scholarly journals TURGENEV AND DOSTOEVSKY: THE MILESTONE CHANGE IN CRITICISM AND LITERARY STUDIES OF THE SILVER AGE

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 503-510
Author(s):  
G.M. Rebel
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Religious Philosophy ◽  
Silver Age ◽  
Fyodor Dostoevsky ◽  
Philosophical Criticism ◽  
Literary Process ◽  
Artistic Vision ◽  
The One ◽  
The University

The article analyzes the reasons and character of historical and literary milestone change, which was fulfilled within the framework of Russian religious philosophy and literary studies of the 1920s. Literary and philosophical criticism of the Silver age made the creative works of Fyodor Dostoevsky the main subject of its interest and it predetermined the content of the literary criticism concepts of B.Engelhardt and M.Bakhtin, who influenced the following literary criticism to great extent. It brought some misrepresentation to the literary process interpretation of the second part of the 19 century, which still influences the university and school literature courses of the period. In particular the religious and philosophical studies and works of the 1910-1920s based on them broke the ideological and aesthetic connection between the creative works of Dostoevsky and Turgenev, the polemical character of Dostoevsky’s works concerning Turgenev was ignored. The article rebuilds the second half of the 19th century’s literary process logic, the consequence of Turgenev’s ideological novel and only after it, in connection with it and mainly in polemic with it - the ideological novel by Dostoevsky. The presumed comparison of the two genre modifications of the ideological novel allows to depict their common features on the one hand and on the other - the principal differences, aesthetic specificity, predetermined by the particular features of the artistic vision and strategies of Turgenev and Dostoevsky.

The Paradoxes of Religious Consciousness: Leo Tolstoy in the Philosophical Criticism of Nicholai Berdyaev

2021 ◽  
pp. 53-63
Author(s):  
Olga A. Zhukova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Research Strategy ◽  
Leo Tolstoy ◽  
Religious Philosophy ◽  
Religious Consciousness ◽  
Russian State ◽  
Philosophical Criticism ◽  
Critical Interpretation ◽  
The One ◽  
Sharp Criticism ◽  
Main Ideas

The article is devoted to the analysis of N.A. Berdyaev’s perception of L.N. Tol­stoy’s work. Berdyaev’s philosophical criticism of the writer requires close at­tention and research because it allows us to formulate the most important ques­tion about philosophical vocabulary of Russian religious thinker. The essay examines not only Berdyaev’s critical interpretation of Tolstoy in its movement, but also the personal perception by the philosopher of Tolstoy as a great Russian writer. This paper explores the evolution of Berdyaev’s views on the problem of religious consciousness of Leo Tolstoy. I reveal the structural elements of Berdyaev’s personalistic metaphysics and analyze the main ideas of his eschato­logical ethics from the perspective of philosophical criticism of Tolstoy. I con­sider the modus of Berdyaev’s assessment of Tolstoy’s nihilism and discuss the ambiguity and complexity of Berdyaev’s attitude to the writer and religious thinker. This problem manifested itself, on the one hand, in Berdyaev’s identify­ing himself as a Russian thinker and a heir to the tradition of Solovyov, Dosto­evsky and Tolstoy, on the other hand, in sharp criticism of Tolstoy for his role in the crisis of Russian religious consciousness, which had irreversible conse­quences for the Russian state and society. This analysis proposes a new opinion on philosophical criticism of Berdyaev, as distinct from the traditional version, and introduces the thesaurus research strategy on Berdyaev’s religious philosophy.

scholarly journals Dostoevsky at the Turn of the 21st Century: Antinomies of Interpretation

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 5-47
Author(s):  
Valentina Borisova ◽  
Sergey Schaulov
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Final Conclusion ◽  
Research Subjects ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Religious Philosophy ◽  
Silver Age ◽  
Classical Text ◽  
Russian Literary ◽  
History Of

