The article analyses Bakhtin’s theory of artistic text, using the example of mid-20th-c. Russian military songs (‘Granada’ [‘Grenada’], ‘Little Eagle’ [‘Orlyonok’], ‘Far Away, Across the River’ [‘Tam vdali, za rekoy’], ‘The Sacred War’ [‘Svyashchennaya voyna’], ‘Dark Is the Night’ [‘Tyomnaya noch’], etc). Focusing on Bakhtin’s idea that an artistic word recalls and reestablishes archaic genres, the researcher examines if a similar tendency can be traced in military song lyrics. A genre analysis shows that the lyrics tend to resurrect the seemingly forgotten archaic techniques of epic distance, epic monism, and syncretism. Russian wartime songs draw on and reinvent the genre features of biblical poetry, classical epics, and Byzantine rhetoric. Which element is responsible for this revival of the archaic? Upon examination of Bakhtin’s key theses, the author finds that Bakhtin’s concept of ‘great time’ is language. The poetics of military songs conforms to the ideas proposed by Bakhtin that an artistic text revives the archaic as a result of a subconscious language instinct.

In this interview, the renowned writer and poet Sergey Gandlevsky talks about his view of poetry as essentially an outcome of a ‘lucky error,’ which the author then tweaks to perfection. A lot of his works result from the author’s desire to stress self-reflection, causing the poet to separate himself from the lyrical hero instead of identifying with him, as if the author is looking at a bystander’s image of himself. According to Gandlevsky, true art thrives on rules and restriction and it is for that reason that he personally prefers accentualsyllabic verse to vers libre. As for prose writing, this task is easier for a poet than writing poetry is for a prose writer. A poet normally draws on their own experience, so locations visited and books read are of particular significance. Gandlevsky believes poetry to be a sensory rather than intellectual phenomenon, one which translates reading into physical pleasure. He also insists that poetry plays the role of a ‘gold standard,’ essential for maintaining ‘supreme examples of feelings and emergency supplies of idealism.’

The author studies the lyrics of the song ‘Paradise’ [‘Ray’] (also known as ‘The City of Gold’ [‘Gorod zolotoy’]) in relation to Volokhonsky’s poetics through the years and discovers a consistent narrative structure of the poet’s songwriting oeuvre. The structure is based on the protagonist’s appeal to his beloved and sacralisation of their love through its transposition to a divine context. In ‘Paradise,’ however, the structure undergoes a significant modification: the scholar believes Saint John the Divine’s Revelation to be the main source of the poem. Alongside a detailed analysis of ‘Paradise’ covering its history, narrative structure and the authorship problem, Drobinin discusses a wider context of 1980s Soviet underground poetry, including, among others, Volokhonsky and Khvostenko’s co-authored cult songs ‘Green Sleeves’ [‘Zelyonye rukava’], ‘A Swan’ [‘Lebed’], etc. that feature similarities with the imagery and plot of ‘Paradise.’ As a separate topic, the article considers discrepancies between Volokhonsky’s original version of ‘Paradise’ and one performed by B. Grebenshchikov — they affect the perception and understanding of the song, argues Drobinin. 

The article considers the language of John Milton’s Paradise Lost and proposes a concept of the poem’s language having two dimensions: before and after the Fall. The concept stems from Christopher Ricks’s monograph Milton’s Grand Style. The two-dimensionality of the poem’s language is illustrated by an analysis of the words ‘error,’ ‘grateful,’ ‘wanton,’ ‘bold,’ and ‘wander’ and of the variations found in Russian translations of the epic. For example, the verb ‘to error’ is used both to mean the action as in ‘to wander’ or ‘to meander’ and, more conventionally, ‘to err,’ where the second meaning is connected to the Fall while the first refers to the language of the Garden of Eden period. Further analysis reveals how the Fall infects words by distorting their original meaning. A dispute around the poem’s stylistic achievements and failures has led researchers to discover a highly fascinating topic, which ties the poem’s language to its message: according to Milton, the fall from grace not only corrupts man’s thoughts and actions but also his language. In the conclusion of the article, the author argues the significance of the linguistic two-dimensionality for the poem’s interpretation as well as for subsequent attempts at its translation into Russian. 

The article is concerned with the motif and symbol of a sailing ship in The Life [Zhitie] of Archpriest Avvakum. The researcher is the first to challenge the supposition about a ‘traditional’ genesis of this motif and symbol in Avvakum’s autobiography; she also defines the role of this motif in the plot of The Life — the magnum opus of the Old Believers’ spiritual leader. Various motif-related elements are ancillary to the main idea of The Life — to demonstrate the hero’s sainthood. The same message guides Avvakum’s choice of sources to borrow the main motif and symbol for his book. Among these is the medieval apocryphal tale Narration of Our Father Agapius [Skazanie otsa nashego Agapiya]. A comparison between the tale and Avvakum’s The Life confirms the hypothesis of such a borrowing, through which the motif and symbol of a sailing ship in the immolated archpriest’s autobiography translates into his guaranteed passage to the heavenly abode. In the closing paragraphs, the researcher shares her observations about the semantics of the motif and symbol of a ship in Avvakum’s prose works unrelated to The Life. 

