Prefacing the first ever publication of V. Grossman’s essay In memory of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising [Pamyati vosstaniya v Varshavskom getto] (1948) in the Russian language, the article recollects the circumstances and reasons for the piece to have been kept from publication and defines its relevance in the author’s legacy. The work is analyzed in the context of the problems of a literary testimony. The researcher points out that Grossman wrote the story using a special writing strategy, where numerous meanings incompatible with official Soviet culture are incorporated by means of an uncontrollable symbolic subtext, decipherable with certain ‘keys’ created throughout the narrative. In this case, such a ‘key’ is provided by the character of the stocking knitter ofŁodź. The story and the editor’s corrections are reconstructed from an archived, typed manuscript. Also included in the publication and supplied with comments are V. Grossman’s answers to the questionnaire distributed by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee to several cultural workers in 1946 ahead of the first Victory Day anniversary. 

In its interpretation of the opposition ‘national literature – world literature’ as defined by Goethe in 1827 the article relies on the dialectic of the hermeneutic circle, related to Goethe’s idea in the general context of the Classical-Romantic utopia of aesthetic humanism. Analyzing Goethe’s statements about world literature, one finds that his tentative concept did not suggest universal surrender of national-specific differences, but rather integration of national literatures (with all of their unique features) as relatively autonomous but mutually conditioned elements of a single literary communication supersystem. According to Goethe, each national literature established itself by involvement in the developing existence of a whole, without losing its identity to an amorphous composite of literatures. By fully preserving its individuality, it in fact joined in a special polyphonic order: a unity of diversity and interpenetration. Goethe, therefore, laid the foundations of a new philological discourse, which gave rise to comparative literary studies as a new scholarly discipline.

The article is concerned with the difference in understanding of the term ‘cosmopolitan’ inRussiaandFrance. Often considered a predominantly negative phenomenon inRussia, cosmopolitanism fi st provoked a discussion at the time when the emphasis shifted from ideology to understanding of the historical-literary process. Since the late 18th c., the idea of the possible existence of a literary work within the global literary environment (the concept of world literature)   was adjusted by the ‘golden chain’ metaphor, which enabled implementation of the ‘universality’ concept as a unity principally separate from the French idée universelle. During this evolutionary period emerged a distinctive subject of literary history: fi st, ‘humanity’ as a general term (initially identifi    with universalism or cosmopolitanism), and then ‘a nation’. But it is the discovery of the national that the author believes is connected with particularism and provincialism,   the latter summoning the memory of the noble intention of universalism and cosmopolitanism. An interim summary of the process was produced by Joseph Texte, a professor of comparative literature inLyon, at the end of the 19th c.

The article examines the ‘active presence’ (D. Damrosch) of the Chinese garden in the literary and cultural history of the English Augustan Age. Special attention is paid to W. Temple’s role as an intermediary in the comprehension of a foreign cultural phenomenon; interpretations of his description of the Chinese garden generated an entirely new tradition in the English literature of the early 18th c. J. Addison identified the Chinese garden with the idea of harmony, making it part and parcel of Neoclassical aesthetics. Pope followed the same logic. In his essay, Castell brings together the classical and the Chinese traditions, where the former does not act as an approving authority, rather it is the Chinese tradition that helps give it a more nuanced description. Quite a few English country homes display a combination of Neoclassical principles and elements of the Chinese garden, the new landscaping style summarized by Pope. Augustans’ Chinese garden draws on two national worldviews, but just like the world ‘sharawadji’ introduced byTemple, it belongs to the realm of imagination, at the crossroads of languages and cultures, none of which can fully claim it as their own.

Amongst the commonly recognized qualities of Timur Kibirov’s poetry is  its extensive usage of quotations, occasionally resulting in a cento. While his scholars have been limiting their search to the references to Russian poetry, this article explores Kibirov’s reception of the work and personality of Heinrich Heine in an attempt to prove that the latter influenced Kibirov greatly at the start of his career, as described in Kibirov’s autobiographic Crones, Deceased [Pokoynye starukhi], an epic poem in prose. The author points out indirect evidence of Kibirov’s enthusiastic reading of Heine (quotations, allusions, etc.), analyzes Kibirov’s poems directly referencing Heine’s work (‘Heine’ [‘Geyne’], ‘From Heine’ [‘Iz Geyne’]), and describes the principal similarities between the two poets’ poetics and philosophy, also noting their differences. Zuseva-Ozkan argues that Heine dominates Kibirov’s output, but if in the 1980s-1990s this ‘obsession’ with Heine’s spirit manifested itself mostly in reminiscences and allusions, the early 2000s saw a more vivid introspection, later turning into Kibirov’s self-identifi ation with the German poet.