The aim of the proposed article is to identify the key trends and contradictions in the study and interpretation of Dostoevsky’s work at the turn of the 21st century. Dostoevsky studies are one of the most advanced and active branches of Russian literary studies, which is confirmed by a large number of regular scientific conferences, as well as by a significant number of fundamental monographs. The search for a new interpretive basis in the Christian tradition, which has revealed a number of axiological and methodological contradictions, including the inevitable choice between literary and philosophical/theological discourses, is seen as the main methodological breakthrough in contemporary Russian literary studies (and simultaneously a challenge). Three aspects of the question of the Christian basis of Dostoevsky’s work are examined: along with “dogmatic ranting” (as defined by I. A. Esaulov), reading the writer’s works in the context of the legacy of religious philosophy of the Silver Age remains relevant. We recognize the analysis and interpretation of Dostoevsky’s texts in the spirit of historical poetics as the most productive, provided that the postulate about the Christian nature of the Russian classical tradition is accepted. The methodological search of Dostoevsky’s researchers, typical for the turn of the 21st century, has found its expression in a multitude of “research subjects”: this polemic centers on the definitions of “realism in the highest sense”/“Christian realism” and a dispute around The Idiot and the image of Prince Myshkin, caused by the receptive conflict of interpreters. In addition, the article underscores the problem of the use of Bakhtin’s legacy in Dostoevsky studies: in our opinion, the key notions of his concept in literary studies “function” either in an adjusted form, or as scientific metaphors, or as an “appeal to authority”. Therefore, it seems more productive to include Bakhtin’s heritage in Dostoevsky studies as an essential fact in the history of perception of his work, rather than as a methodological basis for studying the text. It is in this aspect that the success of Russian literature in recent years is most obvious, however, the gap between scientific excellence and mass perception of Dostoevsky is also apparent. The final conclusion states that the contradictions of interpretations generated by transcending the “spectrum of adequacy” when reading a classical text have not been overcome. Dostoevsky’s work still causes controversy and methodological arguments. This means that the history of his perception remains an ongoing, living narrative. Dostoevsky still remains a subject of contemporary culture, rather than its object.

scholarly journals Russian Silver Age Philosophy of War: Main Features

2021 ◽  
Vol 63 (11) ◽  
pp. 91-103
Author(s):  
Alexei A. Skvortsov
Keyword(s):  
Russian Philosophy ◽  
Broad Line ◽  
Moral Choice ◽  
Silver Age ◽  
Consistent System ◽  
Fyodor Dostoevsky ◽  
Deep Well ◽  
Moral Qualities ◽  
Armed Violence ◽  
The One

The article discusses the main features of the Russian philosophy of war that developed in the first third of the 20th century. The author shows that in Russia, the philosophy of war did not develop as a separate broad line of research but limited itself to only a few meaningful, but rather brief, experiments. Nevertheless, many Russian philosophers (Fyodor Dostoevsky, Vladimir Soloviev, Evgenii Troubetzkoy, Ivan Ilyin, Nikolai Berdyaev, Lev Karsavin and others) left deep, well-founded reasoning about war, which can be reconstructed as a consistent system of views. One of its features is the shift in the focus of considering armed violence from the sociological and political to the anthropological and ethical; the focus is not on war as a social phenomenon, but on the human’s position in war. In this regard, the attitude to war in Russian philosophy is paradoxical. On the one hand, war brings a lot of evil in the form of death of many people and destruction, but, on the other hand, it promotes to the manifestation of the best moral qualities in people, up to selflessness and heroism. Armed violence seems to be a tragedy of the Christian conscience, and each participant must independently find a justification for his participation in the war. Based on the conditions of a difficult moral choice, personal, existential justification may come from the idea that people cannot commit violence with a clear conscience. In this case, the person choosing to participate in a war perceives the battle as his own guilt that should be expiated.

