The article discusses B. Yekimov’s short story Underneath a Tall Cross [Pod vysokim krestom], an attempt to interpret the ordeal of the Great Patriotic War through the experiences of the Atarshchikov farmworker family. Of the story’s two plotlines, one is concerned with the events of the year 2004, marked by preparations for the sixtieth anniversary of the 1945 Victory Day. The other evokes memories of 1942, known to the protagonist, the young cowherd Ivan, mainly from his relatives’ recollections. Following an encounter with grave robbers, Ivan relives his family’s history, including the construction of temporary wooden crosses over the mass graves of soldiers killed in the Volgograd region. The scholar also traces the connection between Yekimov’s story and documented reminiscences of the Battle of Stalingrad (such as Marshal Yeryomenko’s memoir and testimonies of occupation survivors) as well as P. Seleznyov’s novel Southern Cross [Yuzhniy krest]. Perevalova argues that, in Underneath a Tall Cross, Yekimov engages in an artistic conversation with the author of Southern Cross, with both writers viewing the cross as a symbol of a spiritual weapon against evil forces of any stripe.

The Great Patriotic War remains a landmark event of 20th-century world history. Armenian poets have not only introduced it in their works but personally fought on its fronts, suffered wounds in its brutal battles, and contributed to the joint effort to crush Nazism. Such veteran poets include A. Saginyan, V. Davtyan, G. Emin, R. Ovanesyan, and others. The poet T. Gurian lost his life in 1942 during the Siege of Sevastopol. The article explores the poets’ biographies, recounting facts otherwise barely known to a broad audience, and analyzes their work devoted to events of World War II, including the French Resistance, the relationship between Russians and Armenians in the 1940s, concrete military operations, etc. Quoting Armenian poets, the author provides excellent Russian translations of their verse by V. Zvyagintseva, M. Petrovykh, and O. Chukhontsev. In her study of these texts, the scholar finds that the literary legacy of Armenian wartime poetry lives on as a source of lessons taught by history, core moral principles, and preservation of cultural identity.

The article examines the diaries of the German philologist Victor Klemperer, which contain his reflections on historical and social transformations in Nazi Germany, events in the private lives of the Klemperer family, as well as his reflections upon the modifications of the German language enforced by the new ideology. Klemperer’s reminiscences entitled I Shall Bear Witness, To the Bitter End [Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum Letzten] are considered along with his The Language of the Third Reich: A Philologist’s Notebook [Lingua Tertii Imperii: Notizbuch eines Philologen]. The paper demonstrates Klemperer’s use of intralingual translation to describe a model of linguistic dominance and expansion within a single culture. Klemperer’s linguistic experiment is assessed within its contemporary context: the linguistic and comparative studies by K. Vossler, L. Spitzer, and E. Auerbach, as well as in the context of the university life in 1930s Germany with its complicated turns and circum- stances that resulted in both external and internal emigration of scholars and writers.

The study examines the history of the first publication of M. Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita [Master i Margarita] in the journal Moskva and analyzes the reasons for this and subsequent Soviet publications of the novel to go through. The scholar also addresses the underlying factors of the book’s infrequent publications and low print run. Citing the cultural and historical context of the second half of the 1960s and early 1970s, Y. Bit-Yunan successfully argues that such a publishing pattern was politically motivated. The first edition was made possible by a short-lived easing of censorship at the start of L. Brezhnev’s rule. The 1969 détente, aimed at building a more personal partnership with US, French, and West German leaders, prompted the novel’s second publication in the 1970s. Conversely, the main reason preventing republication of The Master and Margarita was increasingly more restrictive Soviet internal politics in response to the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars

The article discusses M. Elizarov’s novel Cartoons [Multiki] set in 1980s–1990s Russia. Due to its ambivalence and Elizarov’s signature total eclecticism and allusiveness, the novel is viewed as a receptional puzzle that Yamina sets out to solve. She suggests that the key device shaping the novel is provided by the topographical and symbolic opposition of Krasnoslavsk, the city where the protagonist spends his formative years coinciding with the final throes of the Soviet Union, to ‘the City of N,’ an illustration of the USSR sliding into something nameless and presumably terrifying that destroys families and lives. Soviet realia receive an ambivalent implementation: on the one hand, the Union is shown as a sacred image of a guarding angel, who watches over the heroes and repels evil. On the other hand, it symbolizes mystical kabbalistic knowledge passed on from a tutor to a teenage student, turning the latter into a true fighter and arming him to fight the capitalist world.