Devoted to Amarsana Ulzytuev, one of the most fascinating contemporary poets, A. Uvitsky’s article examines his work in the contexts of modern Russian and the little researched Buryat poetry and looks at the results of his pet project – to establish anaphora as the regular accentual rhyme for Russian poetry. The author admits that Ulzytuev’s idea to introduce the regular anaphoric sound to Russian poetry, as detailed in his books Anaphoras [Anafory] (2013) and New Anaphoras [Novye anafory] (2016), is theoretically viable. But more than its ongoing implementation, he is interested in Ulzytuev’s creative evolution: the poet’s oeuvre is typified by a natural combination of two poetic cultures – one Russo-European and the other Buryat- Mongolian, according to P. Basinsky. In Uvitsky’s view, the archaic manner of the Buryat-Mongolian poetics, realized through the use of anaphora, among other things, is not inconsistent with the deep and sophisticated European poetics, with an epic meaning expanded and enhanced by the poetic sound championed by Ulzytuev.

Y. Shestakova’s article looks into the literary techniques of the contemporary writer V. Kazakevich. Having immigrated to Japan, Kazakevich repeatedly cites his early autobiographical experiences to reconstruct his life in the USSR: he is convinced that children have the best tools to understand the encounters of the mundane and the eternal. It is for this reason that he extensively uses sensory descriptions, typical of the child’s perceptive view of the world. Throughout his writing career, Kazakevich will work to expand and intensify the range of such descriptions, from casual observations in the predominantly narrative discourse at the beginning of his story A Hunt for Maybugs [Okhota na mayskikh zhukov] to the comprehensive associative ornament in his book A Unicorn Will Come Get Me [Za mnoy pridyot edinorog] (2016). Following analysis of Kazakevich’s works in the context of ornamental prose by the 20th c. Modernists (I. Bunin, V. Nabokov,  and I. Shmelyov), Y. Shestakova opines that it is thanks to a combination of the classical and Modernist traditions that the author succeeds in creating artistically convincing prose about childhood.

The article deals with the lyrical prose by the modern poet Sandzhar Yanyshev. Examining his collection Umr. The New Book of Transformations [Umr. Novaya kniga obrashcheniy] (2017), the author distinguishes the selfidentification process of the lyrical hero, who is a product of the imperial period, typified by bilingual and bicultural intentions. The images-transformationsmetamorphoses of the lyrical prose reveal milestones of the Soviet-era colonial history and their post-colonial reception. Family members in the book are surrounded by an array of historical and mythological figures (from Golem and Christ to Khyzyr-bobo), as well as an allusive-reminiscent set from Russian and world literature. Also investigated is the mix of genres represented in the collection: part of the Russian literary and Uzbek cultural traditions, each of them can be viewed as the contextual genre of umr – an ambivalent phenomenon of life-death, transformation/metamorphosis. Sandzhar Yanyshev’s lyrical prose offers a richly flavoured illustration of current Russian literature and exemplifies the mental processes of the post-colonial era..

This essay argues that Webster was more than just the dramatist ‘much possessed by death’ depicted by T. S. Eliot but a bold and innovative writer. Taking advantage of the emergence of an exceptionally gifted boy actor, he brought a new and more realistic type of woman to the English Renaissance stage, and also two unusually disturbed and psychologised male characters, one who thinks he is a wolf and one who looks into water and sees a monster. He also benefited from the King’s Men’s move to an indoor theatre, the Blackfriars, when the Globe burned down soon after the first performances of The Duchess of Malfi, not least because one of those who lived near the new theatre had been Lady Arbella Stuart, whose story chimed very closely with that of the Duchess. Finally he astonished by the richness of his imagery, which together with his recurrent use of sententiae (pithy sayings) creates a sense that the play has a language all of its own. Eliot was right to identify Webster as violent, but he was also much more, and in the Duchess herself he has given us a moving and haunting female hero.

The author of Ala Recherchedu Temps Perdu, M. Proust was certainly a man of his time, which was coincidentally the beginning of the cinematic age. Therefore, it remains a relevant scholarly task to recognize the virtual connections between Proust’s poetics and filmmaking techniques: a problem S. Fokin is trying to solve in this article. Here, he focuses less on the principles of a strictly philological analysis that centres on textual elements, intertextual aspects or the book’s genesis, but prefers instead to delve into elements of literary anthropology, with its preoccupation with the unity between the author, the text and the context, which does not rule out the use of literature as a tool for comprehension of a literary personality. Such an assumption does not reduce literature to life: an opponent of Sainte-Beuve’s biographical method, Proust, for one, would not tolerate it; but neither does it reduce literature to a text as a self-sufficient structure: this position sees the book as co-substantial to the author. To summarize the findings, in order to understand Proust’s view of the cinematic art, one should remember that his almost snobbish dismissal of the meaning and significance of motion pictures was just as typical of the author as his aristocratic ideas about the meaning of literature.

The article provides an overview of all Chinese translations of Sergey Dovlatov’s works and a systemized summary of the most representative academic articles authored by renowned Chinese scholars of Russian philology, as well as candidate’s and master’s theses and a monograph. The author highlights the approaches by Chinese specialists to Dovlatov’s oeuvre and points out the lack of translations and consistent effort to deepen academic knowledge about the writer. Since most translations appear in academic journals and only two of his books have been published inChina, Dovlatov’s works remain largely unknown to the public. Focusing on Dovlatov as a representative of the third-wave Russian emigration and a Postmodernist in the late part of the 20th c., Chinese philologists have centred their research on misfi    and outcasts in Dovlatov’s books, his distinctive sense of humour, and his manner of depicting Soviet reality as absurd.

