The principal innovation of Cervantes’s Don Quixote is a shift of focus from the logic of writing a rhetorically convincing text to the problematization of the reader’s perception. For the first time, reading and readers naturally constitute the subject of narration. The novel registers a point of balance, where a new reading practice (individual reading) coexists with the old-fashioned way (reading aloud in a group). The article explores two types of characters: one is responsible for oral narration and emotional engagement and dependability, while the other represents the culture of printed text, with its presupposition of a creative and critical perception of the text. Don Quixote himself is a paradoxical combination of both. The author also discusses the novel’s paratextual area — the prologues, where the battle for new readers plays out in the guise of a critique of chivalric romance. The scholar discovers that Cervantes not only analyzes the dramatic innovations in text interpretation prompted by Gutenberg’s new technology, but also attempts to eliminate the resulting discord with his writing and creatively reinvent the very essence of the novel as a genre.

A central figure in the English modernist movement, Virginia Woolf became famous as a children’s author after her death, upon the discovery and publication of ‘Nurse Lugton’s Curtain’ and ‘The Widow and the Parrot.’ The study is innovative and relevant in its exploration of the stories’ connections to Woolf’s personal and literary life. Focusing on the untitled pages found in the manuscript of Mrs Dalloway, M. Ivankiva sets out to establish the relation between the story’s holograph penned for Woolf’s niece and the novel’s poetics and problems and define the place of this manuscript in the writer’s legacy. The article details the history of the manuscript, from its drafting and editing by the author to its discovery and first posthumous publications to the first Russian edition in 2022. The scholar concludes that ‘Nurse Lugton’s Curtain’ marks a borderline case in Woolf’s oeuvre: small and big prose, between the realms of literature for grown-ups and children’s fiction, having a public and a private addressee. This liminal nature is reflected in the work’s central images of the town of Millamarchmontopolis and the animals who came to the lake to drink.

R. Frost’s dramatic monologue of ‘A Servant to Servants’ is the cornerstone of the collection ‘North of Boston,’ which propelled the poet to international fame. The poem, however, receives little attention from literary critics and remains somewhat unappreciated. Frost addresses a theme he finds important and may have private reasons to explore: human creativity, a force that creates but also destroys and can get out of control. In this sense, the author finds it appropriate to draw parallels between ‘A Servant to Servants’ and the famous ‘Birches,’ as well as ‘A Brook in the City,’ which features similar imagery. The article discusses Frost’s typical understatement as a principal choice, as well as the devices and ‘tricks’ of the text that enable him to entice ‘his’ reader and not discourage mass readership, who may be unprepared to appreciate the tragic quality of the depicted poetic world in its entirety. The world appears tragic indeed: to the poem’s heroine, the prospect of being committed to a psychiatric institution seems less of a hell than loneliness.

The article discusses the work of S. Hawking, who, besides his straightforwardly scientific output, is known for writing popular science and, relatively more recently, science fiction (with L. Hawking as his co-author). The study explores the advantages and flaws of Hawkings’ books and traces the connection between their plots and the mythic structures summarized by C. Vogler for novice writers. According to Grinfeld, the George Greenby series is an easy and exciting read and has all the makings of pure science fiction, a genre underrepresented in modern literature, unlike its punk subgenres or fantasy. In his interpretation of the novellas, the author discovers that, while succeeding in popularizing science (due to the readers’ interest in the series, for one thing), they all but fail to impress artistically. The main reason is that the series relies on a simplistic formula that does not vary or get reinvented from one book to another. The resulting works, therefore, belong to pop-science journalism rather than fiction, argues Grinfeld.

