The article states that the heroic-patriotic traditions of Russian classics (M. Lermontov, L. Tolstoy, A. Blok) live on in the works by participants in the Battle of Stalingrad: the founder of the ‘lieutenant prose’ Viktor Nekrasov and poets Mikhail Kulchitsky and Aleksandr Korenev. M. Lermontov’s ‘Borodino’ sounds with a new vigour in the lyric poetry by the fighters at Stalingrad. Works dedicated to the Battle of Stalingrad follow and modernize the traditions of Russian realism exemplified by the first-hand accounts of L. Tolstoy, an officer during the Siege of Sevastopol. Military and engineering learnings of the Russian army garnered during the Crimean War were adopted by the characters of Front-Line Stalingrad [V okopakh Stalingrada] by V. Nekrasov, who received an architect’s degree in pre-war Kyiv and was in command of a sapper battalion on the Stalingrad front. This officer writer also follows the narrative approach of the 19th-c. classic, so that the ferocity of the battle does not obscure the ‘dialectics of the soul’ of his fellow soldiers, whom he portrays as part and parcel of the centuries-long national culture.

The article is dedicated to the pre-war poet Yury Inge, who was killed at the very start of the German invasion of the USSR. A war correspondent during the Winter War (1939–1940), Inge joined the newspaper Krasnoznamyonniy Baltiyskiy Flot in 1941 at its headquarters at the new Soviet naval base in Tallinn. Inge took part in the so-called Tallinn disaster, a tragedy yet to be fully explained: the Soviets lost two-thirds of their Baltic Fleet ships during evacuation to Kronstadt. Inge was leaving on the icebreaker Valdemārs, when it was sunk by a naval mine placed by the Soviet military just days before. A witness account describes the poet, wearing a long black naval coat and equipped with a gas mask and a pistol, helping women and children into a lifeboat, while remaining on board of the damaged ship the entire time. Inge died before reaching his 36th birthday. The article offers a first estimation of the tragedy’s scale and lists all literary workers attached to the Baltic Fleet who met their end on the 28th–29th of August, 1941.

The article reveals the names of the prototypes of certain characters in Nagibin’s long story My Golden Mother-in-Law [Moya zolotaya tyoshcha] (the mother-in-law being A. Likhachyova, the wife of the director of the Moscow Car Manufacturing Plant ZIL). For the first time we read the names and learn about the destiny of M. and L. Kostromin, the real people behind the characters of Matvey Matveevich, the neighbour, and Nina Petrovna, the female protagonist’s best friend. The life story of these personalities, residents of the legendary Niernsee House in Bolshoy Gnezdnikovsky Lane, enables the authors, who are related to L. Kostromina, to explain the underpinnings of the relationships between the prototypes of Nagibin’s characters, often a mystery for the writer himself, and share first-hand accounts that confirm his amazing flair for imagination. The article uses materials of family lore, the authors’ private archive (letters and photographs), as well as hitherto unsearched materials from state archives.

The article analyzes prose works by Russian twenty- and thirty-year-old authors who emerged in the early 2000s and gradually fell into obscurity right after their initial success. Sekretov’s article discusses A. Babchenko, I. Denezhkina, A. Karasyov, and others. All of their works share numerous distinctive traits, such as a predisposition to uncensored autobiographical narration, full identification of the author with the protagonist, and preoccupation with challenges faced by young adults and the force of rebellion, which, however, boils down to the axiomatic teen defiance. As a result, the young authors-cum-protagonists lose their swagger upon the first breakthrough, with their subsequent career grinding to a halt after the highest but single achievement. Therefore, in his analysis of the novels, interviews and critical reviews dedicated to the books by I. Denezhkina, A. Karasyov, I. Mamaeva and others, Sekretov identifies the generational characteristics of early 2000s literature and tracks the authors’ subsequent progress, seeking the reasons for so many failures.

A. Timofeev takes a close look at the works of A. Ivanov, from his early novel Dorm-on-the-Blood [Obshchaga-na-Krovi] (1992), both simplistic and bearing marks of apprenticeship, to Stormy Weather [Nenastie] (2015), the writer’s most popular book, along with The Geographer Drank His Globe Away [Geograf globus propil] (1995), all the better known thanks to their film versions. The critic finds that, rather than a gallery of accomplished works, Ivanov’s writing represents an agonizing search, his path characterized by alternating moments of success and failure and his ambitious preconceptions hindering his development and forcing his artistic intuition to overcome them. Speaking of Ivanov’s undeniable triumphs, A. Timofeev mentions The Heart of Parma [Serdtse Parmy] and the later novel Tobol, whereas Ivanov’s ‘transitional’ novel Bluda and MUDO [Bluda i MUDO], the ‘network’ duology Dog-Heads [Psoglavtsy] and Community [Kommiuniti], and even the cult novel Rebels’ Gold [Zoloto bunta] are presented as flops. Nonetheless, Timofeev rates Ivanov as one of the best writers of the 2000s–2010s.