The Asian American Movement and Critical Practice

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas S. Ishii
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Literary Scholarship ◽  
Asian American Movement ◽  
Asian American Student ◽  
Movement Organizations ◽  
The University

Though Asian American literary studies bears its critical legacy, the Asian American Movement (1968–1977) is largely invisible within Asian American literary studies. This has led to a critical murkiness when it comes to discerning the extent of the Movement’s influence on Asian American literary criticism. The Movement is often remembered in literary scholarship as the activities of the Combined Asian Resources Project (CARP)—a collective of four writers who were only loosely associated with Asian American Movement organizations. As metacritical scholarship on “Asian American” as a literary category has suggested, CARP’s introductory essay to Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974) is simultaneously held as the epitome of cultural nationalism’s misogynist tendencies and as the prototypical theorization of Asian American literature. However, this essentializing of CARP as the Movement ignores how the collected writings of the Asian American Movement, Roots (1970) and Counterpoint (1976), identify literary production and criticism as sites of racial critique in distinction from CARP’s viewpoints. Literary and cultural scholarship’s deconstruction of “Asian American” as a stable term has provided the tools to expand what constitutes the literature of the Movement. As Colleen Lye notes, the Asian American 1960s novel has emerged as a form that challenges the direct association of the era with the Movement. The historical arc of the Movement as centered on campuses highlights the university as an institution that enables Asian American student organizing, from the 1968 student strikes to contemporary interracial solidarity actions, as well as their narrativization into literary forms. Expanding what counts as literature, the decades of Asian American activism after the Movement proper have been documented in the autobiographies of organizers. In this way, the Asian American Movement is not a past-tense influence, but a continuing dialectic between narration and organizing, and literature and social life.

scholarly journals Russian writers in the Czech environment during the first half of the 1920s: periodicals of the left political wing (newspaper “Rude pravo”)

2021 ◽  
Vol 59 ◽  
pp. 199-212
Author(s):  
Anna V. Amelina
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Russian Literature ◽  
Political Orientation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Ideological Position ◽  
Communist Ideology ◽  
Literary Process ◽  
The One ◽  
Made In

The paper examines perceptions of Russian literature in the first half of the 1920s by a Czech literary criticism of the left-wing political orientation, namely by Rudé Právo, newspaper of the communist party of Czechoslovakia. On the one hand, at this time, the Russian classics are being rethought in terms of their usefulness for the purposes of proletarian movement, up to discrediting individual authors (for example, F. M. Dostoevsky) and adjusting ideas of other writers to the communist ideology (L. N. Tolstoy). On the other hand, much attention of the editors is paid to the modern literature of post-revolutionary Russia, whose representatives are evaluated and selected for translation and review, provided they accept and praise the revolution (first of all, this is the poem The Twelve by A. A. Blok, poetry by V. V. Mayakovsky, prose by M. Gorky and V. G. Korolenko), whereas their work is assessed one-sidedly, exclusively in the ideological aspect. The first attempts of writing generalizing materials on the contemporary literary process (for example, Peasant revolutionary poetry by I. Weil) are being made. In general, Russian literature is viewed from an ideological standpoint, only with varying degrees of categoricality by individual critics. As the author reveals it was of great importance for the shaping of the ideological position and cultural program of the Czech communists, and compared with other literatures, its role is identified as leading.

Expressive Features of Author Subjectivity in the Literary Ego-Text (Roman Senchin’s What Do You Want?)

2021 ◽  
pp. 23-39
Author(s):  
Olga Yu. Shum ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Time Frame ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Real ◽  
Political Commentary ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Literary Process ◽  
Family Chronicle ◽  
The One ◽  
Almost All

