The article by A. Lyusy, a researcher specialising in ‘local texts’ of Russian literature, discusses ‘the Crimean text’ of I. Selvinsky, who, in Lyusy’s opinion, was in fact among the first authors to produce ‘the Crimean text,’ while ‘the Crimean text’ itself is interpreted as the south pole of ‘the Petersburg text.’ Considered within the Crimean context, it resurrected the real perception of the Crimea (and all of its ethnical groups) as a successor of diverse linguistic, cultural and religious traditions, as well as progenitor of new forms; and in Eurasian and global contexts, this poetics demonstrated the special powers of ‘crossroads cultures,’ or ‘borderland cultures,’ where the ‘periphery’ can become the centre, and a distant past can offer a model, a forecast and a warning to the future. The article examines the connection between Selvinsky’s life and the Crimea, focusing on the episodes and details that influenced the poet’s search of his own promised land.

A detailed reconstruction of the history behind the creation and publication of I. Selvinsky’s Ulyalaevshchina, a narrative poem about the Russian civil war in the Urals, following the 1917 revolution. Composed in 1924, Ulyalaevshchina was first published in 1927 and then underwent numerous alterations by Selvinsky, to a detrimental effect. The 1920s–1930s saw four publications of the poem as a separate book; the poem was considered a masterpiece of Selvinsky’s and of contemporary Soviet poetic output in general. However, its subsequent publications in the 1930s were unofficially vetoed up until the early Thaw years, when, in 1956, the poem was published again upon radical redrafting by the author. The scholar makes a meticulous comparison between various archive versions of Ulyalaevshchina, comments on textual juxtapositions and finds that the poem, conceived as a ‘verse novel’ about the Russian civil war and the Bolshevik pillaging of rural settlements during the food confiscation campaign (prodrazvyorstka), was intentionally rewritten by Selvinsky as an exemplary Soviet epic, which could not but damage the poem’s quality and intonation.

The Humanities are marginalised in today’s ranking of scholarly disciplines. This is partially due to their poorly monetisable subject matter, as well as the fact that their methodology is firmly rooted in the industrial era. The digital revolution provided the humanities with new technologies. However, the same newly available statistical methods that enable generalisation of a large bulk of materials and management of accurate data are fraught with serious limitations. Despite their ostensible novelty, the new methods cannot solve the epistemological problems of humanist learning; instead, they merely help its further adaptation to the inductive logic of scientific positivism, typical of the industrial era. This means that, given their digital nature (i. e., association with the digital era), they fail to generate a new ontology for the humanities. The value of new technologies is mainly determined by our ability to use them in an unconventional way. In order to preserve the subject matter of the humanities in its entirety, one should learn about the potential as well as limitations of digital methods and devise a positive strategy of their application.

The article considers one of the methods of identity creation in a song used by lyricists in the early 21st c.: it involves a combination of profane language typical of an urban outcast (patsan, gopnik) and metaphysical, i. e. sacred, themes. Enjoying numerous representations in contemporary Russian visual arts, the discourse of the ‘metaphysical macho guy culture (patsanstvo)’ is also inseparable from the country’s literary tradition, which, however, is trying to marginalise it yet again and confine it to a song format. Analysing the poetic output of several Russian-speaking musicians (E. Limonov, P. Korolenko, Branimir, M. Elizarov, etc.), the author identifies the key features of the discourse: its faux-playfulness, emblematic quality, and adherence to low culture. The article also proposes a genre typology of the discourse in question, noting its critical, humoristic and paradoxographical varieties. In the end, the author discovers that the image of a macho guy / urban outcast (patsan) confronted with a supernatural experience is heavily influenced by the sacral archetype, which absorbs the most extreme — the lowest and the loftiest — aspects of human experience.

The essay is concerned with the work of the Irish writer John Boyne, who received international renown upon publication of his two young adult novels: The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and The Boy at the Top of the Mountain. The two books are connected by the same topic — a child and the war — as well as an unconventional view of the fate of the small protagonist who becomes entangled in the big history. Among the characters of Boyne’s novels are children of high-ranking Nazis, prisoners of concentration camps, people inhabiting pre-war Europe, and even the Führer (Hitler) himself. The essay not only comments on the plots of the two novels, which follow the lives of Boyne’s young protagonists, but also suggests that everyone, including children, is responsible for their moral choice: whereas Bruno, the hero of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, remains pure in heart, his counterpart Peter (Pierrot) from The Boy at the Top of the Mountain becomes infected with Nazi ideology. In addition, the essay discusses certain facts of the writer’s biography, mentioning, in particular, that he turned to young adult fiction after a successful career in ‘grown-up’ literature.

