The article considers the plight of the ‘Jewish tribe' in imperial Russia in the context of the historical events of 1881 and 1882 as perceived and acted on by Ivan Turgenev. Based on copious documentary evidence, this study offers an answer to the question of why one of the most compassionate and cultured of Russian intellectuals did not condemn the pogroms. The author analyses the political situation in the wake of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II and describes the persistent but fruitless efforts by Turgenev and his followers to convince the new regime of the importance of continuing with the reforms. Also presented are documents confirming Turgenev's interest in the Jewish problem of the years 1881-1882 and the reasons why, despite his sympathy for victims of the pogroms, Turgenev never denounced the mob violence. Lastly, the article examines Turgenev's routine of ‘small actions,' when the writer provided active and effective support to vast numbers of people, including those directly impacted by the events of 1881. The article debunks the myths about Turgenev's apolitical stance and his siding with the official ideology and policy on ethnic issues.

The study is devoted to one of Leo Tolstoy's later short stories, Master and Man [Khozyain i rabotnik]. The article traces its links to other ‘stories for the people,' describes its reception by Tolstoy's contemporaries and deals with the problem of the artistic and didactic agenda that was so relevant for Tolstoy. The authors also examine Tolstoy's preliminary drafts. The article contains an exhaustive analysis of the two main characters, their relationship and correspondence with time and space, daily routine and abstract existence. Tolstoy is presented as a pioneer of methods typical of 20th-c. literary Modernism, which were utilised by A. Bely, A. Remizov, and V. Nabokov. According to the scholars, the story offers an unequivocal illustration of the main thesis of Tolstoy's later religious and philosophical outlook that the material world is a false and illusory form of life, while true life is only achievable through spiritual being.

The article considers a possible influence of J. P. Hebel's works on Leo Tolstoy's stories for children. The author compares and contrasts the two writer's approaches to their genre of choice: the didactic, and entertaining literature. Noted are matching plots used by both, as well as stylistic and narrative differences. The scholar elaborates on the extent to which Tolstoy was familiar with Hebel's works and examines Tolstoy's ‘stories for children' in comparison with the religious and moralistic ‘stories for the people' he produced in later life. His works for younger audiences could have only resulted from Tolstoy's artistic assimilation of Hebel's experience. They are viewed as a sequel to the Treasure Chest of the Family Friend from the Rhine [Schatzkastlein des rheinischen Hausfreundes] inspired by Russian realia. The article describes the ways in which Tolstoy further developed the traditions of the ‘calendar/almanac stories.' Hebel's Russia-themed works are analysed in the context of Russo-German literary ties since the German writer followed Russian events with keen interest.

V. Makhlin's article deals with the recently published book The Life of Leo Tolstoy: An Experiment in Interpretation [Zhizn Lva Tolstogo: Opyt prochteniya] (Moscow: NLO, 2020) by philologist A. Zorin. Noting that in his attempt to reconstruct the context of L. Tolstoy's life, Zorin does not pursue sensational discoveries, be it facts or rumours, Makhlin argues that the author's main goal was to bridge the gap between three different aspects of Tolstoy's image: that of a man in daily life, an artist engaged in creative work, and a religious proselytiser with his beliefs. According to Makhlin, Zorin managed the task brilliantly by employing a unique method, namely an ‘integrated approach' to writing a Tolstoy biography. The biographer tries to portray Tolstoy's life using the writer's own words, leaving to himself the task to comment on, rather than interpret, the events he describes. It is this precision as well as avoidance of personal judgements that, in Makhlin's opinion, make Zorin's book so precious and make it stand out among other Tolstoy biographies.

The article showcases the distinctive characteristics and analytical powers of the narratological approach to examination of a literary text as a system of episodes comprising a unique subject of the artistic whole. The author specifies the typological concept of the narrative picture of the world as the basis for accurate understanding of epic literature. An analytical description of the system of episodes in the short story The Bishop [Arkhierey] reveals the consistency of Chekhov's masterpiece with the precedential (in this case, evangelical) picture of the world. The story's narrative content is examined as an artistic actualisation of a sacred historical event in an incident of a private quotidian existence. The proposed interpretation of the story polemicises with that offered by the German narratology scholar W. Schmid, who denies the eventfulness of the protagonist's metamorphosis and views his epiphany with skepticism.

