Dispute about Holbein as a dispute about faith: discussion around Fedor Dostoevsky’s novel ‘The Idiot’
The article is devoted to the controversy around the painting by Hans Holbein the Younger "Christ in the tomb" and the novel "The Idiot" by Fedor Dostoevsky, where this picture is the central ekphrasis. The aim of the study was to analyze the current trends in the interpretation of Holbein's painting and Dostoevsky's novel, in their relationship with Christian ...
Between faith and disbelief: the theme of life and death in Yu. N. Ivanov’s novel Dances in the Crematory: Ten Episodes from the Life of Königsberg
In exploring the themes of life and death in Yu. N. Ivanov’s novel Dances in the Crematory, I carry out a structural-semantic analysis of the fragmentary chronotope and the ideational- thematic and plot-compositional levels of the novel. I demonstrate that the principle of fragmentarity is utilised by the author ...
City as an explicant of the key concepts in Dostoevsky’s “The Adolescent
... visual metaphors and historical and cultural narratives of the places where he was destined to be, but he also included presciently read city texts in his literary works. This article is aimed to identify those ‘local texts’ of the urban space in the novel “The Adolescent”, which contribute to the reconstruction and representation of its basic concepts. This research affirms the consistency and integrity of the artistic geo-panorama created by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The creation and representation ...
«Nomen est omen»: the role of names in the novel Parade by Nikolay Kononov
The author analyses the role of the main characters’ names — Lev, Lyuda and Arkady — in the novel Parade by N. Kononov. The multilanguage anagrammatic code is chosen as a research technique: anagramming (in some cases with a transition from one language to another) allows the author to identify hidden meanings consciously or subconsciously ...
Semiotic representation of Minsk in Viktor Martinovich’s novel “Mova”
The article aims to reveal the principles of urban space organisation in Viktor Martinovich’s novel “Mova”. Due to the fact that the novel is based on a linguistic problem (the author defines the genre of the novel as a “linguistic thriller”), the representation of the city in the novel is subject to linguistic models and principles. The ...
‘Term memory’ and its varieties in the history of the genre nomination of English novel
The history of interaction between romance and novel reflects the richness and originality of English prose and contemporary theoretical reflections about the novel as a free-form and the semantics of its terminological definitions. This was enshrined in the dual terminological definition of novel ...
The four loves in C.S. Lewis’s novel “Till we have faces”10.5922/vestnikpsy-2025-2-6
The article explores the artistic embodiment of the four types of love that C. S. Lewis discusses in detail in his treatise The Four Loves and in his mythological novel “Till We Have Faces”. Given the centrality of the theme of love in the novel, it is reasonable to assume that in this 1956 work, the author was already artistically reflecting on the ethical and psychological concepts he would later elaborate ...
V. The hagiographic topic in I. S. Shmelev’s novel The Inexhaustible Chalice
In this article, we discuss the hagiographic topics in I. S. Shmelev’s novel The Inexhaustible Chalice, which are expressed through different components of the novel’s literary structure — ranging from the individual traits of the main character, Ilya Sharonov, to twists of the plot and the milestones of his biography....
Functions of words-realities in S. Rushdie’s novel “midnight’s Children”
The article examines the features of the functioning of realia words in the text of Salman Rushdie's novel "Midnight’s Children." The delimitation of the term "realia words" is carried out in its comparison with the concept of "realia." The language specificity of the novel is noted, which consists of intentionally incorporating ...
Genre specificity of V. Maksimov’s novel “Farewell from Nowhere”: to the problem of spiritual tradition
The article analyses the genre of the autobiographical novel by Vl. Maksimova in the context of the spiritual tradition and in connection with the typology of literary heroes. The study reveals closeness of the novel-confession “Farewell from Nowhere” to the semantic form of “confession-deed” (M. ...
Intermedial text modelling: D. Lodge. Nice Work
This article studies the cross-disciplinary interactions – a characteristic feature of modern literature – in the case of the novel Nice Work by a famous contemporary author and literary scholar David Lodge. The analysis is based on Yu. M. Lotman’s concept of polyglotism and M. M. Bakhtin’s and R. Bar-thes’s text theories. A specific feature of D. Lodge’s novel is the ...
