Pereverzin, a contemporary poet, a winner of the ‘Moskovskiy schyot’ literary award (2009), and the editor-in-chief of the poetry journal Piroskaf, discusses new names and trends in modern poetry with the critic E. Pogorelaya. Starting with an overview of the changes that have marked contemporary poetry following the dissolution of the publisher Voymega almost three years ago, the conversation next considers the journals Prosodia and Piroskaf and discusses: their objectives, priorities, and target audiences; the similarity of the situation faced by contemporary poets and artists alike; new methods in poetry and artificial intelligence. The discussion mentions the names of modern poets and artists featured in Piroskaf, a journal that promotes an innovative mixture of verbal and visual arts. Pereverzin suggests that today’s poetry seeks new forms of interaction with its audience, but pandering to readers’ tastes will lead the poet to a dead end. Poetry is supposed to perceive and recreate the world as a reality, rather than a reflection, including the reflections in the reader’s eyes.

The article offers a detailed review of The Copper Mirror [Mednoe zerkalo], a collection of selected works from several decades by the contemporary poet I. Ermakova. Following the book’s structure that draws on the titles of Ermakova’s earlier collections (The Provinces [Provintsiya], The Vineyard [Vinogradnik], and A Lullaby for Odysseus [Kolybelnaya dlya Odisseya]), the critic traces a plot that guides the reader on a journey from the post-Soviet Russian provinces of the 1990s into the present day. Although the most up-to-date poems in the book date from 2020 (including the opening verse ‘I started a bonfire, fed the flame…’ [‘Ya razvyol kostyor, nakormil plamya…’], which seems to hold the key to the book’s meaning and objective), the meticulous selection of poems and their arrangement reveal a book that is undeniably modern in its response to the latest topics and challenges. In addition to the commentary on the book’s inner theme and Ermakova’s ‘manifesto’ poems, the review considers the critical reception of her works and cites the best articles about the poet, including the preface to The Copper Mirror by the critics and philologists A. Skvortsov and A. Salomatin.

The article seeks to disprove the assumption that the ode as a poetic genre breathed its last in the 1830s–1850s. The scholars suggest that no genre remains a form cast in concrete, but instead serves as a toolkit facilitating the creative process. To prove that the genre of ode is still relevant, the authors consider works of four eminent modern poets — A. Belyakov, V. Gandelsman, I. Ermakova, and A. Kushner — and describe their use of the genre. In each case, ode features prominently, its importance recognized by the poets themselves. The article argues in favour of a more in-depth study of the evolution of the ode in the non-canonical period of Russian literary history.

The article examines the use of mathematical terminology in J. Brodsky’s poetry and considers the genesis of geometric and arithmetic concepts in his oeuvre. The author suggests that, having dropped out of school at the age of fifteen and loathing the Soviet secondary school system, Brodsky did, however, absorb a plethora of formulae, concepts, and math-related images, which, in turn, revitalized his poetic vocabulary. Listing Brodsky’s typical ‘mathematical’ motifs and phrases, Artemiev focuses on images that often serve as clues, such as a parallel, a perpendicular, lines, angles, cones, squares, and other geometric shapes; each such item is supplied with several examples and a scholarly commentary. The author characterizes Brodsky’s relationship with mathematics as follows: Stopping short of understanding the subject properly, Brodsky used maths terminology frequently and with ease, if with a somewhat tenuous idea of its meaning, and made it part of his signature poetic style. Mathematics endowed his poetry with a vocabulary that made it truly stand out among predecessors and contemporaries alike.

The article deals with E. Boratynsky’s poem about a spirit of a nonviable nedonosok, or stillborn, drifting between heaven and earth. Scholars have noted the poem’s affinity with works of Dante and Goethe, as well as Plato’s philosophy and the Old Testament. The present study considers the poem’s system of motifs and images in comparison with concepts found in folklore and mythology. The East Slavs believed premature or stillborn babies to be dangerous creatures. They emerged from the ‘other world’ and were ‘unclean.’ For that reason, an infant’s christening was a crucial means to humanize the baby. Unbaptized children (preterm or stillborn) were trapped in the air between heaven and earth. They were feared along with the rest of ‘unclean forces,’ e. g., spirits of sorcerers and sinners. Barred from entering heaven and restless, their existence was an agony that made others suffer as well. Boratynsky poetically interprets a popular superstition about a ‘wrongful’ or ‘bad’ death and its consequences for an infant who was forced out of this world unbaptized. These archaic topics and imagery, among others, inspired the poet’s religious and philosophical reflections.

