The image of St Nicholas in the translated Byzantine biography is analysed in order to identify the type of humble behaviour. The author examines the plot-based means of describing the character of the saint and comes to a conclusion about an equal combination of meekness and audacity in his humble behaviour, which is explained by the personal qualities of the saint and his feat.
This article considers Byron’s work based on the well-known Biblical story, which was radically transformed by the poet. An analysis of one of the key categories of Romanticism – central to Byron’s oeuvre – helps show that the fictional conflict of the drama manifested in the images of Adam’s sons is based on the antithesis between the true and false freedom, whereas the general literary structure of the mystery is used to direct the reader to the conclusion that it is impossible for a human being to stay beyond good and evil.
This article analyse the letters of A. G. Dostoyevskaya to F. M. Dostoyevsky written in the 1870s. The analysis covers both earlier published text and the manuscript heritage of the Dostoevsky family. The author focuses on the stylistic features of A. G. Dostoyevskaya’s letters and the thematic trends of correspondence and emphasises the role of epistolary experience in the development of the style of A. G. Dostoyevskaya’s memoirs.
This article deals with the 'time' concept in Boris Pasternak's poem “Sparrow Hills” and its English translation by Eugene M. Kayden. The focus is placed on implicitness as a basic feature of the semantic structure of a poetic text. The poem's main image – Pentecost (“Whitsun”) – proves to be a manifestation of eternity in the realm of time. In the English translation, this broad temporal context is lost.
This article considers the features of the manifestation of B. Pasternak’s mythologism in his early cycle “Romanovka” (included in the book My Sister, Life). The author emphasises the Christian nature of the poet’s interpretation of the war and revolution period of 1917. Special attention is paid to the means of the implementation of the author’s idea of the Fall, punishment, and atonement in Russia at that historical moment. The article stresses the role of Biblical allusions in the literary structure of the cycle.
The fictional world of the work is considered as one marked by binary oppositions of nature/civilisation, the world of children/adults, the ideal/the reality, the truth/a lie, fear/bravery, judgement/absolution, God/devil. The authors analyse the psychology of the novel’s main character. The central autobiographical image of the novel is interpreted in the context of religious and philosophical ideas about the duality of human nature and is connected to the features of adolescent psychology and age-related alienation and rebelliousness.
The space of heaven in the poetic world of M. Tsvetaeva is considered as a hierarchically and semantically complex space structure. The author identifies the specific features of the heaven spacium levels and describes the three main tiers of heaven, namely, the entry to heaven, the mountain space of the “divine youths, and the top of the mountain. The article justifies the reasons behind the rapid movement of the poet towards the space of ‘other’ being. The author addresses the issue of the poet’s godlikeness.
This article identifies the role of the writer Maria Danilewicz-Zielińska in the Polish exile literature of the 20th century. The author focuses on the biography of the writer, her artistic path, and literature connections. The article analyses the reflection of the cultural context of the Kujawy region of the early 20th century in the works of Maria Danilewicz-Zielińska. Special attention is paid to the autobiographical book Fado o moim życiu, which is considered evidence of the era.
This article examines two short story cycles — J. Andrzejewski’s Night and Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen — and reconstruct the authors’ literary and philosophical dialogue about the paradoxes of hope in the conditions of Hitler’s occupation of Poland.
This article studies the semiotics of the ship as an image of the world in cases of the novels To the End of the Earth by William Golding, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters by J. Barnes, and The Ship of Fools by Gr. Norminton. The ship is considered a new version of the Biblical Noah’s Ark – a miniature society. The authors believe that the avantext integrates the new “generative model” creating at the same time new forms of fictional conditionality and types of literary generalisation.
This article addresses the problem of the character’s personality development in the novels of G. Meyrink in the context of the modernist reconsideration of the Entwicklungsroman tradition. In view of the concepts of “subjective” novel, as well as the literary feature of Meyrink’s prose, the character is considered as a subject in the course of development, whereas the author’s variant of the Entwicklungsroman is interpreted as an initiation novel.
This article analyse the motif-image of the mirror and its functions in the novel of the American writer O. Grushin. The author identifies the plot structuring role of the reflection as a method of creating the psychological portrait of the character and the reflection phenomena as a means of the personality’s self-identification and a marker of its disintegration.
Since Lionel Abel (1963), metatheatrical plays are understood as a piece of drama, whose object is the play itself. The author considers the reasons behind the frequent references to the personality and works of A. P. Chekhov found in modern metatheatrical drama and analyses the changes to the standard “author-actor-audience” theatrical communication brought about by metatheatrical elements.
This article considers the structure of the conceptual metaphor of death in A.V. Ilichevsky’s collection of short stories An Asinine Jaw. The existential spatial model of the mentioned metaphor and the specific character of its cognitive-semantic organization are revealed. The author identifies the specific features of the metaphorical reconsideration of Russian reality and the ways of the character’s existence in the world. In A.V. Ilichevsky’s short story collection, the conceptual metaphor of death is identified on the basis of the common conceptual metaphor semantics of “vision/no-vision” and “dream”.