The article prefaces the publication of the first Russian translation of Mallarmé’s essay ‘The Impressionists and Edouard Manet:’ originally printed in English in a London-based periodical in 1876, it was not rediscovered until the early 21st c., when the essay’s translation back into French became available. In his work, Mallarmé offers the first contemporary interpretation of Impressionism as a natural next step in the development of art, revealing it to be a form of self-reflection that gazes at reality. He notes that Manet’s manner of depicting landscapes and people in them bears a similarity to Japanese prints — an art form much beloved by the Impressionists. Other innovative viewpoints expressed by Mallarmé include his interpretation of mimesis, which, rather than mimicking nature, means its recreation, ‘touch by touch:’ the idea that the representative art of the period cannot be isolated from the characteristic politics and industry of the era, and the suggestion that, rather than treating artists as spiritual aristocrats, as was customary in the Romantic era, one should consider them as ‘energetic modern workers,’ exemplified by Impressionist painters. The article sets out to present Mallarmé’s ideas in the context of French art criticism from the 18th c. until the present day.

The article discusses the category of silence and its unique realization in the works of S. Mallarmé and O. Mandelstam. In their search for a new language of the new era, Romantic poets of Europe, and later the Symbolists, promoted the categories of rhythm, suggestiveness, melodiousness, and silence. E. Dmitrieva analyzes Mallarmé’s essays and poems, including ‘A Throw of the Dice’ (which anticipates the poetics of the late 20th c. with its unusual typographic layout), and the poem’s visual interpretation by O. Redon, who decodes its internal meanings with a cryptogram ‘quiet-silence-death.’ The second part of the article is devoted to Mandelstam’s poetry. According to Dmitrieva, the poet’s reputation as a Russian Mallarmé almost certainly originates in the Western studies of Mandelstam’s oeuvre. In order to substantiate the analogy, his scholars often point out the two poets’ fondness for suggestiveness, the magic of words, and the opportunities offered by their liberal combination, seen as a special form of ‘associative symbolism.’ Dmitrieva follows the progression of this method in Mandelstam’s poetry and examines several verses that reveal distinct affinities with Mallarmé.

The article discusses the autobiographical narrative poem The Circle [Krug], often referred to by critics as the crowning glory of I. Lisnyanskaya’s oeuvre. The poem consists of fifteen parts: a classic crown of sonnets written in keeping with the English tradition, with a cathartic final mastersonnet. Each sonnet consists of fourteen lines with a crossed and plain rhyme. In her reconstruction of the poem’s plot and its mentions in Lisnyanskaya’s interviews and reminiscences, G. Kalinkina considers The Circle to be an example of autofiction that paints a faithful portrait of the author, a ‘defiled time,’ and history, of which the protagonist is a part. The critic also examines the poem’s allusions, including implicit references to pivotal events in Lisnyanskaya’s personal life (work as a hospital aide during World War II, interrogations by NKVD, and time at a psychiatric hospital) and fellow poets of an older generation: A. Akhmatova, M. Petrovykh, and S. Lipkin, who each ‘taught’ her a valuable ‘lesson.’ The Circle shows how well.

The history of Dostoevsky’s reception knows a relatively brief but extremely intense and productive period of ‘paradigm shifting:’ displacing the philosophical journalism of Rozanov, Merezhkovsky, Shestov and others in the 1910s and 1920s was literary criticism proper. The paper is concerned with this methodological turnaround in Dostoevsky studies. Inspired by V. I. Ivanov’s article ‘Dostoevsky and the novel-tragedy’ [‘Dostoevsky i roman-tragediya’] (1911), young scholars of the day (V. Komarovich, L. Grossman, B. Engelgardt, and M. Bakhtin, among others) attempted to comprehend ‘Dostoevsky in Dostoevsky,’ i. e., interpret his novels’ ‘ideology’ in terms of his poetics rather than in abstraction. The author suggests that the main problem in all Dostoevsky-centred polemics since the 1910s–1920s and to this day remains twofold: on the one hand, it is a problem of the writer’s attitude to his characters; on the other, it is a challenge of identifying the genre of Dostoevsky’s novels. Citing Bakhtin’s monograph (1929, 1963), the article sets out to disprove Ivanov’s term of ‘novel-tragedy’ in reference to the nonclassic nature of Dostoevsky’s novels.

