2020 Issue №1

This article considered Beckett’s French short stories through the prism of philosophical and aesthetic foundations of modernist music. The rejection of tonal hierarchies by dodecaphonists to transcend the limits of the traditional sonic semiosis can be compared to Beckett’s aspiration to go beyond the ‘fetish’ of words. The study emphasizes similarities between the creative systems of Beckett and the Second Viennese School/neoclassicists. The commonalities range from the work with patterns, which operate very similarly to dodeca­phony in both form and effect, to the impression of the ‘semiotic chaos’ arising when Beckett's texts are mentally articulated. The effect of ‘semantic chaos’ can be compared with the ‘cacophony’ of atonal music and Beckett’s texts, which are devoid of syntactic hierarchy, with dodeca­phonic pieces abounding in accidentals.

Alexander Galich, a prominent singer-songwriter, built a gallery of socio-psychological types, central to which was the image of the ordinary Soviet per­son. This article focuses on the motif of death/immortality as a plot component describing the fate of a small person in Galich’s poetry. The place of the ordi­nary person in Galich’s creative ‘characterology’ is identified. The ground­work for a classification of the ordinary person types is laid and key motifs of plots introducing the types are described. The Soviet small person is consid­ered in the structural context of Galich’s fictional world in view of his ontolo­gy, anthropology, and creative philosophy.

The short stories from Neil Gaiman’s collection Smoke and Mirrors are considered in the context of the cultural tradition of under­standing the sym­bolism of the mirror. The article aims to determine the main functions of the mirror in Gaiman's texts and describe the system of parallel images associated with the mirror and the reflection. The study concludes that the image of the mirror runs through the collection of stories, whereas its symbolism ranges from an object used in creating illusions to a magical artefact helping to see the truth. The images that accompany the mirror are linked to the motifs of silver and silverware.

Nikolai Kononov first published his story ‘Ceylon Island’ under the pen-name Alexander Chekhov (the name of Anton Chekov’s brother). This article explores the author’s literary mystification strategy as an element central to the poetic nature of ‘Ceylon Island’, its intertextuality, and its stylistic ‘set­tings’. The receptive nature of the text of Kononov’s story and the logic behind the creation of the author’s mask are considered. The structural sources of the text are revealed to be Chekhov’s Notebooks, Diaries, and Sakhalin Island.