The article analyzes V. Rasputin’s and B. Yekimov’s 1990s works as a macro plot, a tale of a hero resisting collapse, which prompted both authors to employ the tragic twist of a mother taking to vigilantism. In her study, S. Krylova examines two novellas, published almost simultaneously: V. Rasputin’s Ivan’s Daughter, Ivan’s Mother [Doch Ivana, mat Ivana] (2003) and B. Yekimov’s Hold Back Your Tears [Ne nado plakat] (2004). She argues that the time has come to revise the first impression made by the books at their original publication: having witnessed the historic degradation of the 1990s just a few years before, readers perceived the stories as contemporary and accurate accounts of, or even a verdict about, the events. Twenty years on, this prose reads differently from those previous years. While back in the day the feelings it evoked were those of desperation, the books now reveal more nuances related to their authors’ spiritual interpretation of the era of collapse. As Krylova emphasizes, it has become clear that the act of vigilantism had an unexpected adverse effect on the avengers. She notes that only Ivan’s Daughter, Ivan’s Mother, destined to be Rasputin’s final novella, succeeded in tackling this problem with full consideration of its repercussions.

The article uses the close reading method, which implies efforts to recover the context of, and clarify hidden meanings in, a given text. For her analysis, G. Kalinkina chooses V. Strochkov’s At a train stop on the route to Kharkiv… [Na uchastke pod Kharkovom…], a poem that describes an unremarkable incident at the Merefa station. Drawing on recorded historical mentions of the station (including reminiscences and diaries written before and after the October revolution, as well as Soviet-era memoirs) and internal poetic metaphors, Kalinkina argues that the poem tells a story of a convict who declines a stranger’s offer of freedom. She suggests that the odd-looking traveller encountered by the lyric hero (himself travelling in a train car with barred windows) at Merefa symbolizes destiny disguised as a somewhat unsteady passer-by: “…descending the steps to the tracks was a nondescript fellow. / He was somewhat tipsy and looked both like diamonds and clubs…” Such a detailed analysis seeks to prove that Strochkov’s poetics is defined by a combination of the absolute clarity of verse and simplicity of the plot, but also completely impenetrable semantics and Aesopian language.

The study deals with a subject that has been largely ignored by Russian scholars of literature: the phenomenon of animalism in literature in terms of Darwin’s and Goethe’s natural philosophical ideas and their various influences on animalistic prose written for children in the 1920s–1940s. Such an influence is exemplified by works of the classic of Russian children’s literature V. Bianki, who always stayed up to date with literary thought as well as scientific theories. The term animalism was introduced by the director of Moscow’s Darwin Museum, A. Kots, in his report, Animalism in light of [the teachings of] Darwin and Goethe (1946). According to Kots, two trends dominated the post-Darwinian period of animalist art: a Darwinian animalism and its Goethe-inspired counterpart. The former implied a meticulous depiction of animal protagonists and the use of ‘rational naturalism,’ whereas the latter relied on a combination of scientific (empirical observation) and artistic (visual thinking) methods.

Fedyaeva examines Bianki’s oeuvre from the viewpoint of animalism of the latter type, noting that his portrayal of animal protagonists and their adventures is strongly defined by animal psychology.

The article offers a comparative analysis of two poems for children:

H. Tumanyan’s The Beetle School [Shkola Zhuka] and K. Ldov’s Master Beetle [Gospodin uchitel Zhuk]. The study demonstrates that Tumanyan offers his own liberal retelling of the other poet’s work. The Beetle School uses the Armenian alphabet to make up a poetic narrative and interrupts itself to address the pupils. However, these reprimands do not follow Ldov’s pattern, but instead provide ironic remarks about the realia contained in the text. The scholars argue that The Beetle School reveals the heated debates that occupied Tumanyan’s mind at the time, such as his dispute with A. Arakelyan. According to the article, the attacks of the poem are levied by the beetle/teacher to the insect/students.

The interview with V. Zubareva discusses her innovative monograph that analyzes A. Pushkin’s oeuvre from the viewpoint of A. Veselovsky’s ‘countercurrent’ theory. Her principal objective is to prove that Pushkin’s texts (Eugene Onegin [Evgeny Onegin], Tales of Belkin [Povesti Belkina], The Queen of Spades [Pikovaya dama], Boris Godunov, Little Tragedies [Malenkie tragedii], and The Tale of the Dead Princess [Skazka o myortvoy tsarevne]), far from being imitations, constitute an original synthesis that shapes the ‘literature of reality.’ Veselovsky’s methodology offers a new view of the nature of borrowings and helps identify an artistic response to them, which is determined by a national literary tradition. The key message of the interview and the book alike is that Pushkin, while utilizing elements of Western genres, creatively transforms them in the sense of the ‘countercurrent’ of the national tradition and his own aesthetic agenda. This resulted in a new artistic paradigm: the ‘literature of reality.’ 