The article is devoted to the prose of the fantasy writer S. Arno and considers its principal motifs, images, and stereotypes. The scholar and literary critic E. Shcheglova focuses her analysis on the novels A Novel about Love, and Also Dunces and Drowned Girls [Roman o lyubvi, a yeshchyo ob idiotakh i utoplennitsakh] (2012), A Straitjacket for Geniuses [Smiritelnaya rubashka dlya geniev] (2012), and The Dead Know Why [Myortvie sami znayut otchego] (2020), etc., which display the characteristics of the classical Petersburg text, on the one hand, and are peppered with the aesthetics of theatrical postmodernism, on the other. Therefore, Arno’s works cannot be considered serious literature. Noting that virtually all of Arno’s plotlines and characters draw on the preexisting constructs of the Petersburg prose shaped by Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoevsky, the critic finds that, more than the continued existence of such artistic constructs in modern literature, Arno is fascinated with the fate of those contemporary writers unable to keep a straight face when confronted with literary goings-on. As a result, various fairies and demons swarm with gusto in Arno’s novels, while the living appear dull and unconvincing.

The article discusses the genre attribution of little-known Shakespeare adaptations produced in Russia in the first third of the 19th c. In particular, the author considers French and Russian reworkings of Romeo and Juliet’s story. Examined in detail is A. Rotchev’s melodrama Romeo i Yuliya (1827). The play has never been published, either separately or in a collection of dramatic works, and was scripted exclusively for a theatrical production (a benefit performance). The article successfully argues that Rotchev’s text draws on de Ségur’s French libretto for Steibelt’s opera and that P. Mochalov’s tragic interpretation of Romeo was inspired by the opera and especially V. Samoylov’s performance as the eponymous male lead. Rotchev adapts Romeo and Yuliya’s love story first and foremost for a viewer (and not a reader). Hence the choice of genre favoured by the audience of the day, resulting in an altered and dramatically distorted idea of Shakespeare’s play (a shift from tragedy to melodrama). Analyzing Rotchev’s play, the scholar finds proof that the theatrical and the literary critical interpretation of Shakespeare in the Romantic era (Shakespeare as a dramatic poet) should be viewed entirely separately.

The article is written in response to the 2-volume publication of Victor Grossman (1887–1978), a writer and scholar active on Moscow literary scene in the 1920s–1930s, whose career was rudely interrupted by two successive arrests in 1938 and 1948. Born of a well-off Jewish family in Odessa, Victor was happy to make friends at the gymnasium with Boris Zhitkov, Korney Chukovsky, Vladimir Poplavsky, and his own first choice was a philological faculty. But then he took up law and had a remarkable career as a lawyer, which afterwards he left for literature. He had developed a reputation as an expert on Pushkin’s life and work and wrote adaptations for stage of Pushkin’s prose till he suffered an abrupt end to his activities. The article presents Grossman’s life after his liberation from camp in 1955 when he settled down in the city of Vologda. In the new collection, one volume incorporates Grossman’s works on Pushkin written in his later years and mostly never published. The other is given to nonfiction: memoirs by Grossman, his correspondence with old friends and people involved in the not-so-easy-going publication of his novel on Pushkin — Arion. I. Shaytanov also shares a story of his personal acquaintance with Grossman.

The article deals with the arrest and imprisonment of the literary scholar Victor Grossman. L. Solodukhina cites and comments hitherto unpublished documents, such as Grossman’s appeal to re-examine his case and his interrogation transcripts. He was arrested by NKVD in the night of 9 March 1938, on the charges of being a member of ‘the terrorist organization of Social-Revolutionaries (SR) and Menshiviks formed at the Moscow College of Defence Counsels.’ As grounds for his arrest, the authorities referred to his membership, as a 17-year-old, in a revolutionary SR society in Batum and Odessa in 1905, as well as his brief career as an SR politician (from March to August of 1917), which ended with his election to the Moscow City Duma (Parliament) in the same year. Following his arrest, and despite the absence of any proof of involvement with the terrorist organization, Grossman was sentenced to 8 years in a prison camp. Released in 1946, he was arrested again in 1948. The publication is supplied with a detailed account of the reasons behind Grossman’s first and second detentions and his everyday life in the camp. The article also reconstructs the context of Grossman’s life defined by the respective historical period.

