Writing about Sergey Khoruzhy, Mark Kharitonov describes him as a historian of literature, a thinker, a religious philosopher, and Joyce’s translator and interpreter. Kharitonov reminisces about encounters and conversations with Khoruzhy and ponders his writings and public talks. Also mentioned is Khoruzhy’s television documentary about the Russian religious philosopher L. Karsavin: a renowned specialist in medieval history and a poet, Karsavin embarked on a teaching career at the University of Lithuania, achieved perfect fluency in the Lithuanian language and went on to create philosophical terminology in Lithuanian. According to Khoruzhy, local scholars referred to Karsavin as a ‘Lithuanian Plato.’ On the same television program, Khoruzhy mentioned Kharitonov’s novel that had recently become popular, expressing his appreciation of the book’s fragmentary structure (Kharitonov’s ‘candy wrappers’). The article also examines synergetic anthropology, an important concept for Khoruzhy. His model, abandoning the idea of the essence of man, describes him instead as a system of energies. Particularly analysed are Khoruzhy’s thoughts on escaping to virtual reality, which, he argued, entailed an easy kind of demise not unlike euthanasia.

The article examines the reasons behind the sweeping rejection of liberal values in Russia. The author considers the legacy of the renowned literary critic, philosopher and journalist I. Dedkov (1934–1994), who, in the early 1990s, described the germ of what would become a crisis of liberalism. Having spent his life in a permanent situation of ‘the ever-shrinking space of the last freedom,’ Dedkov embraced liberalism as a key component of his belief system. He often likened freedom to life, arguing that one is inseparable from the other. During the years of transformation, Russia had no shortage of liberals, but hardly any one of them, theorists or practicians alike, was quite as knowledgeable as Dedkov was about the type of liberalism most likely to take root in Russia. A witness and active participant of the 1980s — 1990s events in Russia, Dedkov left behind a compelling analysis of a process that started as liberation, went through a series of bumblings about, deceit and self-deceit, all the way to the predictably dismal ending. Even though it has been a long time, Dedkov’s old projections and premonitions can throw light on today’s events and are likely to remain pertinent for years to come.

The April issue of Dostoevsky’s A Writer’s Diary [Dnevnik pisatelya] in 1877 was focused on the topic of differentiating between good and evil which linked the discussion of the latest Russo-Turkish War and the idea of preaching the truth in the writer’s fantastical story The Dream of a Ridiculous Man [Son smeshnogo cheloveka]. Hoping for Russia’s victory, Dostoevsky aimed harsh criticism at its opponents, pro-European liberals, branding their ideas as intrinsically evil and antagonistic to the national spirit. In his historiosophical view, the liberation of South Slavs from the tyranny of non-Christians was supposed to strengthen the union of the peoples with brotherly love, with more nations joining in and Russia taking its place as the leader of the future ‘panhuman’ European unity. As for the story, the article argues that it is built around the communicative paradoxalism of the hero, whose idea of the difference between good and evil is unconscious and displaced. The author finds that both A Writer’s Diary in general and the two chapters in the April issue specifically can be viewed as Dostoevsky’s own attempt at ‘preaching the truth.’

The article defines the poetry of Udmurtia as a concept that, firstly, describes works created in the Udmurt language (Udmurt poetry) and, secondly, those written in Russian (Udmurtia’s Russian poetry). The author mainly discusses the region’s poetry created in the Russian language, which is naturally influenced by Udmurt poetry (and the other way round): this mutual impact can be traced in vocabulary, imagery, subject and motifs. Mentioned among the trends that distinguish Udmurtia’s poetry among other Russian regions are enthusiasm about the Udmurt language and all that makes up the Udmurt identity, a tendency towards the exotic, as well as the preoccupation with the problem of identity, be it ethnic, territorial, cultural, gender, or lyrical. In addition, the article considers behavioural and aesthetic strategies adopted by contemporary Russian-speaking Udmurt poets and identifies the key artistic tendencies typical of the region’s poetry.

The article offers a look at the philosophical and ethical foundations of the topical young adult novel through the prism of selected modern phenomenological interpretations. Through identification of the principal features of culture of presence, the study explains the genre-characteristic types of an ordinary and a special hero, the reason for abandoning the types of an ideal hero, a superhero, or a rebel, as well as the abundance of negativity in books for young adult audience. The article considers the axiology of emotions such as fear, hatred, love, anger, frustration, shame and despair and argues that these words change their conventional meanings for the opposite ones when used in a topical young adult novel. Adopted as ethical principles, erosion of the meaning, rejection of the single truth principle, individualism and diversity, in turn, allow for a unique view of the problem and its equally unique solution. The study compares the axiology of choice in the existential novel with that in the topical young adult novel. Special attention is paid to the essence of the relationship of the Self and the Other and their significance for the axiology of young adult authors.

