2024 Issue №3

The main objective of the article is to present the multifaceted figure of Jean Chapelain as the foremost French critic and literary theorist of the first half of the 17th century. Significant attention is given to Chapelain’s connection with his time, during which the function of literature and the position of the writer were evolving, as well as his substantial contribution to the establishment and consolidation of classicist aesthetics on a national level. The article addresses the critic’s role in the development of literature, his influence on the formation of aesthetic taste, his mediation between the author and the audience, and the nature of the political engagement in literary creativity demanded by the time, as well as the relationship between the creator and power. Chapelain’s texts are examined in their entirety, allowing for the tracing of the development of guiding ideas and the deepening of fundamental concepts in his theorizing, such as “verisimilitude”, “taste”, “decorum”, “utility”, “morality”, “erudition”, “fashion”, “clarity”, and “novelty”, which gain semantic complexity depending on their application to different — fictional and non-fictional — genres. Through the analysis of specific works by Chapelain, the article traces the nature of the unfolding of his critical-theoretical discourse, reflecting the principle of aesthetic-philosophical thinking of French classicism as a whole.

The article examines the aesthetic aspect of the artistic pursuits of famous English philologists and writers of the 20th century, Clive Staples Lewis and John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, based on their literary-critical works, essays, and fictional texts. In particular, the article traces the search for a criterion of artistry in the works of these authors. The relevance of this study is determined by the belief that the criterion of artistry in a literary text is a fundamental category of literary studies, allowing for the necessary distinction between texts that belong to literature as such and pseudo-literature. This criterion ultimately defines the subject of literary studies as a science, since the science of literature does not study just any written text containing fiction, but rather artistic texts. The purpose of this article is to understand what J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis — colleagues and friends who inspired each other and formed the literary fellowship of the Inklings — meant by artistry and what criteria of artistry they were able to develop.

The article addresses the issue of the creative reception of Mayakovsky’s poetry in the lyrics of the poet and bard Mikhail Ancharov (1923—1990). The poetic generation of Ancharov, which was formed in the 1930s and 1940s, was strongly influenced by the classic of Soviet literature. In Ancharov’s lyrics, the influence of Mayakovsky (especially his early works) manifests at various levels: at the level of the lyrical hero’s character — independent and expressive, particularly in love (“Pykhom klubit par...” (Steam Billows...), “Tsyganochka” (The Gypsy Girl)); in urban motifs, the theme of a person’s tragic lostness in a huge city (“Pesnya o nizkoroslom cheloveke...” (Song of the Short Man)); in the anti-bourgeois theme (“Antimeshchanskaya pesnya” (Anti-Bourgeois Song), “Rynok” (Market)), which reveals its ambiguity in Ancharov’s work; as well as at the level of individual themes and motifs (social and racial injustice in the “world of capital”; the lyrical hero and the “icy” land for which he fights). Ancharov frequently mentions Mayakovsky’s name, quotes his poems, and comments on his statements about creativity in his prose and interviews.