The topic of the article places it within the overlapping boundaries of literary criticism, the history of 19th-c. men’s suits, and memoirs.

The methodology of the study involved comparing all contemporary descriptions of I. Annensky’s appearance with his photographs as well as Parisian fashion magazines with articles on men’s fashion, in particular, on collars and neckties; it was mostly these items of his wardrobe that caught the eye of the people who wrote about Annensky. And if it seems that descriptions like ‘overly ceremonious’ and ‘old-fashioned’ begin to dominate the memoirs, it is not because of Annensky alone but rather that, instead of recording what they saw with their own eyes, their authors tend to engage in a dialogue protracted in time and defined by contradictions, concessions and repetitions. The scholar concludes that, not only in his poetry but also in appearance, Annensky was a direct successor of the French poètes maudits with their dandyism. Interestingly, there was no contradiction between Annensky’s poetry and dandyism and his bureaucratic airs; in fact, dandyism and the Decadent fondness for beautiful artefacts perfectly coexisted with the distinguished public office of this Tsarskoe Selo resident.

The article discusses two works of literature: Troilus and Criseyde, a long poem written in the genre of courtly romance (1382–1386/1387) by G. Chaucer, and ‘The Prophet’ [‘Prorok’] (1826), a poem by A. Pushkin. The two works are compared due to a common motif: the opening of the chest and swapping of the heart as a sign of the person’s spiritual regeneration. In her comparative analysis of the two poems, the author attempts to identify their common source or the likelihood of direct contact — whether Pushkin had come across Chaucer’s work and borrowed the motif directly. As for the heart being replaced, it seems both poets may have been inspired by several biblical stories. Further analysis of the motif of the chest being opened suggests that the research should focus on the Arabic tradition alone and take into account the potential influence of Islamic religious texts on Pushkin as well as Chaucer. Relying on the available data about Russian and European relations with the Arabic world, the article hypothesises about the ways in which the motif in question could have reached each of the poets. The author names the Quran as the common genetic source of the two poems.

The article considers a transformation of the Western European motif of the ‘wild hunt’ in V. Korotkevich’s story King Stakh’s Wild Hunt. The author gives an overview of folklore motifs typical of the ‘wild hunt’ phenomenon in the Western and Eastern European traditions. With origins in folklore, the ‘wild hunt’ motifs find their way into works of many writers in the late modern to contemporary period: the ‘wild hunt’ is localised on the edge of the mythological space and retains a fixed set of meanings. Most commonly, the ‘wild hunt’ features at the intersection of two domains. The first one is a complex of motifs inherited from the ancient myths and legends of the Germanic ‘Wütendes Heer.’ The second consists of the attributes of actual hunting. Taking a cue from The Hound of the Baskervilles — an obvious inspiration behind the story — and making use of the motifs traditionally associated with the legend, Korotkevich deconstructs the medieval myth, reducing it to an adventurous technique, only to reinstate it with new and unique meanings. The ‘wild hunt’ becomes a symbol of the ignorance, fear and despondency that have the world in their grip.

The problem raised by the article is defined by a paradox: according to Descartes, education is associated with the darkness of preconceptions, truisms, and instilled prejudices that rely exclusively on the authority of tradition as opposed to light, which is the medium of natural intelligence, free of dogmatism and skepticism alike. The article sets out to solve a dual task: on the one hand, to describe the philosopher’s years of learning and the fruits of his enlightenment, and, on the other, to read Discourse on the Method as a prototypical Bildungsroman that challenges the program of humanistic education adopted during the Renaissance and exposes the novelistic imagination of the author’s contemporaries. Following the method of intellectual history, we discover that the autobiographical setting of Discourse on the Method, combined with the figure of the new conceptual character and the self-reflexive element that reproduces the negative genre-specific model of narration, transform one of the most renowned works of world philosophy into a mature Bildungsroman with a main theme best expressed by the question ‘How to become a philosopher?’

The article is devoted to the epistolary legacy of Nelle Harper Lee, the author of the American cult classic To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). The researcher examines a collection of Nelle’s letters written from 1956 to 2009, provides a detailed list of sources and makes suggestions about the potential new discoveries that could shed light on the life of ‘America’s most reclusive author.’ This short study of ‘posthumous baggage,’ as Lee referred to her private correspondence, offers an insight into the interests of the author, who insisted on keeping her personal life to herself. The letters included in the study concern the writer’s relationship to her father Amasa Coleman Lee, on whom she based the character of Atticus Finch, her attitude to her own biography published by Charles Shields, and personal anxieties of her final years. The author also details Lee’s opinions of literature, from the 19th-c. classics to contemporary authors, and shows how much she valued communication with her numerous fans.

