The article is concerned with variants of the Russian translation of the French term ‘décadence.’ Until the middle of the 19th c., Russian translators used the word ‘upádok’ [‘decay’]. However, beginning with translations of Baudelaire’s works and Flaubert’s Le Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues [The Dictionary of Received Ideas], ‘upádok’ is replaced by ‘dekadans’ [‘decadence’]. The author argues against the latter variant and points out the flaws in the interpretation of literary history that arise from its use. Opting for the term ‘decadence’ while translating texts that predate the actual French Decadent movement by ten to twenty years, the translators effectively portray Baudelaire as the movement’s founder, whereas his own view of the phenomenon he described as ‘décadence’ was mixed, at the very least, nor can he be credited with having laid out the movement’s principles. Even less appropriately, the variant ‘decadence’ appears in translations of utterances by the bourgeois characters ridiculed by Flaubert in his Dictionary of Received Ideas. The author supports her arguments with an analysis of Baudelaire’s and Flaubert’s use of the term ‘décadence’ in various contexts and corresponding Russian translations.

The article explores the origins of Baudelaire’s final book, Paris Spleen. Little Prose Poems [Le Spleen de Paris. Petits Poèmes en Prose] in relation to the poet’s recently discovered letter to the publisher A. Houssaye. Supplying a Russian translation of this dedication to Houssaye, penned by Baudelaire as a preface to the Little Prose Poems, the author also offers its interpretation. The closing paragraphs contain an analysis of the principal and manifesto-like aspects of the dedication. Stating that no one can say about his new work that it has ‘neither head nor tail,’ Baudelaire alludes to the trite expression which describes ‘incoherence’ in French, but which the poet effortlessly transforms into an expanded metaphor of a serpent. In other words, rather than merely dedicating his poems to the editor-in-chief of La Presse, the poet lavishes on him a ‘poisoned gift.’ The poet loathed the newspaper civilisation, but, unlike the ‘aristocratic party’ of French literature, could not afford to withdraw into an ‘ivory tower’ and so had to resort to stratagems to cooperate with the Fourth Estate. The dedication to Houssaye effectively constitutes such a ploy.

Y. Lotman noted that literature in the 18th-c. Russia was considered a noble occupation and, except for translations, unpaid, which fundamentally distinguished literature from other arts. Gradually the laws of the market influenced the cultural situation. By the turn of the 20th c., Russian literature, in the words of B. Eichenbaum, was ‘growing into the press,’ and the fame of the author began to be expressed in circulation and royalties. The relevance of this work is due to the need to study the phenomenon of literary reputation in the context of this problem. The literary reputations of Nekrasov and Andreev, despite all their differences, combine mutually exclusive characteristics, temporal and timeless, reflecting both the economic aspects of life, European social concepts, and the religious and metaphysical traditions of the preceding centuries. A fundamental difference is the attitude of the authors to the existing literary market: Nekrasov tried to change it and fought against it, while Andreev tried to adapt to it. This study is devoted to the collision between the author and the bookseller, the understanding of the writer’s success, and the influence of magazines on the literature of the turn of the 20th c.

The article examines L. Andreev’s early short story The Grand Slam [Bolshoy shlem] (1899) which features a number of themes explored in his later oeuvre. The article offers characteristics of the four protagonists. None of them finds the outside world to be of particular importance: they are fully engaged in their game of vint (Russian whist). Their interactions are markedly pragmatic and confined to necessary remarks around the card table; therefore, their psyches never cross. However, upon the sudden death of one of the players, their familiar game world is shattered. Ironically, the player dies on the verge of achieving his long-term goal — to win a grand slam. This is Andreev’s way of showing the irrationality of human existence and raising the subject of death, absurdity, and people’s detachment, all three conceptually related to existentialism, a philosophy that would be defined in the 20th c.

The review by the literary critic S. Batalov concerns the poet and essay writer Anna Markina’s new book of poetry. The collection, entitled Lightening Up [Osvetlenie] (2021), consists of five chapters — according to the blurb, each corresponds to one of the book’s central themes: ‘Cracks’ [‘Treshchiny’] is about loneliness; ‘In place of the sun’ [‘Vmesto solntsa’] — about love; ‘Along the perch’ [‘Po zherdochke’] — about the native country; and ‘Music’ [‘Muzyka’] — about creative work. The theme of loneliness constitutes the book’s leitmotif. However, Batalov points out that, by the end of the book, it is nearly overcome, or at least ‘lightened up’ by the peaceful tone of the lyrical heroine. Like the collection itself, each of the chapters has its inner dramatics: the first poem will be partially developed and partially disproved by the last one, meaning that, together with the poet, we are progressing from darkness to light. The critic not only analyses the book’s plot and motifs but also cites other critical responses to Markina’s oeuvre and considers the key elements of her poetic world, such as childhood, home, and music, among others. 