A review of the literary-epistolary anthology In France with Turgenev [S Turgenevym vo Frantsii], the article undertakes a problem analysis of its content, shedding a new light on Turgenev’s relationship with French authors, the scale of his personality, and the relevance of his cultural mission. Included in the work’s title, the idea of universal responsiveness was introduced to the daily cultural vocabulary by F. Dostoevsky and is viewed here in its relation to the concepts of cosmopolitanism, national identity, and cultural universalism. Turgenev’s universal responsiveness is treated as an opposing phenomenon to Russian messianism, namely, it is considered to combine national uniqueness with the willingness and ability to absorb world culture and become an integral part of it. It was Turgenev who not only succeeded in mediating between Western European and Russian culture, but also embodied pan-European cultural unity. While commonly recognized and repeatedly voiced by French cultural fi   res, this achievement remains little known and appreciated in Russia.

The article discusses W. Küchelbecker’s Dictionary [Slovar] that he compiled during his studies at the Tsarskoe Selo Lyceum as a kind of reading diary from 1815 to 1817. Dictionary gives an insight into formative influences on the future writer as well as his close friends from among fellow students – most notably Pushkin, who is known to have read the manuscript. It contains extracts from books of fiction as well as philosophical and historical works and periodicals read by Küchelbecker at the time. Among others, Dictionary mentions Pseudo-Longinus, J.-J. Rousseau, F. de Weiss, F. Schiller, L. Sterne, etc., listing the extracts in alphabetical order. Most translations from German, French, and English are penned by Küchelbecker himself. A fi st such experiment in the systematic analysis of this relic of the 1810s intellectual culture, the article reconstructs the reading list of Küchelbecker and his fellow students at the Lyceum. Approximately one sixth of Dictionary, covering the entries from A to G, is published in the appendix to the article, supplied with notes on the sources and their brief description.

First published in 1974, the monograph Hemingway the novelist. The 1920s and 1930s by Iosif Finkelstein (1920-1980), a lecturer at the Gorky State Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages, remains largely relevant many years on. The research is done with the objective of tracing the writer’s evolution from his 1920s early prose to his 1930s novels and to describe their ideological, artistic and poetical aspects. The researcher approaches the task from a very broad perspective, touching on historical, literary, biographical, and intertextual aspects. Far from examining the four novels at the core of this monograph in isolation, the scholar undertakes to analyze a variety of the writer’s smaller prose, journalistic output, and his later works. Finkelstein views Hemingway’s legacy a solid textual continuity, defined by semantic and stylistic coherence. Another valuable aspect is the book’s polemic quality and response to the work of fellow Hemingway scholars.

The review is devoted to Diana Nikiforoff. De La Russie en révolution à la Cité interdite, a documentarybiographical work by Hélène Menegaldo, a renowned French scholar of Russian émigré literature and professor at the University of Poitiers, dedicated to her mother, a fi st-wave Russian emigrant Diana Nikiforova (Nikiforoff ). Both in terms of the plot and the form (fi st person narration), this book is the author’s experiment combining research and creative writing, and analytical approach and documentary quality, on the one hand, and philosophical lyricism, on the other.

The fact that the book and its likes spring into existence is evidence of the intense, profound and enduring emotions and experiences that characterize the fi st-wave Russian emigration.

Malygina’s book portrays Andrey Platonov in the context of the literary period in which he was active. Malygina also summarizes the history of the journal Krasnaya Nov, the Krug Publishers, and the Pereval Group. While depicted as particularly close to Pilnyak due to his expressionist tendencies, Platonov, however, remained faithful to the utopian ideal of ‘proletarian literature’ and reserved tongue-incheek comments for Soviet literary aristocrats. Although a fi   ce critic of Soviet reality, Platonov cherished his own ‘Soviet project’ – he envisaged a truly revolutionary, progressive ideal of a genuinely democratic nature. The literary period in question is shown to have a complex structure, unyielding to ideological abstractions.

The monograph by Y. Domansky contains a comprehensive analysis of E. Letov’s poetics, typified by short formula-phrases repeated in the song’s chorus or replacing each other in its verses. The research is concerned with their semantics and function in song lyrics. Domansky comes up with the following findings: first, Letov’s formulae have an intertextual nature; second, their position his song lyrics facilitates their perception on a stand-alone as well as contentsassociated basis; and thirdly, their majority is inherently ambivalent. The reviewer finds that according to Domansky, Letov’s rock music lyrics (described as saturated with quotes and featuring a thinning boundary between the signifier and the signified, as well as the emphasized absurdity of the world’s image) show kinship with conceptual art. Domansky’s conclusions are consistently substantiated and the book suggests new methods for research of song material..