2013 Vol. 4 №3

This article considers the aesthetic views of Delvig as a critic and identifies the sources that help him develop individual criteria for assessing literary works. The author emphasises his original interpretation of theoretical problems of aesthetics characteristic of Romanticism. It is stressed that the category of harmony defined by Delving as a crucial principle of artistry is very productive in his system of views and underlies his own poetry.

This article reconstructs the portrait features of a woman as presented in ’female’ modern Russian chanson. The authors emphasise the woman’s original self-perception as opposed to the way she is presented in chanson by a man. Such original features include a greater number of details in the ‘self-portrait’, orientation towards the male psychological models of perceiving reality, and the use of an image of an ageing woman. Love and at the same time freedom are presented as a woman’s basic life values, which is indicative of changes in the female gender perception in the modern Russian society.

The criminal song is considered as a phenomenon of urban folklore functionally linked to the criminal community as an archaic subculture. The author characterises the plot structure of the criminal song: the system-building characters, their plot function, and typical motives. The article poses the question as to the thematic typology of the criminal song. It is emphasised that the bearer of the criminal song characteristics, its “gene” is the main character (the crime lord), whereas the other characters and different situations are found in folklore and plots are borrowed from other fields of the folk or popular song. Having borrowed ‘external’ material, the criminal song develops its own language meant to model and interpret its special worldview.