Impossible ‘qui pro quo’: Fedor Dostoevsky and Zinaida Gippius (the short story “Ivan Ivanovich and the Devil”)
... Ivanovich and the Devil.” Rooted in a comedic literary device based on misunderstanding and confusion, the ‘qui pro quo principle’ was identified by Rita Kleyman as a key element in the poetics of Fedor Dostoevsky's works, particularly in his novel “The Brothers Karamazov”. Scholars have frequently noted the connection between Gippius's story and Dostoevsky’s novel. However, the presence of another link — the ‘qui pro quo principle’ — has yet to be explored in Gippius's text....
Ironic assessment in Saltykov-Shchedrin’s novel The Golovlyovs
... dependent on the author's attitudes and ideological intentions, negative colouring of ironic evaluation and a high degree of its impact on the reader. The authors identify the basic techniques of expressing ironic assessment in Saltykov-Shchedrin's novel “The Golovlyovs”. The peculiarities of ironic evaluation are analyzed, and the forms of expressing irony are identified. The main techniques of expressing irony in the novel are antiphrasis, unexpected ironic inference from a situation, antithesis,...
The literary revision of Négritude in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop
This article analyses the problems addressed in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop, through the prism of imagology — the study of cultural stereotypes as presented in literature. Within the ideational structure of the novel, the author analyses the theory of négritude, which holds that the African civilisation plays a ...
The novel by Marivaux “Marianna’s Life” within the context of French epistolary prose of the XVIII century
The article aims to clarify the genre and narratological features of the most famous novel by J.-P. Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux Marianna’s Life. This work is usually mentioned as a sample of the epistolary prose of Enlightenment. However, the poetics of this literary work which sometimes is called the Second Pamela does not match ...
The ethno-cultural component of a woman image in the novel by M. A. Sholokhov “And Quiet Flows the Don”
... linguistic and artistic are considered. At the same time, the image of a woman appears not only as a significant image of the Russian conceptual sphere, but also as an essential component of M. A. Sholokhov’s artistic picture of the world, reflected in the novel “And Quiet Flows the Don”. The purpose of the article is to analyze the ways of representing one of the structural components of the image of a woman, in particular the ethno-cultural component, in the discursive space of the novel. The main ...
The mythopoetics of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The buried giant
In this article, I investigate the poetics of the novel The buried giant by Kazuo Ishiguro and consider artistic images that tend to actualise mythological poetics in the literary text. I pay particular attention both to the re-creation of elements of mythological origin in the context of the novel ...
John Bunyan’s allegoric tradition in Clive Staples Lewis’s novel The Pilgrim’s Regress
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 ...
Seme-symbol as a means of novel meaning formation in denominal verbs
The paper describes the results of denominal verb analysis. Corpora of media texts provide material for the analysis. The author explores patterns of novel meaning formation in denominal verbs. The proposed method is based on the notion of ‘seme-symbol’. The author reconstructions the semantic structure of motivating nouns and determines the role of different elements in the semantic structure ...
Genre-composition metaphor of rhizome in the novel “Primeval and other Times” by Olga Tokarchuk
... postmodernism as reflected in the writings of philosophers G. Deleuze and F. Guattari. The study investigates the concept of the “rhizome,” which in Tokarczuk’s work functions as a method of plot construction for her literary texts in general and the novel Primeval and
Other Times in particular. The metaphor of the rhizome is expressed in the novel not only through the image of a giant fungal network, a mycelium, but also through a distinctive worldview based on the interconnectedness of all living ...
The plot of Melusine in Russian literature of the XVII— XIX centuries (translations and interpretations)
... the most popular
Western European plots — the story of Melusine. The aim of the study is to examine the attempts to appropriate this plot in Russia from the 17th to the 19th centuries. The story of Melusine formed the basis of two French-language novels at the turn of the 14th—15th centuries, and a 15th-century German translation contributed to the wide dissemination of the novel in non-Francophone Europe, primarily in the form of chapbooks. In Russia, the novel appeared in the 17th century ...
