2022 Issue №1

The article analyzes the typological connections between N. V. Gogol’s prose poem “The Dead Souls”, H. Heine’s poem in verse “Germany: A Winter Tale” and J. Rizal’s novel “Noli me tangere”. The author studies how, in all three works, the image of the author and of his country are interconnected. Each author sees himself as a patriot, and that is why he feels obliged to criticize the situation of his country. Each one of them is to a certain degree seen as a stranger by origin. Obviously, this assumes a mild form in the case of Gogol, the Ukrainian, in Russia. It is stronger with Rizal, who is a Filipino and yet a man with Chinese ancestors. But it is Heine who revels the strongest form of exclusion, antisemitism, who yet sees himself as a German patriot. The three works share the same feature, they were written while the authors were living abroad. Due to this, each of them viewed their countries from the outside. Through travel narration, which, to a high degree, is also the narration of a voyage through the kingdom of death, they describe the problems of their countries. All the above-mentioned factors help to establish the imagery connection to the works of Cervantes and Dante.

The article analyzes the actualization of the dialectical unity of “friend-foe” on the example of the German-language novel G. Radtke “Die Tätowierten”for young adults. The study relies on the research of the ideological attitudes of the GDR through the analysis of theoretical sources, the method of continuous sampling, linguistic analysis of contextual blocks of the story, and establishes the spheres of human activity that represent the rejection of the values of a hostile ideology: appearance, leisure, work, moral principles, upbringing and re-education of the younger generation in the right ideological way. A connection is established between the external and internal manifestations of ideological attitudes, which is especially pronounced in the professional sphere. The authors show that ideological differences in their abstract form are associated with visual and auditory images (photos and media). It is determined that the highest degree of opposition of “own” and “foreign” ideology is achieved when describing the state border of the GDR and the FRG. It is established that an equilibrium opposition of “friend-foe” is impossible without an equivalent criticism of one’s own ideological principles, primarily in the sphere of (re)education of “alien” individuals in correctional homes for teenagers. Likewise, the attention is also drawn to the shortcomings of the planned economy of the GDR, to the economic difficulties of the socialist state, which sometimes serve as the cause of economic crimes.

The article analyses the ways of Russification of Buddhism in the cycle of novels by Holm van Zaichik (V. Rybakov and I. Alimov) “Eurasian Symphony”. Buddhist ideas (for example, the idea of karma in its various forms), Buddhist images (in particular, architectural images), Buddhist vocabulary are integrated by the authors into the traditional patterns of Russian culture. Russian Buddhism depicted by V. Rybakov and I. Alimov in the novels of the cycleoffers answers to complex challenges identified by Russian culture and literature (a version of the theodicy), becomes a part of Russian sacred geography (the co-presence of Orthodox and Buddhist temples on the same land), generates a new, paradoxical idiomatics. The authors of the cycle “Eurasian Symphony” create a utopia of religious and cultural syncretism on the basis of transcultural interaction of religions in the guise of alternative history. At the same time, the main mode of narration in the novels of the cycle is the combination of a serious and ironic attitude to the created artistic world, which makes it possible to read the “Eurasian Symphony” in a variety of ways.