The article analyzes artistic space as a key level of the poetics of Y. Trifonov’s The House on the Embankment [Dom na naberezhnoy]. The research uses various methods and points out two spatial strata: the level of characters (existential-phenomenological aspect) and that of the author, the demiurge (semiotic and structural-typological methods). In the artistic space of The House on the Embankment, incorporating the personal environments of the book’s characters, topoi and loci assume symbolic meaning. A character’s existence in a particular space and their ability or inability to cross its boundary are pre-determined by the author and perform a characterological function. The article focuses in detail on the protagonist, Glebov. His traversal of spaces is only seemingly related to the crossing of boundaries. He forever remains within the same social space, only shifting between its poles; driven by false social values (success, power, and material wealth), he postpones real life over and over again.

The article discusses the legacy of the literary critic M. Girshman, in particular, his book A Work of Literature. The Theory of Artistic Wholeness [Literaturnoe proizvedenie. Teoriya khudozhestvennoy tselostnosti] (2007), which argues the priority of the holistic and value-based approach to literary criticism over Postmodernist deconstruction practices. According to Girshman, the language of a literary work is an embodied and materialized aspect of aesthetic reality and beauty, incorporating the Truth and the Good. The scholar sees it as the ‘existential-semantic assumption’ of literary criticism. O. Minnullin defends Girshman’s method and challenges the ‘instrumental’ approach of ‘deconstructionist’ philologists, which he believes reduces the aesthetic space: significance in place of meaning; the discourse in place of the world; actions or simulation in place of existence; the scribe in place of the author; a construction or deconstruction in place of wholeness, etc. The article is written in response to the polemic reaction of ‘deconstructionists’ to V. Tyupa’s ‘Literary Theory Two’ As a Threat to Humanities, published in Voprosy Literatury in 2019.

This polemic paper by L. Katsis deals with the recent NLO press publication of the collected reviews of international conferences (1993–2018), prepared by V. Milchina and, according to the author, limited to the works produced by the academic community close to Milchina, while completely ignoring discoveries by perceived outsiders. V. Milchina’s collection reproduces the print versions of the reports, mentions the unpublished materials, and includes appropriate references to the impressive bibliography. It is especially astonishing, therefore, that despite such diligence a blunder should have emerged that illustrates Milchina’s treatment of the knowledge with origins outside the editor’s affiliated set, namely, the error related to N. Nabokov, the writer’s cousin, mistaken for V. Nabokov by several contributors (even though abundant Russian and foreign research has established that V. Nabokov had nothing to do with the whole story). The critic argues that the reading list of the academic ‘coterie’ represented in V. Milchina’s collection is scandalously curtailed, focusing only on the works from within the set, which leads to factual errors and unfounded ambitions.

The critic Chukovsky noted that an artist may remain unaware of their own views. These, however, will find an outlet sooner or later, with the writer none the wiser, and it is the fondness for particular tropes that usually reveals them. Therefore, close attention to the author’s writing style opens the way to understanding their ideas. The article applies the method proposed by Chukovsky to reading his diaries. The objective of the research is to identify Chukovsky’s philosophy by examining his writing. The analysis shows that Chukovsky’s technique combines objective-scientific observations and subjective-emotional evaluations, with the two often disagreeing or even contradicting each other. Such dualism explains Chukovsky’s love of paradox: something profoundly imperfect is hailed as admirable, and human weaknesses (or flaws in a work of literature) are interpreted as essential. Chukovsky’s unique worldview is characterized by its holism. Such an angle allows to see the whole as something much bigger than its parts.

K. Chukovsky was one of Russia’s first scholars of detective fiction. Yet his literary criticism on this particular topic has never been researched. Nor has it come to light that his attitude to the genre was ambivalent. On the one hand, he knew it very well, was a regular reader of detective stories and made a number of valuable observations about the works of Conan Doyle (whose writing he contrasted with the cheap sensationalist books about Nat Pinkerton, stressing the quality of logic in Conan Doyle’s stories) and Wilkie Collins. On the other hand, he often made very critical and ironic remarks about the genre, confessing that he failed to comprehend the reason for its popularity. The article suggests the grounds for Chukovsky’s attitude: he argued that literature was linked to ‘the most important personal experience’ (in the words of the writer N. Oleynikov), with entertaining literature automatically dismissed as an outsider to real art.