The Buddhist concept of “Consciousness-Only” in Victor Pelevin’s novel “Omon Ra”
Buddhist ideas, motifs, and imagery are present throughout the works of Viktor Pelevin, from his earliest writings to his most recent novellas and novels. His 1991 novel “Omon Ra”, alongside its diverse philosophical, cultural, and literary allusions, draws upon the Buddhist philosophical concept of “consciousness-only,” which posits that only consciousness truly exists, while the external ...
Language conflict in the literary discourse: Jia Pingwa’s novel “Qin Qiang”
The present study addresses the interdisciplinary issue of conflict and its linguistic specificity as a component of the emotive dimension in artistic discourse, with a focus on the novel “Qin Qiang” by Jia Pingwa (2005). The aim is to analyse the aspects of speech and language conflict, as well as its destructive forms, within the lexico-semantic, syntactic, and functional-stylistic units of the language. A conflictual communicative ...
The imago image of ‘flowers of evil’: from Charles Baudelaire to Joris-Karl Huysmans
This article examines the image of 'flowers of evil' as an imago image — an imaginary image of a real object. The term 'imago' was first used in this sense by Carl Jung in 1912. The work proposes a novel approach to investigating the image of 'flowers of evil'. The comparative historical, analytical and psychoanalytic methods of text examination revealed that, in his novel À rebours, Huysmans espouses Baudelaire's celebrated image, representing ...
A philosophical framework for presenting novelty in a poetic text
Texts of different eras relate to varying degrees to the question of generating and presenting novelty. Recent poetry has been undergoing visible changes in poets’ attitudes to demonstrating linguistic novelty in texts. Young poets write texts that do not use the established algorithms of presenting and perceiving the new but disguise or surreptitiously reveal apparent novelty. One must explore the current practices of hedging against the new in the light of the philosophy of the text and in the...
Parable of the prodigal son in the image-conceptual field of Leonid Leonov's novel "The Pyramid"
A new interpretation of the novel "The Pyramid" by L. Leonov is suggested. The article supports the idea that in his ideology developed in the novel, Leonov is close to Dostoevsky: the central religious and philosophical statement of the novel is the ontological duality ...
Semyon Frank and Yakov Golosovker: On Kantian Motives in the Works of Dostoyevsky
... attention to the fact that the concrete-metaphysical method of seeing the world is not identical to the amphiboly of Kant’s reflexive concepts. He made it the central theme of his book, Dostoyevsky and Kant, immersing the philosophical component of the novel The Brothers Karamazov in the context of Kant’s antinomies. The later Frank took up the subject of Dostoyevsky’s worldview in response, as it were, to the discussion of the problem of cultural crisis at Volfila (including at meetings “In Memory ...
Semantics of abionims in S. Snegov’s novel “People as Gods”
... Gods” by the Soviet science fiction writer of the second half of the 20th century. Literary abionyms related to the habitats of the heroes of the work are in the focus of the research. It is noted that the space objects of the solar system in the novel retain all real names, on the contrary, the forces hostile to humanity are distinguished by invented names that reflect the specifics of their life philosophy and destructive activity in space. The significance of another literary abionyms in the ...
The motive of duality in the novel “Cursed Place” by M.I. Voskresensky
The topic “duality” in novel “The damned place”, written by M. I. Voskresensky, little known author of the “second line” is revealed through the changes the main character has undergone within three years and female twin-images, who look similar, but differ in nature....
The linguistic representation of subjective time in Florian Illies’s novel Generation Golf zwei
This article is based on the postulate that there are objective and subjective forms of time. I consider means to explicate subjective time in literature, using the novel Generation Golf zwei by the contemporary German author, Florian Illies. In this autobiographical novel, Illies goes heavy on self-irony to draw a psychological portrait of his generation, which he calls the ‘golf generation’ and thus emphasises ...