This study explores the patterns defining Galich’s artistic self-identification with the ideal of Pushkin’s fate. The scholar shows that declarations of filial loyalty to Russia disguise an apocryphal interpretation of the ‘inner’ Pushkin theme. An example of such а statement can be found in A Study in Nostalgia [Opyt nostalgii] (1973), a poem intended to be sung. The poem’s reconstructed subtexts allow for the following interpretation: the exiled poet believes to have strayed from the poet’s ideal fate — a trip to the Black River, a Russian Calvary. During the period immediately before his emigration, when his status of a persecuted poet suited the actualization of the tragic version of the Pushkin myth, Galich realized that any symbolic identification with Pushkin had become forbidden. The contrast between the two poets, both Alexanders, is only somewhat attenuated in another sung poem, When I Come Back [Kogda ya vernus]. 

Everyday life almost inevitably spills over into fiction written in the late 18th — early 20th centuries. Its role is not limited to useful props around the protagonists, elements of a mise-en-scène, or a means to make fictional situations look more realistic. It is not uncommon for the mundane to have a direct or implicit effect on the plot or the hero’s mental and physical health, or even their life and death. Writers typically assume that contemporaries would be aware of the environmental conditions, conventions of dwelling hygiene, indoor lighting, and the problems of water supply. Not particularly interesting as such, these aspects of everyday life become relevant in their connection to the story and the life and actions of the characters. While their contemporaries remained oblivious of certain risk factors (chemical contamination, the ways infectious diseases are transmitted, etc.), the more observant and perceptive writers (not all of them adherents of Realism) took note of such issues, which facilitated improvements of home hygiene. The article contains a detailed analysis of the most fraught areas of domestic existence through the prism of literary fiction of the 18th — early 20th centuries.

The article sets out to reconstruct the Cinderella story along the lines of the changing scholarly hypotheses about the subject. The study considers theories about the origin and development of the Cinderella plot found in writings by A. Veselovsky, A. Lang, M. R. Cox, and R. Nazirov. The principal difficulty in the study of the Cinderella story is the insurmountable challenge of establishing the time of its emergence in world folklore and its exact place of origin. Relying on the analyses of the Cinderella tale produced by the mentioned scholars, as well as existing studies of the plot and its essential elements by various scholars of folklore and anthropologists, the author traces the evolution of the Cinderella story from its putative origin in oral tradition to interpretations in modern literature. Drawing on the findings of her predecessors, O. Pospelova proceeds to reconstruct the evolution of the Cinderella tale from a solar myth about  a goddess of the dawn into a domestic fairytale and an initiation narrative. The story was further developed in novels of various genres, compelling the reader to reflect on the problem of social and gender inequality.

The article is devoted to Denis Diderot’s Salons, which laid the foundations of art criticism, one of the biggest gifts of the French Enlightenment to world culture. The paper provides a brief overview of the history of the salon as a genre that appealed to many French writers (Stendhal, T. Gautier, C. Baudelaire, and É. Zola). Like Diderot, they would weaponize their descriptions of paintings and sculptures for a polemic  against the outmoded and in favour of a sweeping renewal of art. The scholar considers Diderot’s evolution as an art critic: he becomes increasingly proficient in the subject, offering informed analyses of aesthetic categories such as harmony, composition, symmetry, colouring, and drawing. The article dwells on the dialogic style of Salons — a quality that famously typifies Diderot’s entire output. His critical verdicts proved accurate over time: his opponents have faded into obscurity, while the contributions of the artists he championed (Greuze, Chardin, and David, among others) are recognized to this day. The philosopher himself considered Salons his best work, making these reviews an invaluable reference for better understanding Diderot’s philosophical and aesthetic creed.

The essay is concerned with Ovid’s biography and poetics. The author argues that Latin literature owes this supreme poet of antiquity an unsurpassed debt and suggests that Ovid’s exile may have been a hoax contrived to accommodate his creative agenda. The scholar questions the narrative of an exiled Ovid languishing and ultimately perishing far from Rome, in Tomis, on what is today the Black Sea coast of Romania. Could he have simply devised his ostensibly forced departure, glossing over the veracity of its reasons and circumstances? Exploring this hypothesis, Anikin considers Ovid’s relationship with the princeps Augustus, as well as the poet’s role in Latin poetry. He finds that Ovid outlived Octavian so that the end of Rome’s Golden Age was marked by the death of a poet rather than that of an emperor. Overall, the article is less of a study of Ovid’s biography and more of an attempt to present it as the background of a discourse on art. The paper proceeds to discuss Metamorphoses, Ars Amatoria, and Remedia Amoris, supplying each with a concise characterization and pointing out the relevance of Ovid’s poetics in our time. 

The paper contains a hitherto unpublished letter written by A. Losev  to D. Maksimov, an Alexander Blok scholar, in 1975. The epistle comes as  a reply to Maksimov’s inquiry about the philosophical origins of two of Blok’s concepts: the idea of the ‘spiral-shaped’ path of his artistic journey and that of ‘eternal recurrence.’ The latter features prominently in Maksimov’s monograph Blok’s Poetry and Prose [Poeziya i proza Al. Bloka] (1975). The concept of the ‘spiral-shaped’ trajectory is considered in his article, On the Spiral-Shaped Path of Evolution in Literature (Towards the Study of A. Blok’s Evolution) [O spiraleobraznykh formakh razvitiya literatury (K voprosu ob evolyutsii A. Bloka)] (1976). A comparison between Maksimov’s article and Losev’s letter included in this publication shows how the literary critic builds up on Losev’s suggestions and criticisms. Losev also emphasizes the importance of antique remini scences, but his detailed explanation of this point remains largely unaddressed by Maksimov.