The paper reviews two contemporary novels published in 2026: S. Shargunov’s Son of a Priest [Popovich] and B. Peygin’s Next One [Sleduyushchy]. Stylistically different, both books, however, deal with a coming-of-age story — a popular theme these days. Both authors engage in experimentation with traditional canons as well as the now widespread cliché of trauma fiction. In Shargunov’s book, for example, we see the classical story of a child’s soul growing to maturity transformed into an exciting psychological quest that allows for an insight into the events from a teenager’s viewpoint, with his yearning for freedom, as well as through the eyes of a more mature protagonist, who has realized that freedom has to be earned. Peygin, for his part, decides on linguistic and stylistic experiments that result in a successful depiction of a teenager’s warped, intense, and hyper-stressed conscience, inhabited by figures of authority from school and book characters alike. Shargunov’s and Peygin’s novels demonstrate the appropriation of the principles of young adult fiction by ‘grown-up’ literature, exemplified by the rising popularity of a teenage protagonist.

The paper considers the characteristics of the verse penned by the Russian poet Ksenia Nekrasova (1912–1958) that define the unique artistic world of her poetry. The scholars devote special attention to the role of the visual nature of her poems and the principal differences between ‘verbal painting’ and visual representations as such. In addition, the study analyzes the characteristic features of subjective organization and the personification devices that feature in Nekrasova’s texts as a form of man’s harmony with immediate environment. The study suggests that, along with the remarkable characteristics of her poetry, including a syncretic worldview, a spontaneity of poetics, and heteromorphic verse, Nekrasova’s oeuvre remains compelling due to the fact that words are predominantly a means, and not the subject of, depiction. Hence a common, though misguided, perception that her poems are ‘badly made’ and lack skill. Nekrasova’s poetic world is what we see, observe, and reflect upon.

The study examines the composition of A. de Saint-Exupéry’s unfinished novel The Wisdom of the Sands [Citadelle] through the prism of M. Mamardashvili’s ideas about the poetics of ‘productive’ literary texts he referred to as ‘meaning-shaping machines.’ At the time of Saint-Exupéry’s death, the novel existed as a collection of random fragments, their order determined later and in the absence of the novelist’s instructions. Mamardashvili’s concept helps to recognize a special form of aesthetic accomplishment in the book’s unfinished nature. As a ‘productive product,’ the text evokes a certain state of consciousness. Such works of literature possess the following poetic traits: unfinishedness, a fragmentary nature, non-linear narrative, a very high word count, musicality (a leitmotif-driven structure), a unique subjective structure, and the narrator’s meta-reflection. The Wisdom of the Sands is interpreted as a circuitous history of the Berber king’s ideas about the concept of a ‘divine knot that ties everything together.’ The concept multiplies through its variations, extending to the system of characters and perceived at a meta-level. The purpose of such meditations is to encounter the concept in the narrator’s, author’s, and reader’s personal experiences.

On the chronological list of the foremost comparatists — after Curtius, Auerbach and ahead of Guillén, Casanova, Moretti, Damrosch — one comes across the name of the Slovak scholar Dionýz Ďurišin (1929–1996). On this list he represents the 1970s–1980s. He has been widely translated into European languages since the publication of his early Theory of Literary Comparatistics (1975). ‘Theory’ was not the word that readily agreed with comparative study from its positivist beginning, but after its ‘crisis’ in the 1950s, comparatistics was in search for theory. Ďurišin’s book was received as the first attempt in this direction. From the scholar based in socialist Slovakia it was natural to expect good acquaintance with the Russian tradition of literary study. Ďurišin lavishly drew on Viktor Zhirmunsky and via his work on Aleksandr Veselovsky’s historical poetics. This basis allowed him to move towards building up a comparative theory looked for in his time. Thus, Ďurišin’s achievement is considered important as a lead to problematize such notions as ‘world literature,’ and to make a pioneering attempt to classify and systematize comparative study.

The article gleans testimonies of Pavel Muratov’s emigrant days in 1920s Berlin (1922–1923), a city Gleb Struve called the ‘literary capital’ of the early 1920s Russian emigrant community. M. Böhmig describes Muratov’s circle of friends and literary connections, his role in several Berlin-based Russian cultural projects (the Writer’s Club, the Russian Scholarly Institute, and the House of Arts), as well as his collaborations with Andrey Bely’s literary almanac Epopeya and M. Gorky’s journal Beseda. The study offers an overview of Muratov’s output printed by the recently relocated Russian-language publishers Helikon and Izdatelstvo Z. I. Grzhebina in the years 1922–1923. The author devotes considerable attention to Muratov’s novel Egeria and its reception by the Russian émigré press, as well as Muratov’s studies of art history, including an essay on Cézanne’s life and work. Recognizing his talent and erudition, many of his reviewers nonetheless agreed that Muratov was a writer out of step with the times and outside the canon of Russian literary tradition.