Reminiscences of Russian culture in A. S. Byatt’s novel The Children’s Book
... reminiscences of Russian culture do not so much support the national myth as they reveal the state of European culture on the eve of the First World War. The author focuses on the references to the Russian tomb (Raca or reliquary) at the beginning of the novel and Diaghilev’s ballet “Petrushka” in the last part. These reminiscences are closely related to Europe (England — Gloucester candelabrum, Germany — music by Richard Wagner, puppet theater). Therefore, raca (reliquary) is only supposedly ...
Visualization of the esthetics of memories in the novels of W. G. Sebald «The Rings of Saturn» and «Austerlitz»
The article explores the meaning and functions of photography in W. G. Sebald's works exemplified by his novels “The Rings of Saturn” and “Austerlitz”. The relevance of the study of the intermediary component, the photographic one, in the novels of the German writer is confirmed by the abundance of works on this problem written by Western literary ...
The archetypal space of the palace in E. Zola’s novel «The Ladiesʼ Paradise»
The article reveals the connection between the artistic space of the naturalistic novel with the archetypical forms of mentality and culture. The author used the structural-semiotic method of text analysis, as well as the analysis of archetypical images that are regularly repeated in the European cultural experience. The concept ...
Axiological content of the ‘altering modus’ of the inserted texts in the novel Morfo Eugenia by A. S. Bayette
The author shows a change of the axiological paradigm in the literature of the 20th—21st centuries using examples from the novel Angels & Insects by the contemporary British writer A. S. Byatt. Retreat from the traditional characterization in the creation of an artistic image and the aesthetic accentuation of its importance are manifested in the rejection of the unambiguous ...
Male Cinderella: the character, genre, and poetics of Jerzy Kosiński's novel Being There
This article presents a comprehensive analysis of the novel of the Polish émigré author Erzy Kosiński written in the English language. The image of the main character is considered in the typological comparison with the prece-dent images of world literature; the plot and composition structure is de-scribed; ...
Adrian the Undertaker (the subtexts and pretexts of Nikolai Kononov’s novel The Flaneur)
This article examines the multilanguage anagrammatic code of N. Kononov’s novel Flaneur. The authors offer an interpretation of the epigraph to the novel and identify a number of antiquity reminiscence in the text. The article focuses on the parallels between A.S. Pushkin’s short story “The Undertaker” and the novel Flaneur....
Writer Sergei Snegov and the politics of memory in the Kaliningrad region (1950―1970s)
On the basis of previously unexplored archival documents and materials of the regional press, the author considers the history of the creation of the “novel about Kaliningrad” by S. А. Snegova “Wind from the Ocean”, as well as the historical plots of the work. By analyzing the minutes of the meetings of the Kaliningrad branch of the Writers' Union, the editorial councils of the Kaliningrad book ...
Pushkin texts in the description of characters by Dostoevsky and Nabokov
In his novels, Dostoevsky refers to the Pushkin text to describe characters. For Dostoevsky, Pushkin is an ethical and aesthetic touchstone; the writer’s voice is consonant with that of the poet’s persona. In some cases, the Pushkin text is embedded in ...
Time and eternity in the literary image of the church procession: Pushkin’s Boris Godunov and Shmeleff’s The Year of the Lord
This article considers the depiction of the church procession to examine the literary interpretation of time and eternity in Alexander Pushkin’s historical drama Boris Godunov and Ivan Shmeleff’s novel The Year of the Lord. The two texts share fundamental similarities in literary images. The church procession is portrayed as a manifestation of eternity in the tangible reality of this world. Despite their common temporal nature, images in Boris ...
The reality of fiction in a literary world: on an excerpt from Stanisław Lem’s Solaris
... reality. Vestnik RGGU. Seriya «Istoriya. Filologiya. Kul'turologiya. Vostokovedeniye» [Bulletin of the RSUH. Series «History. Philology. Culturology. Oriental Studies»], 2 (35), pp. 59—69 (in Russ.).
Lem, S., 2018. Solaris: roman [Solaris: the novel]. Moscow (in Russ.).
Cervantes Saavedra, M. de., 2017. Khitroumnyy idal'go Don Kikhot Lamanchskiy [The cunning hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha]. St. Petersburg (in Russ.).