An allusive proper name is one of the traditional artistic devices of the Russian classics. The author examines Sholokhov's prose to find nearly a dozen names with reference to various Chekhov short stories. In most cases, there is no similarity between the characters' destinies, but the sheer ubiquity of Chekhov-inspired names can be considered as an homage to the master. On the other hand, the allusive names that Sholokhov consistently borrows from The Cherry Orchard [Vishnyoviy sad] are indicative of plot parallels between Sholokhov's novels and Chekhov's play. Notably, Sholokhov uses allusive proper names as a means of generalisation and typification of characters, from the bulwark of traditional morality, the Cossack woman Natalia Stepanovna, the ‘Russian Lucretia,' to the evercheerful soldier Lopakhin, to the family of Mikhail and Dunyasha Koshevoy as a symbol of recovery of the nation divided by the civil war, to the Gaev family as a premonition of the fate awaiting peasant Russia. Such allusions allow for treatment of Sholokhov's novels as a trilogy about the tragedies of the Russian people in the first half of the 20th c.

The article focuses on Lermontov's publications and their perceptions in the critical reviews that appeared in the journal Biblioteka Dlya Chteniya in the 1830s and 1840s. It was in this period that the poet's literary reputation was shaped, his works published during his lifetime as well as posthumously. In the latter case, some were previously unknown to the public. The journals of the time reveal heated discussions, in which Biblioteka Dlya Chteniya was also a participant. The paper challenges the established image of the journal's editor Senkovsky, whose reviews have been traditionally categorised as negative and contradictory. The article mentions the history behind Lermontov's first publication in Biblioteka Dlya Chteniya and offers its version of the editor's as well as the poet's respective strategies. The author also analyses anonymous reviews published in the 1840s and containing positive assessment of Lermontov's oeuvre, as well as reviews attributed to Senkovsky, who held an overall favourable opinion of Lermontov but remained a staunch critic of the rival journal Otechestvennye Zapiski.

The article sets out to trace F. Dostoevsky's presence in Russian literature over a broader period: from the 1960s until the present time. According to Amusin, his article especially focuses on the more empirically evident forms of such presence, namely film adaptations of Dostoevsky's works, critical reviews devoted to the writer, and, lastly, the dialogue between Dostoevsky and Russian writers of the late 20th — early 21st cc. Amusin argues that Dostoevsky's ‘background' influence (mostly of the philosophical or religious variety) was most perceived in the Russian village prose movement, whereas the ‘urban prose' writers, notably A. Bitov, Y. Trifonov, and V. Makanin, moved beyond that ‘background' to interact with Dostoevsky on the level of specific matches and parallels in the text. In the end, the critic finds that Dostoevsky is a constant presence in literature: the idiosyncratic aesthetic ideas and a high degree of spirituality that define his oeuvre give it enough power to penetrate time, stimulate our sensibility and occasionally administer a curative ‘acupuncture' treatment.

The essay by the writer and critic V. Novikov celebrates the memory of the literary critic Lev Anninsky (1934-2019). Remembering Anninsky's personal qualities (his constant zeal and energy, his fastidiousness and perfectionism as an editor of the journal Druzhba Narodov, his conscientiousness when interacting with the authors of the journal), Novikov also dwells on his method as a critic, the so-called ‘Anninsky's loop': an energetic intro, an escalating culmination, and a paradoxical twist in the end, which shows Anninsky's mastery of composition as well as the language. According to Novikov, Anninsky had been a proponent of deconstruction before this idea became ubiquitous: he would become the writer and co-author of the reviewed piece, and a creator of the critical dialogue. Novikov believes that it is this ability to conduct a dialogue unmarred by grievances or humiliating verdicts that a contemporary critic could learn from Anninsky.

