Volume 15, 2017 year

There are two great questions raised in Russian literature of the 19th century – “Who is to blame?” by A. I. Herzen and “What shall we do?” by N. G. Chernyshevsky. This article for the first time draws attention to the third great spiritual and ethic question of Russian literature – “what men live by?”. It was raised and answered by Leo Tolstoy in his short story “What men live by” (1881). A religious crisis the writer was undergoing while writing the story did not impede his discovering the truth by the fallen angel Michael: “there is love in men”, Man is not able to know his future, “each person lives not by self-concern but by love”. Individual welfare is manifested in global welfare. Analysis of moral and ethic problems of this parabolic story reveals the affirmation of supernatural and consecrated reality in life of the mankind, a chance for salvation by praying. Peculiarities of realism and psychologism, man’s soul dialectics, genre specificity of Tolstoy’s story of his late period are revealed in the article.

Keywords: patristic truth, Tolstoy’s late works, realism, psychologism, love of people, labour, angel, human unknowing, sacral character, miracle

Text (russian)

References

In the 18th–19th centuries, attempts to appropriate folklore heroes and genres in literature were made. One of such literary works was N. A. Radishchev’s poem (1801) where the epic hero Churila Plenkovich became a character. Imitating the folkloric and literary tradition (Homer, Virgil, Ariosto, Voltaire, Wieland, V. A. Levshin, I. P. Bogdanovich), the author combined the images and motives of such genres as bylina (Russian epic song), fairy and literary tale, heroic and comic poem in his work. Using the storyline and retaining the main motives of Levshin’s tale, the poet added mythological and fairy images (Zmey Gorynych (dragon), Yaga, Lel’ (Lel’o), Lada) to his writing, supplemented the narrative with new motives, and gave justifications for the heroes’ actions. Radishchev created literary heroes using fairytale types; he showed their sufferings, emotions and feelings. Radishchev’s Churila lost all features of the bogatyr. He is a literary hero — a handsome, good-looking, ardent and sensitive young man. Prelepa and Yaga have fallen in love with him. His feats represent a plot of romance and adventure novel; his heroic deeds are inspired by Lel’o, a god of love who gives the bogatyr strength. As a result of these transformations, an original fabulous plot and genre of the literary work appeared. The writer is precise in his defining: his Churila is a character of the epic story in verse based on folkloric and literary tale.

Keywords: N. A. Radischev, Churila Plenkovich, epic, povest’, faire tale, transformation of genres, plot, bogatyr, space, literary hero, character

Text (russian)

References

The article presents the characteristics of personal names from four Gogol’s stories of the series “Mirgorod” (1835). It is based on the interpretation of common Slavic Christian names in their Ukrainian and Russian versions according to the word books and a list of “names given at the time of baptism” contained in the “Book of sundries” by young Gogol. The research leads to the conclusion that a system of male and female names in each story reflects the views of the author on the nature and types of his heroes, on their society and era, as well as on their relationship with biblical, ancient and medieval times, with nature around them. Giving a name to his character, the author took into account the phonetic and semantic structure of the anthroponym, its direct and connotative meanings (as well as contradictions between them), its semantic ties, popularity, belonging to a specific social category and/or a personality type, a historical or mythological character.

Keywords: Gogol's creativity, Christian imenoslov, the form and meaning of the personal names, the Dialogue of Cultures, the book “Mirgorod” (1835)

Text (russian)

References

In Tolstoy’s stories of the 1870s the coloratives have negative semantics. In “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” the yellow color “implicates” a movement to death. In “The Kreutzer Sonata” this color aggravates Pozdnyshev’s moral sufferings and embodies deception and lust. In “The Devil” the description of Lisa’s yellow complexion reveals Irtenev’s negative attitude to her. In “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” the pink and green cretonne of a “fashionable” living room loses its grandiosity in the house of the deceased man. In “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” the white color of clothes initially associated by the character with confidence in the future, then resulted in the patient’s dislike and was seen as evidence of inconsiderateness of people. In “The Kreutzer Sonata” the white color, in Trukhachevsky’s portrait, turned Pozdnyshev against him even more. In “The Devil” the white color Lisa was accompanied with provoked the growth of Irtenev’s irritation. In “The Kreutzer Sonata” the semantics of the red color is disturbing, ominous, and associated with debauchery and lie. In “The Devil” the description of the red clothes replaces the portrait characteristics of Stepanida; for Irtenev the red panyova and the red headscarf of his mistress became the symbols of the devilish temptation. In “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” the black color, being an attribute of mental and physical illness of the character, began to correspond to the image of a black sack devouring the person. In “The Kreutzer Sonata” an infernal black and red color scale contributes to the presentiment of tragedy. In “The Devil” the black color discovers Irtenev’s increasing dependence on delusion. In “The Kreutzer Sonata” the coloratives with the root “light” are related to Pozdnyshev’s insight concerning his family life, based on deception. In “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” “light” liberates the character of death anxiety and grants him a joy of interfluence with the world. In the given stories of Tolstoy there is presented color writing not a color code. Not all the coloratives fulfill a descriptive and prospective functions.