The article is concerned with a little-researched period in the life of M. Bulgakov, who spent 1919 to 1921 in Vladikavkaz. The study discusses the reasons for his settling in the city and for the hasty departure to Tiflis in 1921. Also included in the article is the first scholarly publication of an Ossetic translation of Bulgakov’s only surviving early play The Sons of the Mullah [Synovia mully]. Bulgakov famously loathed his early theatrical works and wished that the plays, including The Sons…, written in Vladikavkaz after he gave up his medical practice, would sink into oblivion. The play’s holograph, however, survived, and so did its Ossetic translation by B. Totrov, a professional actor and a personal acquaintance of Bulgakov’s. E. Dzaparova reconstructs the history of the stage production of The Sons of the Mullah in Vladikavkaz and provides numerous details to describe Bulgakov’s life in the city in the years 1919–2021. The study concludes with a comparison between the Russian text and its Ossetic translation.

The author proposes a principle for putting a date to the events described in M. Bulgakov’s novel, for which purposes he examined three groups of objects and phenomena: astronomical (Moon phases), calendrical (direct mentions of a date, month, or year), and ‘signs of the era’ (events in politics, social or everyday life of the period). The scholar strives to study Bulgakov’s book as a testimony about a specific period, which can be established forensically — i. e., by elimination of random, and matching of eligible, data. V. Orlov argues that, while avoiding direct mentions of the dates, Bulgakov could not possibly expunge all implied references. Moreover, the scholar suggests that Bulgakov left them out deliberately in the dual pursuit of appeasing censors and engaging in an intellectual game with the reader. Having analyzed the relevant data, Orlov finds that the novel is set in the period from the 11th to the 14th of May 1938 and hypothesizes other important dates in the novel, including the Master’s and Margarita’s birthdays.

F. Thun-Hohenstein’s Das Leben Schreiben. Warlam Schalamow. Biographie und Poetik — the result of long-term archival and analytical research — is the experience in creating an intellectual biography of one of the main representatives of unofficial literature of the Soviet era. The reconstruction of Shalamov’s biography of a prisoner of Stalin’s concentration camps develops into an in-depth analysis of the crisis of humanism and the transformation of avant-garde aesthetics in the conditions of this crisis. The researcher pays special attention to how the writer’s ethical and aesthetic position was formed and attempts to fit the drama of his life and the analysis of his works into the context of Soviet culture in the 1920s–1970s. The book expressively demonstrates the view of a modern German researcher on one of the most dramatic episodes in the history of Russian culture.

The book of reminiscences about David Samoylov My memory brings you back to me… [Tebya mne pamyat vozvratila…], presented as a must-read collection of memories, features drama and a thrilling plot. Reading it resembles wandering around a hall of mirrors in the vain hope of finding a true image. The collection puts together texts previously scattered across various publications. They become testimonies that help reveal what Samoylov’s poems understated or omitted. A whole generation older than the popular Sixtier poets, he was in the army from the beginning till the end of the Great Patriotic War, and repeatedly and paradoxically referred to it later as his ultimate freedom experience. But he was older in his fear too. Throughout his life we see his preoccupation with the sincerity of fellowship — cherishing the kind of people one can speak their mind to freely. The extreme clarity of Samoylov’s verse is simultaneously a ciphertext of his inner life. The resulting tension between the inner and the outspoken may account for the vibrant authenticity of his verse.

In his biography of the renowned 20th-c. author, E. Lukoyanov portrays Yury Mamleyev’s multidimensional personality based on the writer’s own reminiscences as well as opinions of his friends, foes, readers, and like-minded thinkers. Far from trying to mythologize or deconstruct Mamleyev, Lukoyanov sets out to present a meticulous study of his life and artistic personality. The writer’s paradoxical ethical and religious creed is intertwined with the unconventional destiny of his novels and the contexts of their creation and first public attention. The book also details Mamleyev’s evolution as a writer — his momentous transition from the author of the underground The Sublimes [Shatuny] to the creator of Eternal Russia [Rossiya vechnaya], which offers a crystallized ideology instead of transgression. Lukoyanov’s book goes beyond a mere biography and offers literary critical analysis of several aspects of Mamleyev’s oeuvre, making the study even more valuable, given the shortage of literature on the subject.