2020 Issue №2

In his allegorical travel novel, Clive Staples Lewis tells the story of a hu¬man soul wandering in search for god. The medieval form of the allegorical novel helps the author to speak plainly about complex things: he explores the cultur¬al attitudes of a 20th-century person from the perspective of the Christ-centric axiological system of the Middle Ages. This article considers Lewis’s novel as a complicated intertext, which both serves as a palimpsest of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and enters into dialogue with it. The study identifies the pre-texts of Lewis’s intertextual novel. The interrelation between Lewis’s and Bunyan’s texts, which is shaped by differences between the cultural and religious attitudes of the two authors, is analysed.

The novel by the famous Soviet science fiction writer is analysed in the context of evangelical allusions and connotations. Biblical references in the text suggest a link between one of the main characters, the boy Astr, and the image of Christ. Although well in line with the anthropology of enlighten-ment, the idea of the salvation of the universe, which is central to the plot of the novel, and the image of the saviour, the child that is ‘not of this world’, are counterposed to Christian philosophy.

Georges Perec is a French author, literary experimenter, and member of the Oulipo group, whose works are strongly influenced by pictorial art. This paper explores various ways in which pictorial art affects the plots, style, lan¬guage, structure, and composition of Perec’s poetics. It is argued that the three most important functions of visual art in Perec’s prose are plot-forming, structural, and conceptual-stylistic ones.

A comparison of two original versions of the legend of Orpheus and Eu-rydice, the rock opera Orpheus and Eurydice (1975) and A Hip-Hopera: Orpheus & Eurydice (2018), shows how contemporary mass culture revives and deconstructs the ancient mythological pre-text, which lays a foundation for aesthetic legitimation of rock and hip-hop lyrics and their inclusion in a greater cultural context. The study explores the forms of representation of Orpheus’s dual semantics as the archetypical poet and musician as well as of the general motifs of temptation/seduction and selling one’s soul. It is established that, perceived as a single source of meanings and plots, the myth encourages the musical and poetical culture of the 20th/early 21st centuries to exploit deep¬er levels of the mythological metasystem and to build new cultural mythologies. Contemporary artists transform the traditional models of mythical think¬ing, having placed them into current sociocultural contexts.

This article is devoted to the last, posthumously published, book by Ja-nusz Głowacki – the collection of essays Bezsenność w czasie karnawałui. The focus is on the texts that were translated and published in Russian. They are compared to essays comprising another book by Głowacki, Z głowy, which resembles Bezsenność in terms of genre. The works of the author are considered in the context of 20th-century European history from World War II to the present day as well as of Głowacki’s biography, worldview, ideology, aesthetics, and poetics.