The author of the book began her exploration of the theoretical oeuvre left by the pre-eminent Russian philologist

1. Veselovsky with her article, Re-reading

A. Veselovsky in the 21st Century [Perechityvaya A. Veselovskogo v XXI veke],  where she successfully applied the fundamentals of a general theory of systems to Veselovsky’s output. In her new book, V. Zubareva sets out to demonstrate the scope of the practical application of Veselovsky’s ideas by analyzing Pushkin’s texts. The book’s innovative method seeks to “combine the interpretative approaches to Pushkin and Veselovsky and thus identify the single extent of a metatext, corroborated by artistic logic” (quoted from the blurb). The book’s four sections adopt various angles to detect and observe, across the interpretational field of specific Pushkin works, the functioning of the concepts of ‘countercurrent,’ the poetics of the plot, borrowing and imitation,  a separate ‘vital ideology’ of art, the artist’s apperception, and the syncretism and differentiation of poetic forms. 

The review deals with the first volume in a new scholarly series Emigrantica. This collection not merely covers various aspects of Russian emigration but introduces ‘emigrantica’ as a separate field of study incorporating literary, historical, philosophical, and journalistic research. The contributors include renowned Russian scholars and Slavicists from other countries whose works explore the many facets of the three waves of Russian emigration. The papers cover both traditional problems, such as philology (textual criticism in Russian émigré literature and methods of literary criticism), as well as cross-disciplinary subjects (interactions between various generations of émigrés, the cultural conflict and mutual cultural influence between the Russian émigré community and the home country). Each study draws on archival documents or a historical-literary context, with some papers outlining the prospects of studying emigration as a unique phenomenon. 

A new collection of M. Kvyatkovskaya’s poetic translations spans over five decades and includes verses rendered from the Castilian, Latin American, Portuguese, Catalan, and Galician poetic traditions. The book is structured chronologically, geographically, and by language. The anthology comprises translated works of Ibero-American poets from the Golden Age to Modernism, selected Catalan and

Galician poems, as well as a rendering of La Gran Sultana, Cervantes’s comedy in verse. The book showcases Kvyatkovskaya’s  unparalleled skill: it shines in the  translation of texts defined by formal and stylistic complexity, such as Baroque and Modernist poetry, meditative and burlesque lyric from various traditions and ages, and the Spanish polymetric drama. Composed of translations that appeared in various editions over a period spanning more than fifty years, this book will provide an indispensable resource for anyone interested in European poetry. 

The review is devoted to  a memoir by the pre-eminent contemporary translator of French prose, Natalia Mavlevich, who writes about her life and method. The first part features Mavlevich’s early steps in the trade: the university and the professors and colleagues who encouraged her interest in translation and shared helpful strategies and insights. In the second part, Mavlevich details her work on favourite translations: Comte de Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror, Marc Chagall’s Ma Vie, plays by Eugène Ionesco’s, Louis Aragon’s La Mise à mort, Émile Ajar’s (Romain Gary’s) Gros câlin, Valère Novarina’s L’Opérette imaginaire, Philippe Delerm’s ‘happiness vitamins,’ the diary of Hélène Berr, a girl who died in a Nazi concentration camp, and Montaigne’s Journal de voyage en Italie. Mavlevich shows deference, love, and a sense of humour in her reminiscences about L. Lungina, E. Khalifman, N. Naumov, Y. Yakhnina, A. Revich, K. Tsurinov, and G. Kosikov. This markedly optimistic, concise, and straightforward memoir is a testament to what an arduous and exciting task translation is: the art of building seamless bridges across cultures. 

The article responds to Jam from Fallen Fruit [Varenie iz padalitsy], the book by the poet and critic Aleksey Alyokhin, best known as a founder and editor-in-chief of the poetry magazine Arion (1994–2019). With entries spanning the decades between 1968 and 2020, this literary diary is examined in the context of the vogue for short essay writing prevalent among Russian poets. The book is compared to Vladimir Gandelsman’s Notebooks for Future Use [Zapasnye knizhki] (2022) and Marina Kudimova’s A Phobia of Long Words [Fobiya dlinnykh slov] (2023). The author points out that, despite their dissimilarities, all three poets represent the same generation (with birthdates in the late 1940s and early 1950s), whose worldview had matured before the advent of social media. Jam from Fallen Fruit is marked by the sort of unhurried intonation and highly concentrated statement that has become rare in our age of online journals. Various extracts, though written years apart, can be put together as a jigsaw puzzle, forming a new text. The book seems to invite the reader’s active collaboration: everyone can co-author a unique narrative.