The article sets out to reconstruct Turgenev’s objective in revising a collection of Fet’s poems to be published in 1856. 19th-c. censorship restricted the scope of literature approved for women’s reading, although the restrictions were circumvented where possible. Turgenev took an interest in literature produced by contemporary female authors, introduced characters of women writers and poets in his books, and may have tried to influence female audiences’ reading trends. Preparing the 1856 collection, Turgenev revised its structure compared to the 1850 edition, with the effect of emphasizing female characters and the theme of a woman’s feelings and love. Further changes concerned descriptions of women’s love-induced desires. Turgenev edited out their first-person expression, as well as explicit depictions of a woman’s body; at the same time, he kept first-person descriptions of divination by a lyrical heroine, as well as accounts of love and lovers’ assignations through the eyes of a male lyrical hero. However, such a revision of female images, with their subjectivity and sensuousness, clashed with Fet’s own objective stated in the poem ‘The Muse’ and earlier editions of his poems.

Scholars sound very tentative when mentioning E. T. A. Hoffmann’s influence on M. Lermontov’s work. The only testimony of Lermontov’s awareness of Hoffmann’s oeuvre dates from 1840, yet it is almost unimaginable that the poet, always up to date with latest works of literature, would not have discovered the German Romantic author sooner, especially since he was widely read in Russia. In particular, the fairy tale The Golden Pot (1814), which provides the material for comparison with The Novice [Mtsyri] (1839), was published in 1839 in the same journal Moskovskiy Nablyudatel that had printed the first reviews of Lermontov’s works, and may therefore have been known to the poet. The article focuses on a literary parallel that has thus far escaped scholarly attention: the fish of gold in Lermontov’s poem and the gold snake in Hoffmann’s novella. The author argues that the parallel is more pronounced than the often suggested similarities between the fish and the ‘sirens’ of Goethe’s The Fisherman and Heine’s The Lorelei. The article studies the fragments of the snakes’ first appearance in The Golden Pot and the encounter with the gold fish in The Novice in terms of vocabulary and motifs.

The article considers the phenomenon of theatre in film, associated with the effects of sensory intensification. In her analysis of R. Eyre’s drama Stage Beauty (an adaptation of J. Hatcher’s play Compleat Female Stage Beauty), the author shows that a theatrical performance within a film proves to be especially effective in engaging various perception modalities and bringing the audience in touch with their own sensations. A fragment of Act V Scene II of Othello constitutes the structural core of Eyre’s film. Affectively charged with fear of death, jealousy, and revenge, this fragment makes five appearances in the film. The viewers learn about a reconstruction of a historic theatre, as well as the emergence of a new and more naturalistic tradition. The essay is divided into small sections according to the logic of sensory focuses, which, Rybina argues, reveal themselves at each new staging of the fragment. Tracing how the perception modalities (visual, auditory, and kinesthetic) are activated, the author proves that the main goal of theatre in film is to enhance the viewers’ sensory awareness.

I. Shaytanov offers his polemical response to D. Ivanov’s review of William Shakespeare. Sonnets, a book compiled and commented by Shaytanov, that was published in the journal Inostrannaya Literatura. The author addresses several of Ivanov’s criticisms and is disappointed that the collection’s main component, the poetics of genre Shakespeare itself, completely escaped the critic’s attention, even though it is crucial for the book’s distinct and innovative approach. Shaytanov points out that the concept of genre, with its origin in historical poetics (a system pioneered by A. Veselovsky with subsequent studies by Y. Tynyanov, M. Bakhtin, V. Propp, and Y. Lotman — scholars who upheld dissimilar and often incompatible views), is the main criterion of understanding and translating Shakespearean sonnets in the book. Ignoring the genre conventions, Russian translators ended up struggling with limitations since they focused on rendering the text rather than the genre, whereas Shaytanov’s own translations included in the volume deal with the genre of Shakespeare’s sonnets first and foremost. Failure to recognize the book’s principal subject resulted in missing its point.

The article deals with problems that plagued travellers in the mid-18th to early 20th cc., which often began as soon as they left their house and only got worse on their short- or long-distance journeys. The topic of travel looms large in the literature of the period. Most characters populating Russian or Western European books undertake journeys, be it to a country estate or the capital city; to a spa resort or for a stay at a friends’ house; they head to a ball or for a spot of shopping. Their real-life contemporaries, however, tended to travel even more frequently, almost permanently, while literature often downplayed disruptions caused by travel in favour of a smooth plot. This itch ‘from place to place to roam’ is particularly baffling given the extreme discomfort of travel back in the day. The author examines historical evidence to identify as many travel plights as possible which were omitted by writers who assumed the reader’s familiarity with the situation. Depictions of historical travel routines are contrasted with celebrated works by A. Pushkin, J. Austen, Ch. Dickens, and other writers whose characters live a seemingly realistic life.

The article analyzes inscriptions made by the writer Nadezhda Gorodetsky (Gorodetskaya) on her books gifted to M. Osorgin and P. Berkov. In a brief biographical summary included in the article, we learn about Gorodetsky — a Russian émigré writer and critic, and the key milestones of her literary career, including the years in Paris and England (Oxford and Liverpool). At large the study is concerned with two of her autographs discovered by Sidorova in Belarussian libraries. Their descriptions feature a detailed cultural-historical commentary. The first autograph appears on a copy of A Non-Through-Line [Neskvoznaya nit], Gorodetsky’s novel published in Paris in 1929: it is a presentation inscription with Osorgin as its recipient. The other was left on the front endpaper of the monograph Saint Tikhon Zadonsky, Inspirer of Dostoevsky, converted from Gorodetsky’s own doctoral thesis and published in London in 1951; the author, its previous owner, inscribed the copy to Berkov.

