The article deals with ‘the time after’ as a ‘literary fact’ in Tynyanov’s novel The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar [Smert’ Vazir-Mukhtara] (1927). The Russian nobles’ defeated coup at the time before coronation of Emperor Nicholas I in December 1825 serves as the book’s historical setting and elucidates the problem of the ‘post-revolution’. The author examines the different types of time (in chapters devoted to Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tiflis, and Persia, respectively) and their function in the novel. She suggests that it is the protagonist’s, A. Griboyedov’s, existential state that determines the time motif in the book. It is argued that the character divided into Griboyedov and Vazir-Mukhtar demarcates his ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ selves. The book’s ideological epicenter lies in the theme of betrayal. The author goes on to show that, despite the circumstances of the ‘time after’, and his loneliness, Griboyedov stays faithful to himself, no matter how hard it is; he remains a creator, a poet and a playwright, who penned the blacklisted Woe from Wit [Gore ot uma], a professional diplomat at the heart of the frustrated project to boost the trade and industry in the Caucasus, and a man of honour and duty to his friends and family. The paper cites a number of arguments, polemicizing with critics of Tynyanov’s novel.

The article is devoted to an entry in Pushkin’s diary from when he was a student at the Lyceum, on 10 December 1815: he writes that ‘in the evening, together with his fellow-students, he was snuffing out the candles and lamps in the auditorium’ and calls it ‘a fine job for a philosopher’. In calling himself a philosopher, Pushkin evokes the image of Voltaire in Condorcet’s Vie de Voltaire, the book he was reading at the time and which interprets a philosopher as another term for educator and enemy of prejudice. ‘Snuffing out’, by contrast, was associated with a conservative reaction in the minds of liberal writers in the late 18th - early 19th centuries. This analogy is entrenched in the publications about an imaginary Order of the Extinguishers in the French opposition journal Le Nain Jaune (1814-1815). These were in active circulation among members of the Arzamas Society, with which the young Pushkin was also affiliated. Therefore, a philosopher putting out light must have looked comical, which was noted in Pushkin’s journal entry.

Following his trip to Orenburg, Pushkin wrote to V. Perovsky attaching four copies of his History of Pugachev’s Revolt [Istoriya Pugachevskogo bunta], asking him to forward those to ‘Dahl, Pokotilov, and that hunter who likes to compare woodcocks with Wallenstein or the Caesar’.

This hunter’s identity has long since been revealed by V. Dahl in his Notes on Pushkin [Zapiski o Pushkine]: it is K. Artyukhov, director of the Orenburg-based Neplyuev military school, who once played host to Pushkin in his bathhouse and entertained him with a dialogue about woodcocks (Waldschnepfe) - gamebirds who proudly fly towards the deadly lead, wings spread widely. In Pushkin’s pun, the dying woodcock is likened to the Caesar in his composure, and to Wallenstein in his final gesture, according to Artyukhov’s impression. In Europe and Russia, the memory of A. von Wallenstein was revived after F. Schiller’s trilogy (1799). The prince apparently spread his arms and offered his unprotected chest to the murderer’s halberd. A similar description is provided by Schiller, but in his History of the Thirty Years’ War, rather than in his play Wallenstein’s Death. This history was missing from Pushkin’s library, although he may have found out about the prince’s final gesture elsewhere.

Pushkin’s pun is unique in its two-layer structure: the phonetic likeness reaches into a non-verbal, pantomimic level. In addition, the quip and the final phrase in the letter provide an example of metered prose.

The metaphysical motif of the monument in the works of Pushkin and Gogol is compared with Stendhal’s monument philosopheme. The article demonstrates the ideatorial and material, spiritual and tangible aspects of the motif in the works of these authors, as well as its connection with the historical element in culture and daily reality.

The monuments in Pushkin’s ode and Gogol’s Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends [Vybrannie mesta iz perepiski s druziyami] is perceived by the two authors through the dichotomy of culture as opposed to civilization. It was on Russian soil that Pushkin and Gogol further developed the cultural-historical and philosophical-historical pathos of Stendhal’s observations, moving in the same romantic/post-romantic flow.

The author infers that, in his Monument [Pamyatnik], Pushkin preserved and uncovered his creative self as a combination of the spiritual and the tangible. By contrast, Gogol’s late works show his attempts to evade such preservation or to use ambiguous ways to imply the existence of his morphed self. Indeed, Gogol did not ‘repeat’ Pushkin, but only in the constant inner dialogue with the poet amid history in motion.