What defines the special character of Pirandello's works is the fact that he creates his own literary movement, which draws on the duality of theoretical and practical aspects. His own practice led Pirandello to the creation of a theory (‘humorism') that declares analytical dismantling of reality to be the ultimate goal of literature in order to depict the world as a series of illusions devoid of a unifying central idea. Guided by this postulate, Pirandello was close to deconstruction of the tools he used, namely the novel and the play. His reimagining of the novel was less radical: the revision of this form remained incomplete. His reforms of playwriting principles were more advanced, as Pirandello problematised and rejected traditional oppositions — primarily, the opposition of art to reality. In The Mountain Giants [I giganti della montagna], his final and unfinished play, Pirandello attempted to create a myth about art as a medium between the material and the ideal, but, confined to the rules of ‘humorism', he remained trapped by this contradiction.

The author examines works by Paolo Cognetti in light of the myth he has created about a wild boy from the Alps and the wise mountain folk inhabiting various corners of the world. The myth, including the appeal to return to one's roots, to life in harmony with nature, has resonated with many people who are feeling out of place in modern urban civilisation. At the same time, Cognetti has developed his distinctive poetics by combining traditions of the American short story and those of Italian prose and by proposing a compelling stylistic ideal. The article dwells on the origins of Cognetti's writing, its defining features and Italian as well as foreign influences on his works. Cognetti's principal work, the novel The Eight Mountains [Le otto montagne], is analysed along with autobiographical stories The Wild Boy: A Memoir [Il ragazzo selvatico. Quaderno di montagna] and Without Ever Reaching the Summit: A Himalayan Journey [Senza mai arrivare in cima: Viaggio in Himalaya]. The myth of a savage and idealisation of the past help to explain Cognetti's popularity and the fact that he has lent his voice to a whole generation.

Both Shakespeare and George Wilkins's Pericles and Thomas Heywood's Foure Prentises of London are romances striking in geographical scope. Analysing the two plays principally through John Gillies's concept of ‘geography of difference,' this essay argues that the geography of difference in Foure Prentises of London enhances the crude ideology of Eurocentric and masculine hegemony, whereas Pericles aims at Pentapolis, the Greek city-state, not only physically and geographically, but also spiritually and epistemologically. In Pericles, geographical mobility subserves poetic geography, and poetic geography subsumes geographical mobility. On the other hand, in the larger contemporary contexts, geographical mobility interacts intricately with the aristocratic ideology. In terms of ideology Pericles is basically a conservative play despite its geographical mobility, while Foure Prentises of London responds more keenly to its era and glorifies the middling rank with an aristocratic ideology by means of geographical mobility. Shakespeare and Wilkins's and Heywood's dramatic practices illustrate the rich possibilities inherent in the genre of romance.

The article discusses possible inspiration behind I. Ilf and E. Petrov's novel The Little Golden Calf [Zolotoy telyonok] (1931): newspaper crime reports appearing in the late 1920s. The author points out parallels between the book's characters (Ostap Bender, Shura Balaganov, and Aleksandr Ivanovich Koreyko) and the real heroes of crime news. The article describes the adventures of an Aleksandr Serbin, who crossed the USSR from Odessa to Vladivostok alternately posing as a Brazilian industrial worker and a son of the Brazilian consul in China. All the while, Serbin seems to have been closely imitating the novel's plotline of the Lieutenant Schmidt's children. He enjoys free accommodation in hotels and receives payments from various local Soviet authorities. Interestingly, Serbin chronicles his adventures in letters to his girlfriend, thus immediately evoking another literary character — Khlestakov in Gogol's The Government Inspector [Revizor]. The article also draws analogies between crimes that took place in the Crimea in 1928 and the wealth accumulation schemes adopted by yet another of the book's characters, Koreyko.

The review deals with Luc Boltanski's Mysteries and Conspiracies [Enigmes et complots]. The following is noted as defects of the reviewed book: detective fiction is associated with anxieties that question the framework of modern reality. Such attribution, it is argued, results from inaccurate comparison of detective fiction to a spy novel. The reviewer identifies contradictions in the definition of detective fiction: on the one hand, it is characterised by the proverbial anxiety. On the other, the writer suggests that unravelling a mystery normalises the ‘integrity of predictable expectations.' In addition, Boltanski confuses detective fiction with police procedural novels as well as the concepts of genre and theme with regard to spy novels (as a result, he dwells on ‘the genre of the spy novel,' even though spy novels are written in a number of genres). The review particularly criticises Boltanski's assessment of A. Conan Doyle's prose.