The article tells the story of a rivalry between two remarkable nonperiodicals of the Russian Silver Age: the literary and artistic almanacs printed by Shipovnik [Wild rose] publishers (Petersburg, 1907–1917) and the Zemlya collections published in Moscow (1908–1917). Using the memoirs (including unpublished) left by employees of the two publishing houses and critical reviews from the early 20th c., the article pinpoints the reasons why readers perceived Zemlya as an analogue of Shipovnik. In the period from 1910 to 1917, the editor-cum-proprietors S. Kopelman (Shipovnik) and G. Blumenberg (Zemlya), neither with significant previous experience in the publishing business, made sure that their respective almanacs boasted stellar authors, a unique composition and cover design; however, Zemlya was consistently labelled as a cousin of Shipovnik. Such a description was caused by Zemlya directly copying the Petersburg-printed collections in its first issues (1908–1909), the special characteristics of the almanac as a publication type, and critical reviews of Soviet literary scholars.

The writer Yury Dombrovsky did not leave behind any diaries of memoirs. Glimpses of his life are scattered across autobiographical poems and prose. Although an important source for research, letters and reminiscences of friends are often limited to a single episode or a brief period, usually of the writer’s later life in Moscow. What proved indispensable in the process of recovering facts and compiling a good half of the biography — spanning a lengthy period from the 1920s to the 1950s — were materials of the criminal proceedings. They also help decipher the writer’s major two-part novel, a fact he acknowledged himself. However, the archive materials were only recently declassified. The article aims to reconstruct a period of Yury Dombrovsky’s life and introduces the hitherto unpublished materials of his third criminal case of 1939. The author compares testimonies found in Dombrovsky’s writings and memoirs of his friends and acquaintances with documents preserved in archives, including tip-offs to the authorities.

The reviewer claims that Florian Illies’ essays demonstrate a perfect balance between pure scholarship and journalism. Despite representing a miscellany of genres (book and exhibition reviews, articles summarising the author’s view of various painters and art historians), the collection proves harmonious due to a common motif of the essays. The book does not draw a strict line between history of literature and art history. Similarly, Illies does not separate art history from the context of the life around art, i. e. the authors’ correspondence, their relationships with their family and friends, fellow artists and patrons. His unconventional view of art history enables Illies to identify interesting overarching subjects which include the problem of the patron’s influence on a work of art and the category of taste. The essayist is particularly interested in ‘second-rank’ authors, who, he suggests, emerge as first-rank in various historical periods.

Vladimir Kantor’s new book Demythologisation of Russian culture is concerned with interaction of world cultures and the turning points in the world history — the fall of the Roman Empire, World War I, Russian Revolution of 1917, etc. What drives the masses in times of war and revolutions; how mob mentality takes over society, and how the truth known to an individual defies widespread delusion; what is the nature of the myth and of the two principal events of world history — ‘the life and death of a living being’ — each of these questions receives an answer in seventeen essays on key figures of Russian culture: Peter I, A. Pushkin, I. Turgenev, F. Dostoevsky, A. Chernyshevsky, M. Katkov, A. Kerensky, M. Gorky et al. Published as an addendum to the book is Kantor’s short story ‘The death of a retiree’ [‘Smert pensionera’], supplied with a dedicated article ‘On the event of death’ by K. Barsht.

This first biographical account of M. Aldanov was authored by M. Uralsky, a writer of documentary prose. While not a strict academic publication, the book shows a thorough approach to selection of the material and verification of facts and introduces hitherto unknown documents, thus qualifying as a compelling piece of scholarly research. The book’s three parts are dedicated to key periods of Aldanov’s life: ‘A young Aldanov — happy years’ (1886–1917), ‘A historical novelist of Russian emigration’ (1919–1940), and ‘The twilight of life and work’ (1947–1957). Uralsky uncovered a number of new materials relating to Aldanov’s childhood and adolescence and his work in emigration, completing a reconstruction of the writer’s life. The biographer examines Aldanov’s personality as an artist, a literary critic, a journalist and a scholar. The book’s leitmotif is to actualise Aldanov’s idea of writers dedicating themselves to kalokagathia — the ‘moral beauty.’