The essay is concerned with detailed examination of Children’s Cinema [Detskaya sinema] (2020), a book by the contemporary poet Anton Azarenkov that contains his selected poems, including the narrative poem ‘A refuge’ [‘Ubezhishche’]. The reviewer analyses the book’s subject and motif structure, identifying key topics such as abuse, traumatisation, and a revisited childhood experience, and discusses the complexity and gradual unfolding of the collection’s images and reminiscences. Subjected to Nuzhdina’s close examination is Azarenkov’s lyrical hero and his reception in present-day poetic criticism. According to Nuzhdina, the lyrical hero of Children’s Cinema typifies an unreliable narrator who looks to childhood traumatic experiences for a source of self-identification and, therefore, professes the aesthetic of ‘talking about trauma,’ a staple of modern poetry. In Azarenkov’s case, it results in the cyclicity of the book’s subject structure and its continuous use of recurrent motifs, as well as an artistic world constructed from the same repeatedly used elements, such as the experience of surviving abuse, departing, loneliness, memories about childhood, etc.

A review of the first book by the Moscow-based poet Yulia Krylova, Against the White Background [Na fone belogo] (2022). The critic considers the book’s principal motifs in the context of Biblical metaphors and decodes hidden meanings of Krylova’s ‘messages.’ Along with Brodsky, Mandelstam and other celebrities traditionally referenced by modern poets, they are addressed to Krylova’s contemporary fellow poets. Also discussed is the mixed critical reception of Krylova’s lyrical collection: while some reviewers emphasise its metaphysical quality, others notice Krylova’s extensive use of such hallmarks of modern lifestyle as a 3G network and friends’ and lovers’ online profiles, etc. Batalov argues, however, that Krylova’s unique style results from an unconventional approach to combining modern realia with metaphysical phenomena: not only does it pair the minutiae of quotidian existence with metaphysical and Biblical elements; it shows them to complement each other like two different languages used to describe the same phenomenon.

This article focuses on two major works: A. Veselovsky’s From the history of personality: The woman and medieval theories of love [Iz istorii lichnosti: zhenshchina i starinnye teorii lyubvi] and C. S. Lewis’s The Allegory of Love, a study of courtly love. Their comparative analysis offers a compelling vision of the pragmatics of courtly love, sheds light on its origins, and emphasises its immense influence on world literature. By examining the sources and characteristics of courtly love, the article sets out to describe its evolution in later periods — in works by Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, and then Shakespeare, whose Troilus and Cressida seems to mark the ultimate demise of the tradition. Questioning the latter suggestion, the author attempts to establish whether the rules of courtly love still hold sway in our daily life. Tracing the vestiges of the tradition, the author hypothesises that the relationship between man and woman as we know it is determined by the same old courtesy.

The essay introduces a block of materials in remembrance of the literary scholar Aleksandr Tikhonovich Parfyonov. His field of interest was Shakespeare, his time and contemporary playwrights. The object of Parfyonov’s first thesis was Christopher Marlowe and the legend of Tamburlaine; for his doctoral degree he chose another genre: Ben Jonson’s comedy Volpone. This shift was partly inspired by the publication of M. Bakhtin’s book on Rabelais and folk culture of universal laughter. The essay presents the scholar and provides some personal recollections of a joyful, witty man with an enthusiastic involvement in all arts while music stood out first. When in 1988 an organiser of the Russian Shakespeare studies, Anikst, died, Parfyonov felt the responsibility to go on with his unifying efforts, though the time of social stress was not fit for a serious academic work. For the current publication, one of the chapters written by him for an unpublished school book on literature was dug up from the scholar’s archive. A close reading of Hemingway’s short story represents Parfyonov’s deep penetration and his literary taste.

The article proposes to rediscover and newly appreciate the scholarly output of A. Parfyonov — a renowned expert in English Renaissance theatre, author of books on C. Marlowe and B. Jonson, professor and a regular participant of Shakespearian conferences held in Russia and abroad. The overview of Parfyonov’s achievements shows an impressive range of academic interests. The scholar was always drawn to the problem of the interplay between cultures and different art forms. In many of his works, e. g., those on Shakespeare, Gogol and the baroque, he examines typological similarities of literary phenomena of different cultural and historical periods. Parfyonov shared his time between research of fundamental literary problems and teaching, as well as writing course books for university students, and was successful in all three capacities. In the appendix to the article, the reader will find Parfyonov’s work on Hemingway from the scholar’s unpublished book. Written for students, the article effortlessly engages its readers in a detailed textual analysis, introduces them to theoretical generalisations and succeeds in defining the writer’s unique poetics and philosophy.