The modern literary process indicates the presence of a large number of fiction with documentary subcurrent: facts from the author’s biography are a very slight hyperbolization. An example of such work would be the novel What Do You Want? (2013) by a contemporary Russian writer Roman Senchin, which became the subject of consideration in this article. The synthesis of auto-documentary and literary principles in the story organizes self-narration with unsteady boundaries between the real (“factual”) and the fictional (“fictitious”). The specificity of the correlation of the factual and the fictitious is examined in this work using the method of literary criticism and contextual analysis. The immediate aim of the article is to identify the specificity of expressing the implicit method of author subjectivity in non-fiction. In the author’s opinion, the implicit way of expressing the reflective type of author subjectivity fits more harmoniously into the literary fabric of the work, enriching it with subtexts and hidden meanings. In the course of the study it has been determined that although the center of the story revolves around the everyday life of an ordinary Moscow family, Senchin’s work is not a slice-of-life novel, but a political commentary. The theme of What Do You Want?” is sociopolitical, the problematics are sociocultural. The narration of the novel undergoes an intense analyzing and coming to terms with the sociopolitical events that are highlighted in almost all of the scenes. The text implies that the writer comprehends his own political position and interprets its cause-effect relationships. In order to distance himself as much as possible from his own identity, Senchin uses the technique of “externalizing” and “assigns” the role of the narrator to a teenage girl Dasha, the prototype of which he himself cannot be. Dasha, being a narrator-observer, asks questions, including the one from the title, to herself and other characters, including the father “Roman Senchin”. The time frame for the narration is precisely established: 18 December 2011 – 26 February 2012; each part of the text is a certain day, there are six in total. However, it is not clear who marked the specific days – the real author of the story or, as he conceived, the narrator Dasha. The autofiction method of “externalizing” in combination with the factual plot allows considering What Do You Want? as an ego-text, which in its genre form is something between an excerpt from a family chronicle and a diary. Autofiction in the form of an ego-text allows the writer to implicate his reflection, organizing a space for discussion of the unquestioning “Roman Senchin” (his alter ego) and the doubting Dasha within a kind of a “mental diary” – a space of consciousness in which the author-subject and the narrator are united. “Bringing to light” this “mental” diary, the writer redirects it to a wide range of readers and thus shifts the story from the field of “literature without fiction” to the sphere of art

“Critique Is Ordinary”

PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (2) ◽  
pp. 364-370 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather Love
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Know How ◽  
Reading Methods ◽  
Legitimation Crisis ◽  
The Face ◽  
The One ◽  
Contemporary Practice

In her scholarship and her editorship of the journal New Literary History, Rita Felski has played a central role in recent debates about reading methods in literary studies. Literary critics engaged in endless discussions about how to read may strike an odd note, since reading is the one thing everyone assumes we know how to do. But in the face of the defunding of the humanities, critics have been rethinking the epistemological and ethical grounds of the field and proposing new and often unfamiliar approaches. In her latest book, The Limits of Critique, Felski addresses this “legitimation crisis” by turning her attention to critique, that systematic and skeptical form of inquiry that, she argues, dominates the contemporary practice of literary criticism (5). Critique, associated since Immanuel Kant with the questioning of religious and other forms of dogma, has in her view become a new dogma, an obligatory “style of thinking” in the profession (2). Focusing on critique as “mood and method” (1), Felski follows Paul Ricoeur in considering the attitude of suspicion—detached, wary, vigilant—as the guarantee of scholarly rigor and the last refuge of oppositional thought. Felski has little patience with such high-flown claims. Her focus is on the limits of critique: she sees it as one approach among others, reminding her readers that suspicion is a professional habitus with established links to law, expertise, and bureaucracy. She does not wish to bury critique; rather, she wishes to “redescribe” it, to “offer a fresh slant on a familiar practice in the hope of getting a clearer sense of how and why critics read” (2). If the effect of this reframing is to deflate critique, Felski's ultimate goal in The Limits of Critique is to widen “the affective range of criticism”: “Why are we so hyperarticulate about our adversaries and so excruciatingly tongue-tied about our loves?” (13), she asks, and sets out to imagine a more generous criticism.

On the critical reception of religious literary criticism

2020 ◽  
pp. 44-50
Author(s):  
Светлана Владимировна Бурмистрова
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Russian Literature ◽  
Subject Area ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Religious Literature ◽  
Biblical Hermeneutics ◽  
Religious Philosophy ◽  
Definition Of