The article discusses the history and context of D. Samoylov’s poem ‘Zabolotsky in Tarusa’ [‘Zabolotsky v Taruse’] (1958–1961), inspired by Samoylov’s personal memories of the meeting with the poet, as well as the sketch ‘A Day with Zabolotsky’ [‘Den s Zabolotskim’]. Samoylov’s poem and sketch offer two different portrayals of the older-generation poet, both using various associations and allusions to Zabolotsky’s lyrical works and biography. Reznichenko’s choice of the two works was primarily guided by the fact that Zabolotsky was an artistic as well as moral influence on Samoylov, who appreciated the other poet’s fascinating and unconventional personality and moral code that distinguished him from fellow poets. In Samoylov’s depictions, the single day spent in Zabolotsky’s company translates into the last day in the life of the poet, who senses the approaching end; in some mystical way, his premonition begins to affect the narrator. Through comparison of Samoylov’s journal entries with the sketch and the poem, the researcher finds that Zabolotsky’s image as a hero watching his ‘last sunset’ becomes more nuanced, prompting Samoylov to develop the reminiscence into a tribute to the poet in its classical sense of a monument.

Letters of the poet Mikhail Isakovsky to the literary historian Anatoly Abramov (1917–2005) published in this article constitute a portion of the poet’s extensive epistolary legacy. The two selected letters dated 1968 are mainly concerned with the poet Aleksey Prasolov (1930–1972), whose literary career Abramov actively supported. Having approached Isakovsky for an opinion about the Voronezh-based poet’s verses, Abramov received very harsh feedback. There can be a number of reasons why the poems, some later recognised as Prasolov’s best, were dismissed by Isakovsky: the fact that the two poets belonged to very different poetic generations and traditions and adhered to disparate aesthetic principles may have played a key role here. A poet of a traditional folk-poetic formation, Isakovsky rejected Prasolov’s verses, whose poetics is directly influenced by Blok’s modernist experimentations. Isakovsky expected Prasolov, an author of challenging complexity, to write about subjects easily recognisable and clear to the reader. Thus, incompatible ideas about a poet’s purpose and dissimilarity of poetic languages precluded the two remarkable poets from ever meeting in person.

The article is devoted to the novel Job [Hiob] (1930), written by the Austrian Joseph Roth about the life of a Russian Jew named Mendel Singer. Upon his emigration to America, he is subjected to trials not unlike the long-suffering biblical character — a cruel test of faith followed by last-minute miraculous salvation. Roth’s narrative strategy rests on the substitution of the empirical picture of the world with the spiritual reality of a religious mind. By contrasting the poetics of realism with the truth of the eternal myth, Roth insists on an artist’s right to depict reality from the metaphysical perspective of the absolute future. This material provides the background for the article’s discussion of the conflict between social adaptiveness and culture, which not only are mutually conditioned but also tend to develop in stark contradiction with each other. Roth’s protagonist, who embodies the Jewish idea of becoming a society’s opponent, remains on the culture’s side. He survives America’s excruciating test, and it is only through the mythological model of Job at the core of the novel that the story has a happy ending — a triumph of a religious and aesthetic utopia.

The motif of the hero’s belated, pointless, and ultimately impossible return to his home country after a long absence is characteristic of the verses created by the Israeli poet Dan Pagis (1930–1986). The poet’s personal experience and (apparently unfulfilled) desire to return to normal life after surviving the Catastrophe constitutes the motif’s subtext. The plot of two poems analysed in the article evokes the story of Honi HaMe’agel, the legendary sage and righteous man, who slept for seventy years and upon awakening realised that the once familiar world refuses to accept him. Another two poems are written in a way that leaves the reader guessing if the returning protagonist is dead or alive and his return even possible. The article particularly discusses the technique for biblical quotations, which Pagis often uses to create an enigmatic ambiguity — a balancing act between extremes: the real and the unreal and the possible and the impossible. 

