Aniko Rekhviashvili's creativity in the context of the development of the choreographic art of Ukraine in the late XX - early XXI centuries

The purpose of the article was a comprehensive art criticism analysis of the creative heritage of the choreographer A. Rekhviashvili, during which the main stages of her stage biography were considered, the characteristic features of the staging style were determined. The methodology of the work includes the use of the following cultural research methods: general historical, comparative historical, analytical, biographical, etc. The scientific novelty of the publication lies in the fact that for the first time it comprehensively analyzes the stage achievements of the choreographer A. Rekhviashvili, establishes the influence of her work on the development of national ballet art late XX - early XXI centuries. Conclusions. Choreographer A. Rekhviashvili can without a doubt be considered one of the most progressive Ukrainian choreographers of our era since the stage works created by her: dance miniatures, one-act performances, and multi-act ballet canvases - "Vienna Waltz" (2001), "Daniela" (2006), “Lady with Camellias” (2014), “Daphnis and Chloe” (2015), “The Snow Queen” (2016), “Julius Caesar” (2018), etc. - highly appreciated by modern ballet experts and recognized as the brightest examples of Russian choreographic art of the border XX – XXI centuries, in which academic traditions and new forms of plastic expressiveness were harmoniously combined.

Longus and Vergil

Chapter 7 claims that Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe exhibits a sustained engagement with Vergil’s Eclogues and Aeneid, and, to a lesser extent, the Georgics. The introduction (Section 7.1) gathers the evidence for the novel as the composition of a Romanized member of the Mytilenean Greek elite, descended from Pompey’s freedman, Theophanes of Mytilene, and suggests that it was written at some point during the second half of the second century; this will become particularly relevant to Section 7.8 on Longus’ subversive engagement with the Aeneid (a poem celebrating the Julian—not Pompeian!—claim to autocratic rule). Sections 7.2–7.7 are concerned with setting out the features of Vergilian pastoral that recur in Longus, and which are absent from Theocritus (or at least different in degree and kind). These include: the fragility of pastoral autonomy (7.2); theft and vandalism (7.3, 7.3.1, the latter also positing a connection with Ovidian elegy); various elements of Philetas’ biography (7.4); dendronyms (7.5); Amaryllis and pastoral echo (7.6); and Tityros and pastoral succession (7.7).

Latin Poetry in the Ancient Greek Novels

This work establishes and explores connections between Greek imperial literature and Latin poetry. As such, it challenges conventional thinking about literary and cultural interaction of the period, which assumes that imperial Greeks are not much interested in Roman cultural products (especially literature). Instead, it argues that Latin poetry is a crucially important frame of reference for Greek imperial literature. This has significant ramifications, bearing on the question of bilingual allusion and intertextuality, as well as on that of cultural interaction during the imperial period more generally. The argument mobilizes the Greek novels—a literary form that flourished under the Roman Empire, offering narratives of love, separation, and eventual reunion in and around the Mediterranean basin—as a series of case studies. Three of these novels in particular—Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe, Achilles Tatius’ Clitophon and Leucippe, and Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe—are analysed for the extent to which they allude to Latin poetry, and for the effects (literary and ideological) of such allusion. After an Introduction that establishes the cultural context and parameters of the study, each chapter pursues the strategies of an individual novelist in connection with Latin poetry: Chariton and Latin love elegy (Chapter 1); Chariton and Ovidian epistles and exilic poetry (Chapter 2); Chariton and Vergil’s Aeneid (Chapter 3); Achilles Tatius and Latin love elegy (Chapter 4); Achilles Tatius and Vergil’s Aeneid (Chapter 5); Achilles Tatius and the theme of bodily destruction in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Lucan’s Bellum Civile, and Seneca’s Phaedra (Chapter 6); Longus and Vergil’s Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid (Chapter 7). The work offers the first book-length study of the role of Latin literature in Greek literary culture under the empire and thus provides fresh perspectives and new approaches to the literature and culture of this period.