The article focuses on one of K. Simonov’s final and unfinished works, the play An Evening of Reminiscences [Vecher vospominaniy]. Mentioned only briefly in existing studies of literature, this play now undergoes meticulous analysis. Among other aspects, the author examines its relation to Simonov’s other play The Fourth [Chetvyortiy], as well as works by Western playwrights, particularly J. B. Priestley and A. Miller. Quoting extensively from the play, the scholar hypothesizes that the cited extracts are united by a common plot: to show Simonov from the viewpoint of his four identities, or ‘egos’ (pre-war Simonov, Simonov during the war, Simonov during Stalin’s dictatorship, and, finally, Simonov in the last years of his life). Importantly, the study attempts to tie the plot turns of the play to the actual conflicts of Simonov’s life. His love for V. Serova, relationship with the youngest daughter, and thoughts about Stalin’s political repressions constitute the themes that preoccupy the protagonist of An Evening of Reminiscences as well as the real Simonov. The scholar argues that the analyzed play serves as a prelude to Simonov’s posthumous memoir Through the Eyes of My Generation [Glazami cheloveka moego pokoleniya], published years after his death.

The reviewed monograph is concerned with the problems of the reception of M. Bakhtin’s personality and ideas in the period from the 1910s to 2020s. Along with chapters containing overviews of Bakhtin’s life in the context of reception, summaries of late 1920s — early 1930s response to his Problems of Dostoevsky’s Creative Art [Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo], as well as views of his other works in the 1940s–1970s and post-Soviet era, the study features personalized trajectories of Bakhtin’s reception by Soviet philologists and philosophers (L. Pinsky, G. Fridlender, V. Kirpotin, M. Lifshits, A. Losev, etc.). The contributors to The Bakhtin Encyclopaedia not only introduce new scholarly sources, disprove long-standing myths, and add important nuances to well-known facts, but also suggest new directions of Bakhtin studies. The book is aimed at those interested in 20th-century Russian intellectual history and the current problems of the humanities.

The review discusses a co-authored monograph by scholars from the Gorky Institute of World Literature of the RAS. The book is concerned with the problems of cultural transfer, multilingualism, back-translation, inversions of meaning, and the common space of world culture and history. The monograph offers compelling arguments in favour of combining the methods of historical and comparative studies of literature, hermeneutics and pragmatics, the use of back-translation of a text into the language of its native historical period, and an unbiased assessment from the modern view-point. Each of the articles offers plenty of opportunity to learn, if only from its imperfections. With the example of M. Cherkashina’s study, the reviewer suggests that the discussion of the relevance of back-translation would be more meaningful if, instead of the frequently analyzed S. Marshak translations of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the scholar had considered the latest collection of the Bard’s sonnets prepared by I. Shaytanov (2022). This publication features an innovative structure and approach, resulting in a practical synthesis of the ideas of back-translation and cultural transfer.

The review considers a corrected edition of Z. Kirnoze’s classic monograph on the French novel in the 20th century. The study features a detailed examination of the shift from “the novel about private life to the novel about social life.” The scholar analyzes works by French writers renowned in Russia: A. Gide, F. Mauriac, R. Martin du Gard, and G. Bernanos, and alongside them the lesser-known J. Green, M. Jouhandeau, and J. de Lacretelle, who are still counted among the classics of 20th-century French literature.

The review considers a collection of papers dedicated to the memory of A. Kofman and discussing his versatile scholarly interests. A book celebrating the memory of a scholar belongs to a genre both melancholy and challenging. On the one hand, the goal is to venerate their memory and preserve the precious knowledge gleaned from reading their work, conversing with them, or enjoying a yearslong personal friendship. On the other hand, research is a forward-thinking occupation: one has to continue alongside, on the basis of, or in opposition to, the mentor’s ideas. Finally, the hardest task of all is to compile a semantically harmonious collection out of papers whose authors pursue diverse research topics. While over-coming the first two challenges, the editors were not as successful in combining diversely themed studies under the same cover. However, the overall logic of the collection is clearly identifiable and driven by the desire to create a worthy testament of the mentor’s life and work.