 The review is devoted to a monograph about the Russian émigré poet Boris Poplavsky written by the Serbian scholar Nikola Miljkovic. Marking the 120th anniversary of Poplavsky’s birth, the book is the author’s third study of the poet. Miljkovic justly recognizes Poplavsky’s legacy as a unique literary phenomenon with its own ontological, existential, historical, and aesthetical roots. The book’s structure corresponds to the scholar’s threefold objective: to explore various modifications of Poplavsky’s lyrical self; to examine the influence of various aesthetical paradigms (Romanticism, the Decadent movement, Symbolism, Futurism, Surrealism, and Dadaism); and to determine how prominently Poplavsky’s ties with Russia feature in his poetry, in terms of his connections with Russia’s past, as well as its culture and literature. The scholar’s intertextual approach is viewed as a largely fitting and productive, if not indisputable, new reading of Poplavsky’s oeuvre.

The review discusses M. Stroganov’s new book of essays devoted to the problems of Pushkin studies by Tver-based scholars. The book includes written records about Pushkin’s contemporaries penned by the regional historians V. Mirolyubov and S. Fessalonitsky and treated as original sources, as well as N. Zhuravlyov’s account of the preparations for the centennial anniversary of Pushkin’s death in 1936. It is worth mentioning that the book also features documents invaluable from historical and literary perspectives: namely, family legends in the reminiscences of the Vulf clan: A. Ponafidina, O. Vulf, A. Bolt, and V. Bubnova. In his preamble to their publication, the author specifies the characteristics of family legend as a type of memoir and their genesis. Polemizing with the 20th-c. Pushkin scholars from Tver (G. Khodakov, N. Tsvetkov and others), Stroganov deconstructs the popular mythological notion of Pushkin’s itinerary in the Tver region and corrects the attribution of a whole host of poems allegedly written during Pushkin’s stay in the area.

: In his critical review of L. Egorova’s monograph To Publish and Translate the Impossible: From the History of ‘Kolyma Tales’ [Izdat i perevesti nevozmozhnoe: Iz istorii ‘Kolymskikh rasskazov’], O. Minnullin recognizes the book’s strengths, such as exclusive insights into the story of Shalamov’s publication in the West, an uncompromising quest for the textological accuracy of the published ‘Kolyma epic,’ and the author’s profound understanding of the intricacies of translating Shalamov’s prose into English. L. Egorova successfully proves that J. Glad’s deviations from the original text result from the fact that the American translator often worked with the author’s text heavily revised by the editor. A meticulous comparison of the original text as printed in the 2013 edition of collected works, which is based on Shalamov’s holograph, and the Noviy Zhurnal publication reveals extremely liberal treatment of the text by the journal’s editor.

Chuprinin’s The Thaw as Disobedience [Ottepel kak nepovinovenie] is his latest in a series of research published in the last few years. The cycle opens with The Thaw: Events [Ottepel: Sobytiya] in 2020, followed by The Thaw: Characters [Ottepel: Deystvuyushchie litsa] in 2023. In his studies, Chuprinin draws on material from the press of the day as well as archives. His latest book consists of an author’s preface, six chapters, and an index of names ‘People of the Thaw.’ Each chapter constitutes an individual fragment of the history of the Thaw, whose timeline begins in March 1953, following Stalin’s death, and ends with the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet-led armed forces in August 1968. In the 15 years of the Thaw, the USSR saw changes that, combined with other factors, eventually led to the collapse of the Soviet state. Chuprinin’s undeniable talent as a storyteller shines as he successfully demonstrates how a ‘critical mass’ of rejection of old stereotypes gradually and imperceptibly took over the mentality of Soviet people — a process greatly aided by writers.

This posthumous collection of A. Belousov’s articles throws light on his scholarly interests. He was always fascinated by self-contained cultures that challenged the preeminent conventions of the day: Old Ritualist Orthodoxy, subcultures of various educational institutions (including Russian school folklore), as well as the provinces (in opposition to the capital city: while residents of the capital seek to slight provincials, the latter remain internally self-sufficient; in focus are provincials, people socially disenfranchised as a result of the Bolshevik revolution, as well as children pushed to the margins of the developing socialist state in L. Dobychin’s books). A doctoral student of Y. Lotman, whose structuralist studies caused seismic shifts, Belousov published his works in collections on secondary modelling systems, yet remained preoccupied with a human personality rather than verbal text as such. In his monographs, Belousov would outline topics, leaving others to do the research. Accordingly, an article by S. Neklyudov prefacing the collection is entitled ‘A Pioneer’ [‘Pervoprokhodets’].