 The article discusses the intermedial transfer of the concept of polyphony in Mikhail Bakhtin’s and Leo Spitzer’s studies of Dostoevsky and Proust from the late 1920s. There are plenty of good reasons to compare the two scholars’ works. Firstly, Spitzer’s stylistics was of key importance to Bakhtin throughout his scientific career. Secondly, there is a correlation between the methods for studying Proust’s and Dostoevsky’s novels, which Bakhtin considered as the pinnacle of the European and Russian novel, respectively. The stylistic revolution of the novel anticipated not only the development of 20th-c. prose, the polyphonic novel and stylistic perspectivism, but also the trajectory of theoretical innovations, the study of the dialogue between the Self and the Other, as well the verbal symphonization of the author/narrator’s outer and inner Self. Once polyphony was extrapolated into the field of the novel, the problem of the spoken word and oral genres became more compelling. From the late 1930s until the early 1940s, Spitzer and Bakhtin independently set out to study the genre of ‘shouts’ (cri): Spitzer in Proust’s The Prisoner, and Bakhtin in Rabelais’s novel and Russian literature. Bakhtin’s short theoretical essay on the genre of ‘shouts’ in a Russian town square was discovered by the author of this article and is published here for the first time.

The metaphor of art as a mirror, uncharacteristic of Shakespeare’s Tempest, prompts the conclusion that, rather than referring to the play, Auden invokes the Romantic interpretation of its plot. The Romantics interpreted The Tempest as the playwright’s farewell and the epitome of his artistic endeavours. Romanticism is responsible for the popular thesis that The Tempest is a parable about an artist (Prospero), alone in this world (on an island), who rules over imagination (Ariel and lowly spirits) and keeps savage nature (Caliban) in check. In his poem, Auden deconstructs the parable of the powerful artist Prospero, invoking W. Knight’s allegorical method: Knight followed the tradition of the play’s allegorical interpretation. Auden does not set out to criticize Romanticism, but rather contemplates his own experience as a poet. In The Sea and the Mirror, his reimagining of poetic experience inspires the sections ‘Prospero to Ariel’ and ‘Caliban to the Audience.’ Auden concludes that art, not unlike a mirror, reveals experiences: by looking into it, we may realize our true feelings, yet the effect proves disappointing

The article summarizes the history of Uzbek translations of Shakespeare, which starts in the 1930s: 1934 saw the publication of the first translation of Hamlet into the Uzbek language by the renowned writer and advocate of jadidism Abdulhamid Chulpan. A year later, the translated play premiered in an Uzbek theatre, directed by Mannon Uygur. For a long time, translators worked with a Russian rendering of the original. This changed in the late 20th c., when Jamol Kamol started to translate directly from English. In 2007, he published his work as a three-volume collection of Shakespeare’s plays. The article, however, focuses on translations of Shakespeare’s sonnets rather than plays. It was not until the 1960s that such translations were first made by M. Shayxzoda. In subsequent years, more translators were drawn to the subject: A. Obidov, K. Davron, and Y. Shomansur. The author compares the translations of Sonnets 66 and 73 made by two different translators and offers her arguments about whose version sounds more natural in the Uzbek language.

The article is devoted to the Armenian poet O. Tumanyan, who possessed an uncanny gift of intuitive perception of the causal relationships between phenomena and reality, and whose philosophy and worldview as a result were defined by intuition and prescience. According to S. Ovanesyan, the scholar of the poet’s legacy, Tumanyan saw intuition, anticipation, prescience, and the feeling of harmony as part and parcel of talent. He insisted on relating a moment of creative concentration to the author’s inner awakening, inspiration, and intuitive feelings. Tumanyan predicted the 1905 Russian revolution, the Armenian genocide of 1915, the train wreck en route from Pyatigorsk to Tbilisi (1917), etc. Tumanyan often wrote in immediate response to a dream. Alternatively, dreams provided words and expressions that he had been looking for or inspired certain means of expression for thoughts, phenomena, and anxieties. A study of the poet’s dreams offers a deep insight into his subconscious and psychological characteristics.