The article undertakes to find out what it is that Leo Tolstoy shares with the War and Peace [Voyna i Mir] character Fedor Dolokhov. Opening with a discussion of the 2016 BBC dramatization of the novel, which pushes secondary characters like Dolokhov straight into the limelight and promotes him specifically to a major actor in the drama, the article proceeds to examine his real-life prototypes, and especially the writer’s relative, Fedor ‘the American’ Tolstoy, arguably the biggest inspiration behind Dolokhov. He may have endowed the latter with the traits of a callous duelist and adventurer. Every time Dolokhov makes an appearance in the novel, it becomes clear that he, rather than Prince Andrey or Pierre, is Tolstoy’s kindred spirit. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books feature a character named Antonin Dolohov, a borrowing from Tolstoy. In their pursuit of immortality, Rowling’s dark wizards would split up their soul and keep the fragments in several magical objects called horcruxes. In a way, Dolokhov is such a vessel for Tolstoy’s alter ego, something already noted by his younger English fellow writer Somerset Maugham.

In her article devoted to The Patriot [Patriot], the novel by the contemporary author A. Rubanov (the last in his literary cycle about the hero of our time, from the 1990s to the 2010s), the critic analyses Rubanov’s signature prose in the context of 40 years of literature, from short sketches and autobiographies to historical generalizations. Zhuchkova notices that, even though the protagonist and the author tend to amalgamate in a symbiotic way in Rubanov’s books, a schism is beginning to show from 2012. While the hero preserves his boyish flair, the author matures. Similarly, musings about the fate of the generation replace the autobiographical focus: for example, The Patriot centers on the character of Znaev, whom the article examines in some detail.

The most thorough analysis in Russian to date, this article is devoted to the works of the contemporary French author M.- A. Murail, who specializes in young adult literature, and who is idolized by her audiences in France and holds numerous literary awards. In Russia, her books were ‘discovered’ by the Samokat publishing house. All brought out by Samokat, her four books translated into Russian each target a different reader group, from 6 to 18-year-olds. Murail’s appeal is in her ability to find the right themes, plots, and narration method for each readership, and that she never shies away from modernity’s most uncomfortable topics, but interprets those in an easily comprehensible manner and language. Murail’s work is examined through its main topics: family relationships, the conflict between traditional and new societies, and the problem of the other. Also analyzed are the stylistic features that define this kind of prose as dynamic, easy to understand and filled with irony.

The article analyses 12 texts authored by V. Khodasevich: the poet was planning to publish them separately under the working title of The Blank Verse [Belie stikhi]. Written in an almost uninterrupted sequence, these poems are more than a cycle united by similarities in the genre and meter, but a kind of super-text that describes several episodes of post-revolutionary history, revealing their symbolic meaning as it does so. The plot develops from one poem to another, defined by the lyrical freedom and relative independence of its elements on the one hand, and by the main recurrent topics and images on the other. The article combines a biographical approach and poetic and genre-related analyses to classify Khodasevich’s works as ‘lyrical-epic novellas’ and reveal their genre-specific and metaphorical potential as well as establish their tentative context, namely, links to A. Blok’s Free Thoughts [Volnie mysli] and A. Akhmatova’s Requiem.

The article deals with Shukshin’s most literary-centric short story, Stuck in the Mud [Zabuksoval]. The story reveals a number of intertextual parallels and offers interpretational commentary for some of its literary realia. A popular object of multiple and ever-increasing interpretation attempts, this story is not only marked by intertextuality (Shukshin’s most obvious technique here: quoting another text in his story enables him to utilize a wide range of philological tools), but is also significant in that the question it raises, and which sent the story’s protagonist ‘skidding’, remains the core issue widely debated by Russian intellectuals. Shukshin launches the discussion into the meta-textual level, with the main character engaging in a dialogue with practically the entirety of Russian classical literature. Such perception emphasizes the principal structural and semantic complexes of Russian literature: the themes of cards and card games, the motifs of insanity, ‘blood-soaked food’, rhetorical questions posed by the hero, etc. As a result, the text is treated as a complex expression of the author’ perception of reality.

In recent years, modernist studies have tended to nationalize issues, putting forward specific features of American and British modernist writings. This article treats Anglo-American modernism in terms of ‘the inverted conquest’ (A. Mejias-Lopez) with America ‘wrestling cultural authority from its former European metropolis’. The article starts with the subject of periphery and centre changing places, first in the imagination of American writers and then in reality. In F. M. Ford’s novel The Good Soldier the situation is seen as if the American would absorb the English. An American John Dowell outmatches and ultimately disparages ‘the good soldier’ and a superior Briton Ashburnham. The novel is analyzed as a result of pushing together two ways of writing - English and American (Jamesonian). Louis MacNeice treats the ‘Americanization of poetry’ in Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay (1938). In Aspects of Modern Poetry (1934) Edith Sitwell affirms the triumph of T. S. Eliot’s early poetry over ‘the bareness of the line’ in Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, famous for its poetical Englishness. A sort of latent urge to reaffirm Englishness against advancing Americanism is obvious in Virginia Woolf’s essays on American writers.

