In 1920, a sixteen-year-old G. Gazdanov boarded a steamboat, forever leaving the country where he had spent his childhood but was denied a chance to grow to young adulthood. He entered Russian literature by drawing on his painful existential experience. In his first novel An Evening with Claire [Vecher u Kler ] (1930), the autobiographical memory evoking the lost ancestral home and the metaphysical ‘inner person’ acquires the mode of an autonomous spiritual resource. The novel’s composition emerges from a combination of three virtual worlds — a ‘childhood world’ in the Caucasus, a fratricidal civil war, and Paris as the émigré’s final frontier. The article considers two phases in Gazdanov’s literary career — before and after World War II. The author finds that Gazdanov’s transition to the material based on his experiences of living in France (Europe) in his later prose comes from the increasing openness to the world, intersubjectivity, and self-sufficiency of this cross-cultural individual placed at the confluence of diverse cultural traditions (Russian, French, and Ossetian).

In his analysis of the monograph co-written by O. Lekmanov, M. Sverdlov and I. Simanovsky Venedikt Erofeev. The Outsider [Venedikt Erofeev. Postoronniy], as well as Ven. Erofeev’s own notebooks dating from the 1960s and E. Smirnova’s thesis on that particular piece of literary legacy, A. Permyakov seeks to localise the authorial chronotope of the period when Erofeev was writing Moskva — Petushki and explain certain episodes in the chapters covering the stretch from Orekhovo-Zuevo to Usad by drawing parallels with the author’s personal circumstances and the social context of his habitations in the years immediately preceding the writing of his poem. Such a study entailed personal visits to and inspection of the locations described in the aforementioned works. For example, Permyakov closely examines those events in Erofeev’s life that are related to his marriage to Valentina Zimakova and the birth of their son, reconstructs the routes of their travels, and details Erofeev’s reading preferences. According to Permyakov, a specific location has a strong bearing not only on Erofeev’s writings but also his philosophy — therefore, the local context of his works must be considered.

The article considers a popular and controversial modern phenomenon — the use of books as a medium for various mixed media art forms. The author gives examples of contemporary book altering techniques, such as book carving, painting and upcycling, etc., following the trend of transforming our interaction with books into a show of craftsmanship and entertainment. The critic points out that, in order to create a visually stunning and artistically expressive altered book, artists often work with beautifully published tomes, complete with quality materials, imaginative design and moderately used look, rather than with inferior mass-produced or defective books. It is not uncommon for book alterers to use antiques or rare editions: for example, British and American book artists particularly value Victorian books. It follows that, rather than popularising and creatively reimagining the book as such, this fad causes erosion of the meaning and profanes the process of book reading and contemplating.

A journalist and Voprosy Literatury’s regular interviewer E. Konstantinova talks to the contemporary poet S. Stratanovsky, bringing up topics of his artistic philosophy and poetics, looking back at his publications in samizdat collections and association with the so-called ‘second culture’ of a censorship-free literary Leningrad, and following up with his contemporary publications in thick literary journals and opinions about poetry of the 2000s — 2010s. Konstantinova’s questions concern modern interpretation of classic quotations — by Pushkin or Tyutchev, the special ‘poet’s behaviour,’ the attitude towards Soviet poetry, etc. Stratanovsky’s concise and levelheaded answers not only provide the reader with a key to his own lyrical poetry but also present familiar works by 19th- and 20th-c. poets (e. g., E. Bagritsky, V. Khodasevich, and others) in a new light; in addition, they introduce poems by Stratanovsky’s fellow members of the so-called Leningrad’s ‘second culture.’

The concept of ‘living life’ became widespread in 19th-c. Russian literature. Dictionaries record its origins as a literal translation of the German expression lebendiges Leben. Scholarly sources point to Schiller, who is supposed to have coined the term (in his tragedy The Bride of Messina [Die Braut von Messina], 1803). The article argues that Schiller may not be given the credit as he only followed a much older spiritual tradition (J. Arndt, True Christianity [Wahres Christentum], 1605–1609) and gave a secular use to a previously sacral concept. The honour of being the first to use the expression in Russian belongs to N. Yazykov (‘A farewell song’ [‘Proshchalnaya pesnya’], 1829). The term began its wider circulation among people with various connections to Yazykov: N. Gogol, the Slavophiles, V. Zhukovsky, and V. Odoevsky. Next, the term gained popularity with critics and journalists, and scholars and writers alike. A very special meaning of the term ‘living life’ can be found in works by the Pochvenniks A. Grigoriev and F. Dostoevsky, whose interpretation accentuated its profound significance and relevance in the values system, and ensured its enduring appeal.