Wilde, O., 2017. Portret Doriana Greya: roman [Portrait of Dorian Gray: ...
Linguistic Means Expressing Argumentation in Judicial Discourse late 19th: The Prosecutor’s Speech in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov
... Izbrannye proizvedenija. Tom 1. Stat'i i zametki. Sudebnye rechi [Selected works. Vol. 1. Articles and notes. Forensic speech]. Moscow.
8. Koptsev I. D., Kutdinova N. V. 2013. To speech pragmatic argument in the artistic discourse (on the material of the novel of T. Mann “Buddenbrooks”). RACIO.ru, 11, pp. 168—186.
9. Kotov, S. L., 2014. Chto imel v vidu Dostoevskii? Rossijskaja advokatura v romane F. M. Dostoevskogo «Brat'ja Karamazovy» [What did Dostoevsky mean? Russian bar in the novel F. M....
Poetics of the ‘ideal’: The ancient and Christian tradition in K. N. Leontyev’s novel Odysseus Polychroniades
This article examines the interaction between ancient and Christian world-view traditions in K. N. Leontyev’s novel Odysseus Polychroniades. Leontyev expresses Christian ideas using images of Greek heroes. The ancient tradition is represented in the pan-aesthetic attitude of the literary work. In the text, the two traditions are compared using the ‘icon – ...
Karamzin 's code in the novel by V. V. Sipovsky "The Journey of Erast Krutolobov"
The paper is analyzing the novel "The Journey Erastus Krutolobov..." (1929) by the Soviet and Russian philologist V. V. Sipovsky as a tool for explaining Sipovsky’s literary concepts. Emphasis is placed on Karamzin, who Sipovsky considered a key-figure for the Russian ...
Novel-reconstruction: the creation of the genre (On "The Creation of Karamzin" by Yu. Lotman)
Y. Lotman’s defined his own book " The Creation of Karamzin” as a " novel-reconstruction”. This is an attempt to create a new genre — the ideal historical description, organized as a polylogue between the historian, novelist and semiotician. For this, Lotman relied on Karamzin’s experience. The structural and semiotic characteristics of the novel-reconstruction allow revealing some new features of Karamzin’s "History".
1. Аристотель. Об искусстве поэзии. М., 1957.
2. Данто...
The hermeneutics of literary modelling and intertext in L. Leonov’s novel The Pyramid
This article analyses L. Leonov’s novel «The Pyramid» from the perspective of hermeneutical and intertextual methodologies and identifies the coordinates of the text’s literary dialogue with the reader’s perception. The author shows that the hermeneutical and intertextual research ...
The problem of hereditary sin in F.M. Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov
The analysis of the problem of “hereditary sin” in Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov is considered in the light of the discussion on the theory of “hereditary sin” within modern Orthodoxy. The author examines the “threshold situations” faced by the novel’s characters and arrives at a conclusion about ...
From the fall of man to the image of the Antichrist : Biblical allusions in W. Gombrowicz’s novel Pornografia
This article analyses W. Gombrowicz’s novel Pornografia as a parodic interpretation of Nietzsche’s overman philosophy. The myth of the fall of man from the Book of Genesis and the biblical and eschatological myth of Antichrist are considered as the interpretive key to the novel.
1. Гомбрович ...
Lyubov Axelrod on Kant: Reflections on Marxist Discussions of the 1920s and 1930s in the USSR
The authors attempt to look back on discussions of Marxist philosophy and historical materialism in this country without censoring, obfuscating, or simplifying issues in order to assess the prospects of their development. They focus on the work of a follower of Georgy Plekhanov, Lyubov Axelrod, who, in developing the concept of historical materialism, turned to Kant. Axelrod’s published works (from early articles and a dissertation on Tolstoy’s worldview, to her mature works on the history of materialism...
The cognitive model of ‘NARCISSISM’ as represented in Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray
This article aims to describe the linguistic features of explicating the cognitive model of ‘NARCISSISM’ in Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Methodologically, the study draws on cognitive salience theory, dealing with elements such as trajectory and landmark when analysing the verbalisation of the model in question. This way, it becomes possible to describe ...