The article is concerned with the Russian prose that emerged in the years before the perestroika, in the 1970s — 1980s, and specifically, with authors who showed a clear tendency towards the techniques and structures typical of metafiction: A. Bitov, V. Makanin, A. and B. Strugatsky, and others. According to the author, it is their books that demonstrate a consistent and deliberate employment of metafictional techniques and constructs, where the metafictional nature is manifested as the use of methods that accentuate and simultaneously disrupt the boundary between fiction and real life, as well as the text and an extratextual reality (structures like ‘a story within a story,’ conversations between the author and a character, and the effect that the writing is taking on the author’s life, etc.). Said devices suggest to the reader a possibility of parity between reality and the worlds created by an artistic imagination. Through his analysis of the defining features of the late Soviet metafiction, M. Amusin discovers that the aforementioned writers experimented with metaprose in particular to reach new creative heights, i. e., a more nuanced, genuine and conscious type of prose.

The article deals with the unique viewpoint of the reader who, when reading Tsvetaeva’s ‘In the Hall’ [‘V zale’], discovers that, along with the space of the artistic world inhabited by the poem’s lyrical heroes, the poem offers an extra level — one produced by the heroes’ imagination. The children in the poem allow the reader to catch a glimpse of their imaginary world. The world of a child’s play exists in the minds of the depicted heroes, meaning a doubling of the artistic reality. It is for this reason that the reader becomes aware of a double viewpoint — one of a grown-up observer and the other belonging to the young heroes, and is exposed both to the visually perceptible embodiment of the world created by the poet as well as to the space hidden inside of it (visible only to the children). The structure of the depicted hall is transformed through the introduction of the space of a hero’s imaginary world. The game described in the poem is, therefore, taking place not only in the reader’s presence, but with the reader’s participation, meaning that self-reflection of the lyrical ‘us’ achieves its development, with the reader sharing in the experience.

The article discusses the idea of love, which in the mid-18th — early 19th cc. implied the possibility of marriage in Russian and European aristocratic circles. Behind actual or fictional marriages one can discern social and cultural ideas easily recognisable by contemporary readers. The article only considers objective factors that were rooted in traditional religious and wealth- and classrelated values and therefore seen as obstacles or taboos by any member of the society from the very outset. Most of the conditions for a real-life marriage were pre-determined by social codes and traditions, based on social stratifications which had to be observed in disregard of lovers’ feelings. The extent to which an author dared to abandon the imposed limitations demonstrated the writer’s level of innovation and their stance on social issues.

The article analyses two classical translations of the Medieval Latin song ‘In taberna quando sumus…’ from the collection Carmina Burana into Russian, made by L. Ginsburg and M. Gasparov. Comparing each of the translations with the original, the authors demonstrate the difference in the translators’ approaches. Fond of archaic vocabulary, Gasparov ended up with an effectively Slavicised translation, whereas Ginsburg, who relied on the German version of the poem, gave its translation a somewhat Germanised air. Examined in particular is the extent to which the translators succeeded in rendering the song’s parodying aspect. The authors point out with regret that the Biblical quotes and reminiscences incorporated in the song by its anonymous medieval author are almost entirely omitted. At the end of the article, the authors include their own Russian translation, which focuses on the song’s parodying reminiscences, supplied with a detailed historical and philological commentary.

The fact that the existing Russian translations of the four famous ballads by the French 15th-c. poet François Villon are plagued by tentativeness and inaccuracy calls for a new translation, based on consistent preservation of the original’s imagery and meaning in each and every line. The texts of the ballads, their rendering from the language of the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance into contemporary French, and materials on the poet’s biography and possible autobiographical allusions in the selected ballads come from the latest French editions of F. Villon’s complete works prepared by renowned experts such as Claude Thiry (1991) and Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet (2014 and 2020). The translations are accompanied by the proposed article, which, together with the commentary to the ballads, makes use of research undertaken by foreign scholars over the past decades. The author also examines the compelling hypotheses put forward by the German scholar of Romance studies Gert Pinkernell (1937–2017). To sum up, Russian-speaking scholars and readers are offered a new annotated philological translation of four ballads by F. Villon.

The article examines Thomas Mann’s use of repetitions and leitmotifs as recurrent creative devices. The main bulk of the examples come from the novel Royal Highness and the novella The Blood of the Walsungs. The second book’s motto selected by the writer from the very outset came from a poem by Pushkin: ‘You are a king; live alone.’ The article considers the evolution of the book’s plot in accordance with changes in the novelist’s social and marital status. Also analysed are cases when a translator faces difficulties rendering the novel in Russian. While repetitions and leitmotifs accentuate the holistic nature of the novel, a word-for-word repetition of a passage may be misinterpreted by the reader. The author discusses such an example found in Royal Highness, hitherto unnoticed by Russian and German commentators alike. These cases E. Berkovich looks into are seen as ‘a striking example of the use of leitmotifs and plot repetitions, which in this particular novel is exaggerated to the level of self-caricature’ by Prof. Heinrich Detering, author of the volume of comments to Royal Highness in the large annotated Frankfurt edition of Mann’s works.