S. Matyash's book is preceded by years of research. The author appears equally interested in individual examples of poetics and in typology. Findings concerning the function performed by enjambement in works of a particular poet are accompanied by definition of its structure and are considered in the context of the principles guiding the use of enjambement in a given historical period. In her definition of enjambements Matyash relies on gradation of the density of syntactic relations, a rule proposed by M. Gasparov and T. Skulachyova, and later M. Shapir, and suggests the use of this rule to avoid inaccurate definitions of enjambements and to discover new ways of their classification. Despite O. Fedotov's argument that syntactic relations should be considered jointly with metrical ones due to their mutually complimentary nature, the system used by S. Matyash to define enjambements can be viewed as an achievement in the fields of prosody and poetics.

The book is a collection of two texts separately brought out half a century ago: one on Jonathan Swift (1968), the other on his famous novel Gulliver's Travels (1972). If on the first publication they attracted attention it was thanks both to the hero, presented as a satirist and political journalist, and the author Vladimir Muravyov (1939-2001), who enjoyed a reputation among Moscow intelligentsia as a dissident intellectual whose taste in poetry was appreciated by Anna Akhmatova. The texts in a new book are identical to those published in the Soviet time. Muravyov must have mastered stylistic inventiveness of his hero — to speak in a manner quite direct and at the same time elusive. He wanted to tell a life story of the writer whom he had chosen as one of his literary guides and whose lifelong battle on the side of the Reason must have looked too archaic, and therefore safe, to the Soviet censor but quite actual to the penetrating eyes of the audience.

The new edition of E. Pound's poetic collection Cathay, first published in 1915, shows the idea of world literature to be as real as it is problematic. Thanks to T. Billings, the editor behind the publication, the book offers the most exhaustive description of the process whereby the translations were created: it involved not only Pound and Fenollosa, but also K. Mori and N. Ariga, who represent the Japanese tradition of reading classical Chinese poetry. The volume contains almost all of Pound's Chinese translations produced in the 1910s, his essay ‘Chinese Poetry,' as well as an impressive scholarly corpus: articles on the significance of these translations in the era of close relations between China and the West, extracts from Fenollosa's notebooks deciphered by Billings, and the original Chinese poems, each supplied with comments. The reconstruction of the process by which word-for-word translations were created puts Pound's translation effort into a new perspective.

The review is concerned with a collection of hitherto unknown prose by B. Zaytsev that uncovers new aspects of his oeuvre. The collection covers literary variants of famous essays, hitherto unpublished short stories from before the October Revolution, and travelogues showing the writer's attitude to the spiritual and creative culture of the West. The reviewer points out the problem of the interaction between Russian literature and its European counterparts (particularly French literature) and defines the criteria (the Christian ideal and ‘common human compassion') used by Zaytsev for its assessment. Mentioned are the authors especially favoured by Zaytsev (F. Mauriac, A. Maurois, and G. Duhamel). Also noted is the writer's polemic with Western authors. The collection offers a treasure trove for scholarly reflections on literature and religion, as well as on Russian emigre literature versus Soviet and Western literatures.

The review considers S. Gandlevsky's travel notes in the context of the author's poems, fiction, and memoirs. The reviewers analyse the characteristic genre features of the travelogue and the principles for selection of the realia behind the ‘future reminiscence' (rather than showy ‘facades' meant for tourists, the traveller shows appreciation for something random and unobtrusive and, therefore, suffused with mystery). The review takes special interest in the constant features of the writer's poetics that reveal Gandlevsky's works as a homogeneous whole, consistent within its established framework. Such features include a particularly dense medium of quotations constituting a special kind of optics with the purpose to ensure that everything visible is fitted into a mandatory intertextual framework.