В статье представлена попытка проанализировать современную критическую рецепцию религиозного подхода («богословско-догматического», «конфессионального (православного) подхода») к изучению русской словесности. Автор рассматривает вопрос о генезисе термина «религиозное литературоведение», его связи с дефиницией «религиозная философия», а также вопрос о его функционировании в современной гуманитарной науке. Выявляется преемственность религиозной филологии с философской и литературоведческой традицией рубежа XIX-XX веков. Обозначена методологическая неоднородность «религиозной филологии», в которой сосуществуют два самостоятельных подхода: «богословско-догматический» и собственно филологический подход. Рассматривается дискуссия о специфике предметного поля религиозного литературоведения и особенностях интерпретационной модели, позволяющей объективно проанализировать отечественную словесность в православном аспекте. К наиболее значимым тенденциям современной религиозной филологии можно отнести следующие: анализ литературного материала в междисциплинарном ключе, в том числе с использованием методов библейской герменевтики; смещение акцента с вопроса о степени религиозности того или иного автора на проблему функционирования религиозных кодов в художественной системе, их трансформация как на индивидуально-авторском, так и на общекультурном уровне. Анализ критических суждений о «религиозном литературоведении» представлен в формате «pro et contra» (С. Бочарова, М. Дунаева, И. Есаулова и др.). This article attempts to analyze the modern critical reception of the religious approach ("theological and dogmatic", "confessional (Orthodox) approach") to the study of Russian literature. Author considers the genesis of the term "religious literature", its relationship to the definition of "religious philosophy", as well as the question of its functioning in the modern humanitarian science. The author reveals the continuity of religious philology with philosophical and literary tradition of the late XIX-XX centuries. The author indicates the methodological heterogeneity of "religious philology", where two independent approaches coexist: theologico-dogmatic and philological ones. The author considers the debate about the specificity of the subject area of the religious literary studies and peculiarities of the interpretational model, which allows to analyze the Russian literature objectively from the Orthodox point of view. Among the most significant trends of modern religious philology are the following: analysis of literary material in an interdisciplinary way, including the use of biblical hermeneutics methods; shifting the emphasis from the question of the degree of religiosity of the author to the problem of functioning of religious codes in the artistic system, their transformation both at individual author and at general cultural level. The analysis of critical judgments on "religious literary studies" is presented in the "pro et contra" format (S. Bocharova, M. Dunayev, I. Esaulova and others).

scholarly journals BRAZILIAN LITERARY CRITICISM AND HISTORIOGRAPHY

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (41) ◽  
pp. 37-45
Author(s):  
Roberto Acízelo de Souza ◽  
José Luís Jobim
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
School Level ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
High School Level ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
Literary Education ◽  
University Courses ◽  
The One ◽  
The 19Th Century

Abstract: In Brazil literary studies, after scant manifestations in the colonial period, represented by the activity of literary academies founded in the 18th century only really expanded in the course of the 19th century. National literary production grew in quantity and quality, as did literary studies, which, on the one hand, were demanded by this production- that, after all, needed to be studied and evaluated -, but, on other hand, stimulated this creativity, as they established as a criterion of value the alignment of fiction, poetry and dramaturgy with the nationalist agenda. As a result, from the 1820s until the 1880s, literary studies in Brazil underwent a period of expansion and diversification. If in the 1800s literary education was conducted at high-school level, from the 1930s onwards university courses in literatures began to be established in Brazil. In this paper we will provide a short introduction to Brazilian literary criticism and historiography from its very beginnings to the present time.

scholarly journals Philosophical aspects of literary-critical creative work of I.B. Rodnyanskaya

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 204-212
Author(s):  
Elizaveta M. Zenova
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Careful Study ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Philosophical Perspective ◽  
Philosophical Aspect ◽  
Philosophical Criticism ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The One ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Methodological Guidelines

In most literary and critical articles of I. Rodnyanskaya, regardless of the originally chosen topic, the reasoning affects the laws of human nature in general. The explanation of this sustained interest in the philosophical aspect can be found in Rodnyanskaya’s methodological guidelines, namely in the commitment to the direction chosen by V. S. Solovyov in literary criticism. The essence of this approach is to correlate observations on the aesthetic side of the works with the truth in the highest sense of the concept. Solovyov’s method is evaluated positively, because he managed to point out the absence of contradictions between the careful study of the artistic aspect and the reading of the text from a philosophical perspective. The purpose of this article is identifying patterns that indicate the impact of creativity Solovyov on the methodology of literary criticism Rodnyanskaya in general and poetics of articles in particular. Referring to the literary and critical work of Solovyov, it is possible to comprehend goals of Rodnyanskaya herself. Close attention to the one of the sixties’s philosophical criticism suggests: in the era of the Thaw in literary criticism revived philosophical direction.

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