Analysed in the context of the German Italian myth and the author’s own understanding of the Ligurian complex is the poem ‘Turin’ (1936) by Gottfried Benn, devoted to Friedrich Nietzsche’s private disaster (loss of sanity) in Turin in early January of 1889, at the end of what had been the happiest and most productive period in the philosopher’s life. With reliance on H. Fröhlich’s interpretation of the poem, the author demonstrates that, along with the semantic layer directly pointing to Nietzsche’s life events, ‘Turin’ features a different and hidden layer projecting a growing feeling of anxiety onto the poet and his time. The latter is made possible by a transformation of the ‘two sorry old nags’ whom the philosopher embraces in the last stanza of Benn’s ‘Turin’ into the poem’s central image — both in reference to the key metaphor in Benn’s worldview (Doppelleben) and the doomed finale of the Ligurian dream. For this reason, what was inspired by sympathy with Nietzsche’s private tragedy reads as one of Benn’s most personal poems. The author goes on to show that, on account of an extra pair of quotes at the beginning of the second stanza, the semantic level related to doubling is completely lost in the Russian translation.

It appears that existing collected works and editions have been misleading as to when exactly Yury Dombrovsky started writing his novel The Keeper of Antiquities [Khranitel drevnostey]. This hitherto unpublished collection of annotated correspondence between Dombrovsky and his friends and fellow writers not only reveals the year when he began writing his book, but also provides an invaluable source of biographical knowledge that sheds light on the later Moscow-based period of his life (1955–1978) and, specifically, on the favourable period during the Khrushchev Thaw, when Dombrovsky’s books finally appeared in print. Among his correspondents and people mentioned in the letters are N. Anov, I. Ehrenburg, N. Mandelstam, S. Markov, Y. Kazakov, and others. Interestingly, the collection contains a letter where, without naming the author and paraphrasing the book’s title, Dombrovsky offers his view of the recently published Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich [Odin den Ivana Denisovicha].

The review discusses L. Egorova’s book devoted to Vologdabased literature — currently one of Russia’s most thriving regional literary scenes. The reviewer characterises the book’s structural parts and explores its genre-specific features. Especially stressed are the monograph’s distinct freedom of self-expression in terms of contents, style, and genre, and an original approach to interviews. Egorova’s book offers an invaluable insight into writers’ daily lives and work, and reveals how poets and writers survive in a mediacentric civilisation, what transformations their creative practices have undergone, and how socio-cultural roles assumed by the interviewed authors affect their output and uncover various life strategies of modern-day artists. The reviewer considers Egorova’s book a remarkable phenomenon which combines scholarly principles with a special anthropological approach to the subject matter.

The review deals with a monograph co-authored by 61 scholars from 19 research centres located in Russia and across the world. The authors chose to follow a geographical approach, counting all writers who had ever resided in the Urals and surrounding area (Western Siberia) as belonging to the region’s literature, irrespective of their ethnicity. The book discusses the history of Russian literature in the Urals in the first and second halves of the 19th c., as well as literatures created by the Bashkir, the Udmurt, and the Komi — the peoples inhabiting the Urals alongside Russians. The authors of the monograph also examine the work of exiles to the Urals, travellers’ impressions of the region, the origins and evolution of the region’s journalism, bookselling, and libraries, as well as the Urals’ most prominent writers, with the figure of D. MaminSibiryak looming large. The approach feels completely justified: we are presented with a glorious patchwork of a literary world created by Russian, Bashkir, Ukrainian and even Polish writers, whose fate brought them to the Urals.

The review discusses issue No. 103 of the renowned journal of theoretical and cultural studies Communications (published in France), devoted to the centenary of Russian formalism. The same issue also celebrates the memory of Tzvetan Todorov, deceased at the time of its publication. A transcribed report by Todorov, included as a foreword to the issue, identifies three strategies for the appropriation and reception of Russian formalism: its ‘modernisation’ and positioning in a relevant context; a study of individual concepts within the bulk of theory; and, lastly, its interpretation in terms of the period’s intellectual context. The three strategies are unmistakably present in the articles collected in the issue. At the same time, the majority of the papers conform to the third strategy, placing formalism in the intellectual context of the period and drawing biographical, national, ideological and conceptual parallels with pivotal contemporary phenomena. The reviewer also compares the issue in question with another collection celebrating formalism’s centennial anniversary (published by NLO in 2017) and comments on the modern reception of formalism.