Keywords: coloratives, light coloratives, color writing, color code, Tolstoy

Text (russian)

References

This article is devoted to the problem of resurrection which was widely spread in Silver age philosophy and literature. Basing on the New Testament, Russian philosophers N. Fyodorov and V. Solovyov associated the resurrection process with improvement of the nature and unification of the humankind. Leonid Andreev saw the consequences of returning from the nothingness to the real world in a different way. The attempts of resurrection (Vasily Fiveisky) and the resurrection itself (Eleasar) were seen by him as a tragedy of the personality. Fiveisky who believed to be the God’s elect did not manage to repeat the miracle of Jesus — to resurrect Semion Mosyagin, and that became the reason for the character’s madness and death. The resurrection of Lasarus, who saw death and overcame it, is represented by Andreev as a tragedy for both the resurrected and all the people he came in contact with after his returning from the beyond. The notion of a time limit and its understanding help people keep the freshness of their feelings and thoughts, to limit their lives by the moral categories, to enjoy every moment of their secular life.

Keywords: philosophy, literature, New Testament, Leonid Andreev, resurrection motif, time, space, tragedy

Text (russian)

References

The article is dedicated to the poetics of Shmelev’s story’s title “The Hidden Face”. The ideological and thematic aspects of the title, that develop story’s fiction structure of the writing are exposed to analysis. The story got its final title in the last, second, manuscript edition (its previous title was “Furlough”). The writer accentuates the character’s inner, radical crisis of consciousness, rather than external events. This intention manifests itself in the ideological structure of artistic images: the characters’ philosophy is based on the principle “thesis — antithesis — synthesis”. However, there is another viewpoint, that prevails over others and comes out of this system of immanent relations and theoretical judgments of the characters — the Orthodox one. In the text there are several semantic levels of an image system of the story that are kept current in the concepts of “holy face”, “face” and “mask”. The “hidden face” is nothing more than God’s image, contained in every human being, in other words, his true, original nature. Thus, in the title of the story the author’s idea of Shmelev is revealed.

Keywords: Ivan Shmelev, “The Hidden Face”, history of the text, manuscript editions, poetics of story’s title, being, daily life, “holy face”, “face”

Text (russian)

References

The author of the article analyses the interpretation of the gospel episode of the Crucifixion of Christ in the story “The Last Temptation” by A. Kondratiev. The research asserts that the writer follows the variants of the New Testament story presented in the Gospel of Luke and John, and considers the initial events as Christian myths that can be recreated in Art. A. Kondratiev changes the perspective of the event and shows it through the eyes of the spirit of the Devil’s army. The episode of the Passion of Christ is presented as a decisive battle between good and evil, that are embodied in the son of Man and the Chosen one (Satan). The outcome of the battle is related to the presence of the third force, a mysterious Arab criminal, whose attitude the result of the battle depends on. The writer interprets the legend of a sensible robber and a mad robber in his own way, turning these minor characters into protagonists. The story contains allusions to the apocryphal “Gospel of Nicodemus”, “The Arabic Gospel of the infancy of the Savior”, and direct quotations from Testament texts. A. Kondratiev adds the motive of a cosmic battle between Light and darkness to the New Testament story, he accentuates the image of the wise thief introducing a key intrigue of the narration, emphasizes the role of this character in the fight between good and evil. The mystery of the character (who is he? what purposes is he pursuing?) produces the innuendo effect, the sense of an unsolved mystery of the Gospel story.

Keywords: The Gospel, Alexander Kondratiev, the image of the Devil, motif, allusion, sensible thief

Text (russian)

References

The article is devoted to analysis of folklore features of A. A. Kondratyev’s novel “On the banks of the Yaryn river”, in particular the influence of poetics of the folk non-fiction prose (folk stories) and fairy-tales on the form and content of this “demonological” novel (as it was characterized by the author himself). It is possible to claim that on the one hand, A. Kondratyev applied here the ethnographic filling of non-fiction stories and on the one hand the laws of formation of a fantastic world of the magic fairy-tale on the other hand. The special attention is paid to a problem of “borders” that is the main law of the magic fairy-tale, a clear distinction between “one’s own” and “someone else’s”. In this novel the Yaryn river serves as a border and seems the contamination of the real Goryn and Yarun rivers and an archetypic image of the River. Besides, one more law of fantastic poetics is considered in the novel. It is the requirement to keep one’s word and not to break a ban, because it is such an infraction that is the engine of a plot of the novel and that leads characters to death, although death in the novel is not the end of life but transition to another state of soul, as far as the characters of the novel can exist in three forms: a man, evil spirits and the undead. In such a manner, the eternity, constancy and basic repeatability of the world “On the banks of the Yaryn river” are formed.

Keywords: A. A. Kondratyev, “On the banks of the Yaryn river”, folk non-fiction prose, fairy tale, poetics, Slavic mythology

Text (russian)

References

The article presents the experience of reinterpretation of the novel of V. Y. Shishkov as the phenomenon of “spiritual realism”, from the point of view of identifying the role and functions of biblical symbolism and imagery in its artistic system. Biblical symbolism pervades the narration, manifesting itself both at the level of the semantics of names and imagery, and in a three-part compositional structure of the novel that conveys the author’s idea — the movement of the characters from the darkness of the underworld to the light. Life of the homeless children is depicted by the author as the “dark world”, “antiworld”, which disfigures all the concepts ontologically important for Man. The idea of spiritual commonality is replaced by the thieves brotherhood, the life of street children under the inverted barge turns into a hideous parody of monastic life, the place of the Virgin in this world is given to a prostitute girl Mashka nicknamed May Flower. In the plot of the story the motifs of the Apocalypse (destruction of the old world) and of the prodigal son in the heroes’ life stories who undergo transformations take place in parallel. The interpretation of biblical symbols, which saturated Shishkov’s novel “The Wanderers” brings new connotations, still unrevealed in literature studies, that reside in the content of this work.

Keywords: symbol, allusion, parody, apocalyptic motif, the transformation of the prodigal son

Text (russian)

References