relation instead. The second part of the book features a corpus of counting-out rhymes and examples of other folklore genres. Unique in terms of sheer volume, it is the fruit of years of field research and diligent reading of the classical folklore studies penned by distinguished Russian scholars in the 19th and 20th centuries.