The article continues the discussion started in ‘Behind the stage of a literary text. ‘Custom is despot among men’’ (Voprosy Literatury, 2020, issue 6). Health problems caused by poor hygiene, limitations of medical care, and inadequate physical activity of people in the mid-18th — early 20th cc. get almost no mention in fiction of the period, although they definitely had bearing on the life of any literary character of the day. Analysis of the culture of the everyday reveals factors that shaped philosophies of bygone-era authors, who inevitably fell under the influence of contemporary cultural and gender stereotypes embedded in the daily life. Such factors proved highly influential for plots, in particular, through aposiopesis. The article offers a comparison of the attitudes to unappealing hygiene-related subjects in literature and visual arts. Examined in detail is the problem of physical culture and sport: the 20th c. brought about radical cultural and psychological shifts in the attitude to these areas of human activities, especially among women, which often limits appreciation of both fiction of the past and events of its authors’ lives.

Due to its highly metaphoric language, O. Mandelstam’s Conversation about Dante [Razgovor o Dante] holds a unique place among studies of the Divine Comedy. This provokes its diverging interpretations and even questions the work’s scholarly aspect. In order to discover the best way to treat Conversation about Dante, one should assume it contains several aspects (a description of the author’s own poetics, reflections on the general workings of poetry, and observations of Dante’s language and imagery) and proceed to analyse each statement made in the essay. The article sets out to undertake the same, to a small extent, by examining a specific comment on the imagery of the Divine Comedy made in Conversation about Dante — namely, Mandelstam’s interpretation of Canto XVII of ‘Inferno’ and the character of Geryon, in particular. Through its analysis in comparison with Dante’s text and interpretations of Geryon by academic philologists, and by tracing the sources and history of this image, we find that Mandelstam’s treatment of this fragment is well justified from the viewpoint of Dante studies.

This analytical overview of materials located in Moscow archives is devoted to the history of American literature and the Soviet-American literary connections in the years before World War II (1917–1941). These materials document American writers’ contacts with Soviet and international communist organisations, personally with Joseph Stalin, with cultural and literary institutions. The USSR closely monitored the sentiment among American writers, as evidenced by the corpus of correspondence between Soviet literary functionaries and their informants in the USA. Archives of Soviet publishers offer insights into the process of translating and editing American literature as well as creation of theatrical and film adaptations. Readers’ letters from the 1930s demonstrate the mass audience’s enthusiasm for American literature.

The article discusses two records of the journeys to the Soviet Union by the American writers E. E. Cummings and J. Dos Passos. In 1928, Dos Passos saw the country as a compelling example of success in building a new society, whereas Cummings denounced the 1931 USSR as the embodiment of Dante’s Hell. A number of reasons can account for that. Mutual interests that had brought Dos Passos and Cummings together mainly came from their belonging to the same generation and social circle. At the same time, their existential priorities could not have been more different: Dos Passos was preoccupied with pursuit of social justice, while Cummings remained apolitical. Another reason is that Cummings and Dos Passos were exposed to two different Soviet Unions: Dos Passos witnessed the USSR during its late NEP years, with artistic freedoms still mostly in place, whereas Cummings visited the country in the early days of the Great Purge. The subsequent historical events confirmed Cummings in his loathing of the USSR and prompted Dos Passos to lose faith in the country. The article offers extensive supplementary material consisting of correspondence, extracts from memoirs, and publications translated into Russian for the first time.

The enduring collaboration between the outstanding German writer and Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann and the Frankfurt-based publishing house S. Fischer Verlag started in the late 19th c., with the publication of Mann’s early novella Little Herr Friedemann [Der kleine Herr Friedemann]. The year 1897  marked the start of Mann’s correspondence with Samuel Fischer and then his successor Gottfried Bermann Fischer, which spanned more than fifty years; the committed publisher saw to the publication of such landmarks of 20th-c. German literature as Buddenbrooks [Buddenbrooks — Verfall einer Familie], The Magic Mountain [Der Zauberberg], Lotte in Weimar , the four installments of Joseph and His Brothers [Joseph und seine Brüder], Doctor Faustus [Doktor Faustus], and Felix Krull [Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull]. The novels appeared in print even during the author’s enforced emigration at the time of Nazi persecution. Resulting from this collaboration with the publisher, which exemplifies preservation and propagation of German literature’s humanistic traditions, was the fact that, upon Mann’s death, none of his completed works ended up locked up in his desk — all having been published.