A publication of the correspondence between the political ‘heretic’ and Leningrad-based writer Y. Zamyatin and the ‘pessimist’ and Moscow-based author I. Novikov. Covering the years from 1922 to 1929 and gleaned from the annals of the Gorky Institute of World Literature (IMLI RAN) and Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI), it is supplied with an introduction and comments. The epistolary friendship of the two writers resulted from common interests and acquaintances in the literary world as well as the critic Zamyatin’s backing of Novikov in the 1924 article ‘On the current and the contemporary’ [‘O segodnyashnem i o sovremennom’]. In their letters, Novikov and Zamyatin bemoaned censorship and shared updates about new projects and upcoming productions of their plays, and discussed the life of literary organizations in Leningrad and Moscow as well as anthologies published in Leningrad. Stigmatized as a ‘fellow traveller’ (poputchik) during the 1929 persecution campaign, Zamyatin turned to Novikov in search for a like-minded supporter who would stand by him in print. The published correspondence offers a glimpse into the 1920s historical and ideological climate of Moscow and Petrograd-Leningrad, as well as the literary and theatrical process of the period.

E. Tsimbaeva’s monograph analyzes the literature of the mid-18th — early 20th cc. in comparison with the realia of the everyday that were omitted from books by contemporary writers as too obvious and have become obscure and unknown to present-day readers. Notably, the book suggests that the commonly accepted rules and conventions of a period would often determine the plots of contemporary works of literature and shape the images and psychology of their characters, whereas new generations of readers may have trouble understanding their seemingly random and strange behaviour. The scholar argues that the bygone realia of the everyday and customs left behind the scenes of a literary text may not be deduced by the modern reader and therefore provide material for studies by present-day historians. Tsimbaeva’s study focuses on this missing knowledge and its cultural and literary significance.

The review discusses two monographs devoted to Victorian novels: H. Ifill’s work on the problem of character in sensation fiction and H. L. Pennington’s study of what shapes identity in an imaginary autobiography. Among the indisputable merits of Ifill’s book, which focuses on W. Collins’s and M. Braddon’s works, is the author’s attempt to consider Victorian novel as a holistic literary phenomenon beyond its chronological definition. Such an approach immediately removes the division into literary ranks and the opposition of realistic to sensation or social-criminal novel, etc. The scholar describes the essential genre characteristics of the texts, partially represented by the principles of character shaping. Pennington looks at C. Dickens’s and C. Brontë’s novels from the viewpoint of shaping of the protagonist’s identity in a genre born as a mixture of fiction and autobiography.

In his book, A. Vetushinsky conducts a comprehensive study of video games. It is the first such analysis undertaken by a Russian scholar, who considers the phenomenon of video games not only from a practical but also culturological viewpoint. A philosopher by training, the author, however, extends his study into other disciplines: he examines games in terms of communication theory, media studies, anthropology, and other fields. It is the book’s multi-disciplinary prism that reveals the contemporary phenomenon of video games as a complicated and even textual structure. The scholar’s fascination with the subject is immediately obvious from a specially devised structure to describe gaming history. The book will interest not only gaming fans but also those who may only have heard about the phenomenon or observed others at play.

The review is devoted to a book by the philosopher, culturologist, and literary critic René Girard, who famously devised the concept of fundamental anthropology with an emphasis on mimetic violence and scapegoating as cornerstones of social life and culture. His ‘mimetic theory’ constitutes one of the last big narratives of the humanities in the 21st c. A Theater of Envy is a must-read for those interested in Girard’s ‘canon’ and an unconventional interpretation of the English playwright’s oeuvre. The scholar is particularly interested in the Bard’s hypermimetic sensitivity. The book reveals a mimetic dimension in Shakespeare’s works, arguing that the playwright was always drawn to plots with mimetic potential. Following brilliant handling of complex structural models and paradoxical inversions, Shakespeare moved on and gradually lost interest in the mechanics of mimetic rivalry, focusing instead on ethical and human repercussions.