The article contains the transcript of the poet and translator M. Zenkevich’s remarks at the 1931 conference of Soviet poets. The public discussion at the conference was triggered by N. Aseev’s speech ‘The present day of Soviet poetry,’ which appeared in print soon after the event, in 1932. Opening with a mention of the ‘inadequacies’ and ‘dawdling’ of fellow poets, Aseev proceeded to classify the contemporary ‘poetic forces’ into three troops: archaists, eclectics, and innovators (‘former LEF members’), speaking about the latter with undisguised sympathy. In the closing words, he urged poets to finally shoulder the responsibility for the development of the problems and themes that are demanded by the class, the country, and the party. One of the first speakers to offer their remarks on the speech, Zenkevich tried to refute the statement about the inherent necessity for poetry to be subjugated to the social and political agenda and for critics to judge poetry ‘on a scale of an ideological charge.’ The article supplies the transcript with comments and discusses the circumstances of Zenkevich’s speech, including the reaction it provoked among the participants of the conference.

The Sphinx factor symbolises the duality characteristic of a human who faces an ethical choice. Borrowed from Greek mythology, the Sphinx, that epitome of post-primeval universality, is transformed by Nie in the analysis of key works of world literature into a universal mechanism for explaining the coexistence of good and evil. The book brings up the Confucius factor, with its ritual self-discipline, by referring to the traditions of American ethical criticism, thus enabling a reversed Confucian interpretation of the classical canon. Nie’s work illustrates the methodological choice of Chinese ethical criticism, itself a product of the interaction between Chinese ethical philosophy and the theories and concepts defining the knowledge generated by scholars of the humanities across the globe. Familiar plotlines coalesce into an ethical map of the world.

The reviewed proceedings of the international symposium on Dostoevsky’s anthropology include papers so diverse and often unrelated to the topic of the event that they hardly merit the title Dostoevsky’s Anthropology, which may mislead the reader. However, as a collection of papers that introduces and characterises the specific symposium, the publication will find an interested audience. The reviewer proposes that the reader begins with A. Gacheva’s article, as it appears to have had the most success in identifying the main themes and key points of Dostoevsky’s anthropology as such. The author argues that Dostoevsky’s writings centre on a human in God’s perspective, which accounts for the fact that our fascination with his work grows over time, and suggests that the collected proceedings may appeal to Dostoevsky scholars and broader audiences alike.

The monograph consists of chapters devoted to various methods of expressing hatred using the imagery out of a bestiary. Despite the book’s diverse material, it strikes as a holistic piece of research that touches on such problems as reliability of sources, convergence of historical facts and literary topoi, the correlation between a tradition and an author’s intention, the mutual influence of literary and visual images, the ambivalence of the symbolism of beasts, creativity and the interplay between the animal world and humanity. The book considers material produced in different languages, which enables the authors to trace the stylistic evolution of animal metaphors and transformation of their meanings. The contributed studies prompt the conclusion that it is impossible to find a beast that would unequivocally symbolise hatred: any negative connotations are revised by a later tradition.

The first Russian translation of Thomas Coryat’s travel over Europe cuts a fantastic figure on the London literary scene at the beginning of the 17th c. The book opens with over one hundred pages occupied by the panegyrics to the traveller from the pen of the customers at the Mermaid tavern, Ben Jonson and John Donne most illustrious among them. The prevalent carnivalesque style adds a mysterious flavour to the book, enhanced in the Russian version where Caryot is presumed to be a literary mask of Shakespeare (his name stands on the titlepage as one of the authors) while Shakespeare, in accordance with one of the anti-Stratfordian heresies, is advanced as the mask of the earl of Rutland. The exaggerated academic style of the Russian edition features as another carnivalesque attribute in this enigmatic case. Coryat’s Crudities, apart from the anti-Stratfordian guess, is an important contribution to Shakespeare studies in Russia vividly presenting Elizabethan wit as a fact of literary everyday life.

Professor Mikhaylova’s colleagues and followers explore her favourite subjects — artistic prose and poetry, literary criticism, and gender-related literary studies. The section of reminiscences sets the tone for the rest of the book: it concerns the destiny of a woman in the time of historical calamities. The book also includes papers on comparative and semiotic analyses and studies of poetics and the history of philology, cultural codes, and myths.

The review examines a publication of the poem ‘Zone,’ which counts among the most famous works by the innovative French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, in the original language and seven Russian translations, two of which were made in 2022 under the auspices of the Pushkin programme funded by the French Institute of the French Embassy in Moscow to promote book publishing. The book’s structure can baffle the reader, just like Apollinaire’s poem does. Opening with a double dedication to the 110th anniversary of the poem’s original publication and the centenary of M. Kudinov’s birth, the book then displays the original French version of ‘Zone,’ followed by the publisher’s colophon. The subsequent sections of the book seem to follow the conventional logic: N. Zubkov’s foreword discusses the unique characteristics of the French poem’s poetics and outlines the key points for a comparative analysis of the translations. The sequence of the printed translations is at odds with their chronological order, a conscious decision made by the publisher. The final section entitled ‘In the Russian mirror’ features insightful comments on the poem offered by distinguished scholars of French poetry such as N. Balashov, S. Velikovsky, Z. Kirnoze, and M. Yasnov.