This article attempts to identify the dominant oriental hetero-images of the eighteenth-century English essays. It deals with the imagological structures of the oriental essay, by means of which the author outlines the main oriental constructs on the Englishmen’s «mental map» as artistic methods of opening up the literary space of the era.
This article analyzes the opposition of open and enclosed space in the novels of Jena and Heidelberg romantics, considering its relation to the problems of artist’s personality and freedoms. An analysis of similar space images used by several authors shows how the tradition was reinterpreted at different stages of romantic thought. Stepping out into the open, which expresses liberation from limitations imposed on the individual, is one of the key motives in the novels of Jena period, while the Heidelberg novel stresses the positive value of “limits”.
This article compares the poetics of two works by Hesse and Frisch brought together by a similar topic and complex of motives up to identical plot elements. It is shown that the problem of self-identification is solved differently by two writers: Hesse’s solution lies in Klein’s rejection of the role and mask of Wagner, which was imposed on him by the society, through a voluntary death, whereas Frisch’s character Stiller faces desolation and shows outward acceptance of his name and role still rejecting them inside.
The parabolic works of F. Kafka and F. Dostoevsky are compared in the ideational context of the 20th century philosophy in relation to different philosophical interpretations of sin and crime. The ideal world of these works is considered in the light of sociocultural experience of totalitarian system, its later analysis and overcoming. The author address the writers’ interest in the psychological determination of enslavement and the unconscious mechanism of rejecting freedom.
The author focuses on the response to the short stories of the Latvian writer Rudolf Blaumanis within the intertextual space of literature. Blaumanis’s short stories are considered as pre-texts for the works of H. Sudermann, Ch. Aitmatov, and V. Astafyev. The author analyses the logic and forms of interaction between texts in the literary era in question.
Peter Handke’s novel is considered in the context of a change of eras in European and German art. The results of the study is the identification of the aesthetic characteristics of the writer’s prose that exhibits the features of both modernist and postmodernist poetics reflecting the general historical and literary pattern that has become the focus of current discussions.
This article analyses the books of the Polish writer Maria Danilewicz-Zielińska The fado of my life and Essays on literary emigration. The author focuses on Danilewicz-Zielińska’s recollections and criticism of the members of the Skamander group: Julian Tuwim, Jan Lechoń, Kazimierz Wierzyński, Stanisław Baliński, etc. The article explores the logic of the writer’s assessments of her contemporaries and emphasises the historical significance of Danilewicz-Zielińska’s memoirs.
The body is considered as a spatial structure that serves in M. Tsvetaeva’s poetics as a form of spatial “exploration” of the world. The authors describe the functioning of the body image as a model juxtaposed with the structure of universe, on the one hand, and the being of the poet, on the other. The article explores the connection between this model and the image of Sybilmountain-cave-tree as a hollow body “inhabited” by God and the problem of overcoming the corporeal and achieving the true, out-of-body being.