THE SHEPHERD AND THE SHEPHERDESS: V. Р. ASTAFIEV’S MODERN PASTORAL IN THE CONTEXT OF GENRE TRADITIONS

The purpose of this article was to consider the movement of literature through the genre metamorphoses as a category that transforms in its immutability. Consequently, the author’s task was to study the modifications of the genre of love idyll using the example of Modern Pastoral ву V. P. Astafiev’s (The Shepherd and the Shepherdess) in the context of works about love that had emerged in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. This task is carried out using the example of the initial samples of the love idyll genre in prose, as well as a theoretical justification of the unity of love idyll and pastoral as its main type (M. M. Bakhtin), which make up a single line of genre tradition. The article demonstrates the productivity of genre splices, i. e. the initial actualization of the love idyll genre in combination with the novel (Daphnis and Chloe, The Romance of Tristan and Iseult) and the story (The Tale of Peter and Fevronia, The Shepherd and the Shepherdess). The correlation between the ancient pastoral and Astafiev’s Modern Pastoral was noted in literary studies, albeit poorly justified, while the implementation of the traditions of the love idyll set by the above-mentioned medieval models remained beyond the scope of research. The study tested the typological resemblance of genre models, their similarities in themes, plot, and imagery, which allowed to include characters in the range of enamoured couples that have largely determined the development of world literature. The article focused on the debated question of the validity of the writer’s definition: Modern Pastoral. As a result, the study tested the productivity of Astafiev’s update to the genre canon; the validity of the genre naming by the writer, with regard to the modification made by him.

LONGUS’ NARRATOR: A REASSESSMENT

An influential position in the scholarship on Longus is that the narrator of Daphnis and Chloe is dissociated from, and ironized by, the author. Two articles by John Morgan, in particular, have propounded this interpretation. Morgan argues that Longus’ narrator relates the story with simplicity and naivety, and in ignorance of the more complex subtleties to which only Longus and the more discerning reader have access: ‘Daphnis and Chloe is told by its narrator as if it were a simpler and more conventional story than it really is, and invites its reader to read it in the same way. One way to describe this textual duplicity is to think in terms of a surface “narrator's text” and a deeper “author's text”. We can conceive the narrator, as established by the prologue, as a distorting and simplifying lens between the story and us. As readers we effectively have the choice of accepting what we see through the lens (that is the “narrator's text” as the “narrator's narratee”) or of correcting it and reading around the narrator (that is reading the “author's text” as the “author's narratee”).’ This type of separation of author and narrator is identifiable in Petronius’ Satyrica, in which the first-person narrator Encolpius who tells his story in hindsight is ridiculed and his narration destabilized by the hidden author who ‘is also listening, along with the reader, to Encolpius’ narrative—and along with the reader is smiling at it’.

Finding the Time for Ancient Novels

This essay looks at the history of the novel, starting from the influential postwar critical insistence on the importance of the novel as a nineteenth-century genre. It notes that this tradition singularly fails to take account of the history of the novel in antiquity–for clear ideological reasons. It then explores the degree to which the texts known as the novel from antiquity, such as Longus's Daphnis and Chloe, Petronius's Satyricon, or Heliodorus's Aethiopica, constitute a genre. Although there is a great deal of porousness between different forms of prose in antiquity, the essay concludes by exploring why the ancient novel, ignored by critics for so long, has now become such a hot topic. It argues that much as the postwar critics could not fit the ancient novel into their histories, now the ancient novel's interests in sophisticated erotics, narrative flair, and cultural hybridity seem all too timely.

A Stormy Debate

This article aims at a better understanding of the trial scene in Longus’ novel Daphnis and Chloe (2.12-19). It argues that Longus capitalises on contemporary rhetorical debates to elaborate on his own literary project. The insertion in Philetas’ verdict of a debated point (the storm) in stasis-theory aims at underlining the discrepancy between the means of persuasion mastered by an uneducated cowherd and by an educated reader. This allows a reflection on the incidence of the displacement of an elite social practice, the trial, into the rustic world of Daphnis and Chloe. This displacement is further emphasised in the trial itself by the juxtaposition of two speeches, one that is artificially simple (the Methymnaians’), and another naturally simple (that of Daphnis). Through this, Longus promotes his own stylistic project. I eventually contend that this scene explores the notion of credibility within Longus’ fictional world.

“Here came these five beautiful Littlefield girls, good dancers all.”

Lincoln Kirstein brings George Balanchine to America to start a ballet school (SAB) and professional company (the American Ballet). Needing dancers, Balanchine visits the Littlefield School and successfully recruits seven Littlefield students and Dorothie Littlefield to take part in his ballet initiatives in New York. Holly Howard becomes his first American muse and Dorothie becomes the first American and first woman to teach at SAB. Dorothie leaves SAB because of unrequited love for Balanchine and unhappiness with his casting of her. Big Jim dies unexpectedly in 1934 and Mommie moves to a modest Cobbs Creek row house. In the summer of 1935, Catherine premieres the third scene of her first major original ballet, Daphnis and Chloe.