Historians of literature have often studied M. Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita [Master i Margarita] in order to identify the sources that fuelled the author’s imagination. Considered in the context of a common European literary tradition of the 19th and 20th cc., Bulgakov’s oeuvre may reveal parallels with works of other European literatures. The article contains a comparative analysis of characters and plot lines in The Master and Margarita and The Count of Monte Cristo, a novel by A. Dumas (père), which reveals similarities in plot devices and character portrayals. Similar, too, is the period when the novel takes place — shortly after the shock of a revolution. The researcher suggests that both novels may have targeted a post-revolutionary society with ridicule and, at times, censure. The similarities between the two novels may stem from French romanticism’s enduring influence on Russian literature. At the same time, it is not impossible for the parallels with The Count of Monte Cristo to have been inspired, at least in part, by new Russian translations of Dumas’s novels in the 1920s — 1930s.

The article is devoted to a centennial of Eccentrism, a collection of manifestos by the artistic group FEKS (The Factory of the Eccentric Actor), created and published in 1922. The author focuses on the problem of the collection’s originality as a manifesto and the personalities of its individual authors: G. Kozintsov, G. Kryzhitsky, L. Trauberg, and S. Yutkevich. The history of their writing and the manifestos themselves are considered from the viewpoint of FEKS’s nascent aesthetic platform and in a broader context of the manifesto tradition of the Russian avant-garde movement. The article offers a hypothesis that Eccentrism was conceived by the group’s founders as a kind of FEKS periodical, but that project was doomed once Kryzhitsky and Yutkevich left the group in the summer of 1922. Further analysed are each of the four articles in the collection, their interplay in getting the group’s message across, and the role of each of the four directors in the genesis of FEKS. All four contributions create a consistent message; Eccentrism combines a sharp and rhythmic language, typical of avant-garde manifestos, with a snappy imperative tone and juvenile self-advertisement.

The article analyses the defining characteristics of a method in textology that is rooted in the idea of a search. The method is described in detail with the example of Aleksey Balakin’s study ‘Was Goncharov the author of Nimfodora Ivanovna?’ [‘Byl li Goncharov avtorom povesti Nimfodora Ivanovna?’]: we follow every step taken by the researcher in his quest for truth about the authorship. The article acknowledges the compelling arguments offered by Balakin to debunk the novella’s long-established but hasty and unfounded attribution to Goncharov and the researcher’s meticulous verification of the style and writing period of the anonymous author against the events in Goncharov’s life and literary career (as well as his known stylistic, ideological and artistic preferences). The article mentions that the search relies on the method of comparative-critical analysis. In addition, the study compares and contrasts the meanings of a search in history and textology. In support of such a comparison, the author refers to theses from Marc Bloch’s The Historian’s Craft. 

S. Martianov describes the attempt at screen adaptation of Platonov’s Chevengur by the Sverdlovsk film studio in 1989, offers a summary of the concept for the novel’s interpretation and analyses his own experience of working with Platonov’s text. The article’s literary plot centres on reminiscences about the meeting with the writer’s daughter Maria Platonova in 1989. Martianov found the key to unlocking the novel’s meaning in the scene where the protagonist A. Dvanov is killed in a train crash and then miraculously brought back to life. The screenwriter argues that the problem of Chevengur’s film adaptation lies in its incompatibility with traditional genres, sensual symbolism, and an unreal type of reality, all of which disrupt conventional cultural codes. The article suggests that, in order to solve the genre-related and stylistic problems of the novel’s screen adaptation, one must create an artistic image of ‘an empty heart,’ free from love of open spaces, where dear old huts and rivers are replaced with nature and weather, heroes and enemies — with drab faces and exhausted bodies, and beauty and amusements — with simplicity and the sensory clarity of intellectual cravings. 

O. Korobkova offers a brief description of meetings organised by the Rybinsk-based Poetic Translation Club, illustrated with short interviews of the translators E. Matveev, P. Efimova, V. El, A. Koryakov, and S. Mokeev. In her talks with the club members, Korobkova finds out about the history of the artistic society and their preferred authors for translation. Demonstrating a broad scope of interest, Rybinsk-based translators tackle a variety of authors from internationally renowned anglophone poets like M. Strand and H. Graham to the Norwegians H. Børli and R. Jacobsen and the Bulgarian B. Khristov. The club members also discuss challenges faced during translation and poetic collections published by the club: the Rybinsk-based society has so far produced over fifty books of collected poetic works translated from English, Norwegian, Polish, and Bulgarian. The article also exhibits selected translations by members of the club and proves that the meaning of a literary map is not limited to prose and poetry written in a particular region but also includes educational efforts, thus artistic and translation societies of the kind we find in Rybinsk make a valuable contribution to the development of a regional culture as well as artistic translation in general. 