The article is concerned with the literary history behind the anonymous brochure entitled La Russie Envahie par les Allemands, which appeared at the Leipzig Book Fair in 1844 and quickly became a sensation in Russia and Europe alike. Its author, a former member of the Arzamas Society Filipp Vigel (Weigel), had fallen under the spell of the Slavophiles. The brochure served as the first manifesto and the first attempt at a historical-philosophical justification of the anti-German sentiment espoused by the majority of the Russian elite during the reign of Nicholas I. The book’s publication is examined in the context of the rivalry between the Ministry of the Interior (where Vigel held an office from 1829 to 1840) and the Third Department, believed to be a stronghold of the German party, and the rising Pan-Slavism in Europe, whose principal champions were in correspondence with Vigel. In addition, the article considers the connection between the brochure’s fragment describing Pushkin’s death and the anonymous anti-German letters received by V. Zhukovsky and Count A. Orlov upon the poet’s tragic demise.

G. Rebel’s book contains a series of essays on Turgenev’s life and work. The first part focuses on the problem of the ideological novel in the oeuvre of Turgenev and Dostoevsky. The second part examines personal relationships between Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and L. Tolstoy, as well as Turgenev’s influence on Chekhov. The author proposes a hypothesis about personal (financial) circumstances behind Turgenev’s dispute with Dostoevsky over the novel Smoke [Dym], as well as the parody of Turgenev in The Possessed [Besy]. Yet Turgenev and Dostoevsky are both attracted to the ideological novel, a genre each of them worked to develop. The book offers a detailed description of the roles Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky played in the 1880 Pushkin celebration. Even though the emphasis on Turgenev as the key and central character of the study is justified, his single figure sometimes overshadows the literary and cultural context of the period, as presented in the book.

By examining archived records, letters, memoirs and fiction, the authors set out to reconstruct the story of Babel’s life and resurrect his spiritual biography. An exemplary scholarly study, the book also conveys a strong humanistic message; the authors clearly love the object of their reflections and respond to his pain with deep compassion. Babel is shown through comparison with his contemporaries. Main characters of the story include Gorky, Voronsky, and Polonsky. The biographers portray Babel as he enters the lives of his friends and correspondents and wins their hearts. The book is dedicated to A. Pirozhkova, the writer’s widow — an astonishing woman who spared no effort in reacquainting readers with Babel. The writer’s biography will provide an enduring inspiration for scholars of Babel and literature of the 1920s — 1930s, and offer a key to understanding of the unpredictable and incredibly complicated situation of this Soviet author.

The book is a collection of Elena Pestereva’s philological and critical articles, overviews, reviews, and essays. Equally good are ‘one-off pieces’ and continued articles devoted to the recurrent and highly appreciated characters of Tsvetkov, Yuriev, and Gandlevsky. The book contains over fifty articles, grouped into three sections. The section entitled ‘Context’ features chapters on festivals and poetry, literary awards and poetry, and specific cases of visual arts and poetry. The section ‘Text’ discusses the poets from the Moscow Time [Moskovskoe vremya] circle and the Lwów school of poetry, as well as prose writers, critics and their books. ‘Intertext’ contains reviews of new books, originally for the ‘Bookcase’ column of the Novaya Yunost journal. E. Pestereva possesses a refined literary taste, which inspires confidence in the readers of various media (thick literary journals, young adult magazines or glossies). And, even more importantly for a critic who substantiates her personal preferences with a scholarly argument, she is familiar with modern psychological methods.

The monograph deals with the current trends of modern culture — total seriality and the tendency to model alternative universes. The scholars discover that the serial setting not only creates a model of a stable picture of the world but also performs a crucial anthropological function by consolidating a disconnected and segregated society. Seriality on the whole is turning into the guiding principle for nearly all layers of culture, permeating its mass and, tentatively called, elite strata.

The 2-volume book of personal recollections, literary memoirs, immediate reactions of a literary critic and thoughtful opinions of a scholar covers a greater part of the second half in 20th-c. Russia. In agreement with the promise in the book’s title, literature was more than part-time, it was life itself, books as real as people, sometimes even more real. The author is with them who love classical Russian and English literature and is very strict on others whose tastes are being shown off as radically modernist or avant-garde. Pushkin and Shakespeare are the objects of the academic study and eternal fellow-travellers for the author who rejects Joyce with Ulysses , Pasternak with Doctor Zhivago , and Bunin with Dark Avenues [ Tyomnye allei ], presumably not on any political or moral reason but primarily as the books badly written. Urnov’s own book is sincere when the author speaks about his position in life and literature, and it will stay as an opinionated commentary to the time partly gone, partly going on.