2015 Issue №8

This article addresses the memento mori genre in the German literature if the 11th-12th centuries. The works in this genre present a literary expression of the category of reminder of mortality. It is close to the sermon calling for repentance. The typical texts by Heinrich von Melk include lamentations about the deceitfulness of the world, the brevity and vanity of earthly life, a reminder of the Last Judgement, and a prayer to God. Heinrich von Melk’s memento mori contain criticism of emerging Minnesang.

This article considers the ‘Faustian motif’ in Pushkin’s life and work. The problem of the ‘Faust zone’ in history is emphasised in the context of compari-son of different ideological and poetic interpretations of the Faustian archetype in the works of Goethe and Pushkin. It is concluded that Pushkin’s poetic ge-nius is Christian in its essence and related to the key characteristics of the Rus¬sian national identity.

The plot structure of the poem by a Russian author of the Pushkin era A. Podolinsi is characterised in comparison with the context of Russian Romanti-cism and the conceptual constants of Russian cultural consciousness. The au-thor identifies the function of the image of house in the poetic body of the poem. The ‘house’ is analysed as an element of the literary space and as a topos with symbolical and mythological connotations.

This article considers one of the most complex works of Byron. The author focuses on the key motif in the plot of the philosophical drama. The analysis shows that Byron’s interpretation of the Biblical events makes it possible to conclude that, striving for absolute freedom, the human being is incapable of protecting themselves from the spiritual captivity of passions and their soul cannot remain independent from such opposite forces as the light and the darkness, good and evil, god and the devil.

The particularities of the key collision of H. G. Wells’s short story “The door in the wall” is considered in the spiritual axiological aspect. The issues of true and false values, the visible and invisible worlds and the border between them, and the meaning of human life are examined as the central problem of the text. It is shown that the image of Wallace and the related plot are deter-mined by the choice between the eternal and earthly values, this and the other worlds. The image of the narrator embodies the opposition between the catego-ries of faith and doubt shaping the inner collision of the short story.

In line with the need for a comprehensive system analysis of the poetic works of the influential Tatar poet and literary figure Fatih Karimi, this arti-cles considers the early but the most literary advanced poems created as his poetic voice was emerging. The study shows that the process of the poet’s creative evolution followed a trajectory from the ‘social ideological order’ towards expressing the ‘living’ human feeling and lyrical sacredness.

This article discusses the dominant textual elements in Der fernste Ort — one of the most famous novels of German author D. Kehlmann. The novel’s text organization is described; parallels to other literary works are drawn. The author analyses the influence of the 20th century modernist experiments on Kehlmann’s works. The article focuses on the general and specific features of the writer’s literary image.

This article analyses the spatial and temporal structure of Edward Stachura’s short story “The Wedding” in an intertextual dialogue with Sta-nislaw Wyspianski’s play of the same name and in the existential literary-philosophical context. The author focuses on the problem of relations between the individual and the historical national community. The article analyses the logic of solving this problem in the romantic context of Wyspianski’s thinking and the existential context of Stachura’s works

Czeslaw Milosz and Jerzy Putrament studied together at the Stefan Ba-tory University in Wilno and were members of the Żagary literary group. Later, their relationship faced certain challenges and was broken off as Milosz emigrated. The relationship of the two authors is considered based on J. Putrament’s letters to Cz. Milosz published by the latter in 1998.

Using the historical-cultural and comparative methods in the literary analysis of two novels, this article describes the role of synaugeia motifs in Murdoch’s works. Synaugeia is Plato’s concept of vision as a combination of the subjective and objective types of light. To a large degree, the light imagery of Murdoch’s novel is based on this concept.

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; the genre is identified. Using the analysis of the novel’s key episodes, the article stresses the meaning-creating function of the reflection technique. The receptive field of the novel is identified.

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 visuality of the world of literary images created using special literary techniques. The novel’s picture poetics emphasises picturesqueness as a generalising feature. The poetic role of the intermedial techniques – portrait and self-portrait, semiotics-enriched landscape, and genre episode – is identified in the visual ima-gery of the novel.