The interview with the head of the Educational and Research Centre for Bible and Judaic Studies at the Russian State University for the Humanities begins with an account of the cultural and pedagogical exchange with the Israeli Bar-Ilan University (Ramat Gan) and Jabotinsky Institute (Tel Aviv). The interview goes into detail about the exhibition entitled ‘Nostalgia for world culture: O. E. Mandelstam’s library’, which took place in the Moscowbased Jewish Museum and Tolerance Centre from December 2018 until March 2019 and enjoyed a total turnout of 45,000 visitors. Thanks to N. Mandelstam’s personal archive display, the visitors could learn about the poet’s reading preferences and his outstanding contemporaries, as well as how N. Mandelstam shaped the poet’s image among the Russianspeaking intelligentsia in the second half of the 20th c. Also discussed in the interview are Leonid Katsis’ recently published books on V. Mayakovsky and V. Jabotinsky.

Founded in Moscow almost a century ago, the Higher Literary-Artistic Institute was nicknamed Bryusov Institute. However, following the poet’s death and the dissolution of his school, it was the Higher State Literary Courses (VGLK) that carried on Bryusov’s project. Very little is known about VGLK, much less about Y. Dombrovsky’s life as a student there. Working on the writer’s biography, the author turned to archives and discovered facts and documents related to Dombrovsky, which also shed light on the history of the university and student and literary life in Moscow in the mid to late 1920s. Among the findings were VGLK records of the scandal involving Dombrovsky and his statement submitted to the Presidium, as well as other documents, this time in relation to a different court case, a trial that shocked Moscow public in 1928: it concerned an alleged gang rape of a female VGLK student, who later committed suicide. These incidents are described in the novel The Faculty of Useless Knowledge [Fakultet nenuzhnykh veshchey]. All materials are published and commented for the first time.

A review of the collective monograph dedicated to various problems related to the study of French-language manuscripts and bilingual culture in Russia, as well as analysis of minor genres and unpublished archived materials. The monograph introduces a number of hitherto unpublished sources from the period of the 18th–20th c., each supplied with a commentary. Several authors and works are recalled from obscurity into the scope of academic research. The book also contains articles concerned with the problems of conquering an ‘alien’ literary market in the early 20th c. (French authors H. Barbusse, A. Malraux, and A. Gide, as well the Belgian F. Hellens, tried to succeed in Soviet Russia, whereas D. Merezhkovsky tried in France). All works in the monograph – a French lexicon and its 18th-c. Russian translation, letters, diaries, political pieces and noble ladies’ autograph books – are published with detailed supplementing articles.

In his book, Essipov contrasts ‘myths’ with ‘reality’, namely, historical facts and documents unearthed by the scholar through exploration of Pushkin’s works and the poet’s world. Essipov’s judgement of the value of findings by fellow Pushkin scholars and their approach to the study of the poet’s works published during his lifetime relies on Pushkin’s holistic personality. The same paradigm is assumed to solve the perennial problems of Pushkin studies. There is plenty of evidence that Essipov prefers working with poetry and is capable of a dedicated analysis of individual words, words groups, stanzas, leitmotifs, dates, numbers, and metres. However, analysis of Pushkin’s works as artistically complete forms, characterized by a special genre-specific meaning and connected with the poet’s life and times obliquely rather than directly, presents an altogether different challenge.

Glushakov’s book joins in the polemic about the status of Vasily Shukshin in 20th-c. Russian literature. The reviewer argues that it was Shukshin’s prose that gave voice to the hitherto unknown and disturbingly unusual stratum of the Russian people. He further points out that the book draws hardly any parallels between Shukshin and his predecessor Gorky. It is also argued that the compiler of the tome chose to forego a detailed examination of Shukshin’s numerous ties with world literature. Therefore, P. Glushakov’s opus seems a product of a respite, defined by renewed interest in Shukshin’s works and enthusiastic search by the post-Soviet people for a source of the much coveted and needed spiritual revival. Glushakov’s position appears highly uncertain: he places Shukshin in a hermetic environment with only echoes of his relations with contemporaries and his own spectral image for company.

M. Yasnov’s book attempts to bridge the cultural gap between France and Russia. Showcasing Yasnov’s talents as a poet, writer of children’s books, translator, and commentator of French poetry collections and anthologies, the book continues the cycle of his works dedicated to French poetry and its Russian translations and interpretations. The bilingual edition of 16th–20th-cc. French poetry published in 2016 started the series and included the works of La Pléiade and La Fontaine, Baroque and Rococo poets, as well as poètes maudits and the poems of La Belle Époque. In addition to the collected poems, the book contains essays on the poets and Yasnov’s comments about the challenges of translation. In the new publication, Yasnov the translator lends a voice to French poems for children, many of which appear in press for the first time. Finally children’s literature originating in France will reveal its diversity to Russian readers.