The article is concerned with the musical speech techniques used by Charles Dickens, particularly in Our Mutual Friend, and brings up the problem of Dickens’ unique sense of language in the fragments where speech reveals musical qualities, or a focus on how it would be heard. Based on Sher’s intermediality theory, the analysis takes into consideration the sounds of words, rhythm, ‘volume’, length, and the pace of sentences. Special attention is given to the technique of repetition and accompaniment, used to intensify the musical effect of speech. The findings reveal new aspects of the correlation between speech structure and semantics, their union a proof of the writer’s sensitive ear. The article points out the significance of the musical, i. e. ‘non-semantic’ elements in the creation of the book’s atmosphere and semantic emphases. The paper goes on to give a new interpretation to speech intonation, suggesting it should be treated as a musical concept. Finally, the author argues that, rather than ‘imitating’ languages (according to M. Bakhtin), Dickens invents new ones through his masterful use of various techniques.

In his comparison of the notes for the unfinished mystery play Antichrist (both those published and those archived at the manuscripts department of the Russian State Library) with dramatic sketches He Who Has Come [Prishedshiy] and The Night’s Jaws [Past’ nochi], the author discusses the peculiarities of Bely’s arrangement of the acting space. The problem of dramatic convention is examined through text analysis and with a direct reference to the mystery play: a genre that experienced revival in the period between the 19th and 20th centuries. The symbolism of the stage space in Bely’s shelved project Antichrist is in many ways determined by the very nature of the genre: many writers of the time were drawn to its paradigm, the universal model, realized in various forms. Notably, Bely’s early plays feature the metaphorical leaning towards unitotality, typical of mystery plays in general and eagerly embraced by the Russian symbolists.

The paper sets out to examine the literary impulses at the heart of Charles Maurras’ (1868-1952) philosophy, namely, the doctrine of integral nationalism, which signified French literary nationalism in the 20th century. The author finds that, in Maurras’ view, the concept of ‘integral’ was inseparable from the ‘monarchy’, with the latter destined to blend together the real social oppositions spawned by various anarchies, be it political, religious, familial, university-based, economic or even literary ones.

A review of the editorial archive of the Literary Heritage [Literaturnoe nasledstvo] book series at the Manuscripts Department of the Russian Academy’s Gorky Institute of World Literature. The emergence of the new archaeographical publication, Literary Heritage, was at odds with the political context of the early 1930s. I. Zilbershtein’s personality and extensive connections in the publishing world, as well as the favourable disposition of the RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) and Stalin himself, helped to launch the series and made sure that it endured despite the RAPP’s downfall and to meet the program’s goals to ‘explore the archived riches’ and ‘bring out the hitherto unpublished’. It was thanks to the utmost erudition of LH’s authors and reviewers that their editorial office remained a platform that accumulated both archival discoveries and contemporary challenges and ideas. LH’s survival amid constant scrutiny from the party and official censorship was the result of often obscure forces and political schemes put to work. It was driven by personal interests and scholarly collaborations and rivalries, something that broadly defined the trends in literary studies of the 21st century.

This issue includes four literary essays: an introductory article by Yelena Dubrovina, and three essays by Youri Mandelstamm from the archives of his granddaughter, Marie Stravinsky: ‘A Call for Metaphysics’ in Émigré Literature [ ‘Metafizicheskiy zakaz’ v emigrantskoy literature], The Fate of the Novel [Sud’ba romana] and Love in the Modern Novel [Lyubov’ v sovremennom romane].

In the late 1920s and the early 1930s, the centre of Russian cultural life moved from St. Petersburg to Paris. A human tragedy in a foreign land, with life as a constant struggle for survival, intensified the perception of the world and the interaction with the creative process, and made young émigré writers take a profound look inward. Freed from Soviet repression, their creative process was liberated. Based on numerous philosophical studies of that period, a metaphysical theme began to dominate the work of émigré writers. A new metaphysical approach, a spiritual and religious awakening are clearly traced in Russian émigré literature. The importance of such an approach was a key theme in the critical essays of Youri Mandelstamm, a Russian poet and literary critic. His inner emotional wealth and his ability to look into the core of surrounding events, his philosophical approach to life, love, religion and creative process were the essence of his work.

‘A Call for Metaphysics’ in Еmigrе Literature. The Fate of the Novel. Love in the Modern Novel. Publication and comments by Y. Dubrovina.

Y. G. Fridstein. Inner Circle. Y. G. Fridstein. The Fifth Book. Y. G. Fridstein. Back to Theatre Reviews.

J.M. de Heredia. Trophies. Sonnets Translated by Mikhail Travchetov.

Understanding the West. Foreign Culture in Soviet Literature, Art, and Theory. 1917—1941. Research and Ar chival Records.

Anne Applebaum. GULAG.

E. L. Demenok. ‘Odessa has very many shores’.

A. Melnikov. Boris Ryzhy: Introduction to Mytho logy.

M. Veiskopf. Between the Walls of Fire: A Book on Isaac Babel.

New books.