A publication of journal entries left by the German psychiatrist A. Dietrich, who for years studied the poet K. Batyushkov’s mental illness (caused by multiple intermarriages in the family) and supervised his treatment at the Sonnenstein psychiatric asylum. The publication is compiled and supplied with a preface and comments by the poet and literary historian G. Shulpyakov. The level of detail in the doctor’s notes gives an idea of the sick poet’s condition and helps to reconstruct the hospital routine that surrounded Batyushkov in the 1820s. The comments shed light on the poet’s family life and his relationship with sisters Aleksandra and Yulia, his brother Pompey, and contemporaries such as V. Zhukovsky and N. Karamzin. Batyushkov mentions their names in his every interaction with the clinic’s staff — evidence of an unrelenting loss of sanity: at one point, he insists that Zhukovsky ‘has visited him accompanied by his wife’; at another, he takes a random visitor for his paternal half-brother.

The book examines the ‘poetics of joy’ in Dante’s Divine Comedy across the disciplines of lexicography, language history, philology, and theology, with reliance on an extensive body of research and supplemented with numerous comments to the poem. The book consists of two parts. In the first, the author analyses the vocabulary used by Dante and other medieval authors to express the notion. Dante’s artistic world exists within a broader cultural and religious context of the period. The book’s second part is devoted to the means by which the vocabulary denoting joy is rendered in M. Lozinsky’s now classical translation of the Comedy. The addendum contains the author’s own translations of several cantos from the Paradiso as well as of Jacopone da Todi’s lauda on the meaning of joy. The book will certainly interest Dante scholars and a broader audience of readers who are keen to understand the Divine Comedy — a unique work of world literature that has roused profound curiosity for more than seven centuries. 

This book can be classified as a memoir with one reservation made by its author: ‘These meditations go alongside the recollections…’ The son, writing his recollections in the memoir form, is Vladimir Zelinsky, a Russian Orthodox Church priest serving in Italy. His father Kornely Zelinsky (1896–1970) is a Soviet literary critic whose reputation has been stained by a number of gestures in his literary career. Most known as the theoretician in the Constructivists poetic group in the 1920s, he abandoned it and his former views in 1930 under the ideological pressure. In 1940, he wrote an internal review that practically barred the publication of Marina Tsvetaeva’s verse collection and made her life situation unbearable. In 1958, he was among the most bitter critics of Boris Pasternak after the latter was awarded the Nobel Prize. What position can his son, a priest, take in his memoirs? This position is not one of all-forgiveness but of understanding arrived at in the filial dialogue with his father’s life spent in the time affected by the ideological virus. 

The review considers the scholarly legacy of D. Medrish, a doyen of folklore and literature studies, and the book dedicated to him. Both the monograph and the review discuss the scholar’s main areas of research: interaction between folklore and literature as subsystems of a comprehensive metasystem of artistic language and the study of the folklore dimension that exists in works of A. Pushkin, A. Chekhov, and others. The reviewer praises the biography as a valuable contribution to contemporary philology. Among Medrish’s most important postulates are those of debunking the enduring belief that folklore should be contrasted with literature and proving their typological and structural kinship. Medrish viewed folklore and literature as two subsystems of a single metasystem which is the Russian artistic language: interpreting one through the other helps to reveal substantial new meanings. 

The Encyclopaedia of V. I. Belov’s ‘That’s How It Is’ [‘Privychnoe delo’] appeared fifty years after the novella’s publication in the Sever journal (1966). An exhaustive product of seven researchers, the monograph earned its place among such landmark philological projects as The Encyclopaedia of ‘The Tale of Igor’s Campaign’ [Entsiklopediya ‘Slova o polku Igoreve’], The Onegin Encyclopaedia [Oneginskaya entsiklopediya], and The Oblomov Encyclopaedia [Oblomovskaya entsiklopediya] currently in preparation by the Pushkin House. The scholarly commentary reconstructs an impressive context in its historical, cultural, social, spiritual, and psychological dimensions. The encyclopaedia’s lexical scope comprises thousands of vibrant words of the distinctive Vologda dialect. The spoken language functions in a literary space, evoking the ancient culture of Russian folk speech. The metaphysical inseparability of Life and Soul engenders Lad (a harmonising category crucial for the writer) that receives a lot of attention in the encyclopaedia as its key concept. 

In her review of the writer and critic Evgeny Abdullaev’s (Sukhbat Aflatuni’s) How to kill a literature [Kak ubit literaturu], Zhuchkova lists the phenomena of contemporary literary process that, according to Abdullaev, are lethal to literature: literary politics, literary economics, prizes, creative writing workshops, and many others typical of the post-Soviet literary process. The reviewer also emphasises Abdullaev’s positive programme based on his beliefs and arguments about the importance of succession in literature and history and careful treatment of the language. Abduallev rejects a one-dimensional and profane approach to literature and substitution of literature with management, maintaining that a critic’s essential qualities include self-respect and professionalism, loyalty to the criteria of high literature and faith in the Russian language. In a separate section, the review portrays Abdullaev as a critic and describes his professional and human qualities and talents.