REVOLUTIONARY OR NEW? ROMANTICISM IN K. SIMONOV’s POEM “THE RETURN”

The article presents an analysis of Simonov's poem “The Return” in the aspect of interaction with the literary tradition. In the poem, the motifs and values of revolutionary romanticism, neo-romanticism and romanticism coexist in conflict. Thus, the romantic motif of flight structurally equates the city of childhood with a vulgar reality and calls into question the ideas of camaraderie and labor exploits that are important for Soviet literature. In the story of the hero's brief return to the city of his childhood, a "secondary phase of alienation" (Mann's term) is realized. The myth of the beloved as the embodiment of the heavenly ideal takes on special significance in the poem. The source of certain motifs and images is the romantic tradition as a whole, besides, allusions and quotations referring directly to the works of Byron, Zhukovsky, Pushkin and to the lyrics of Gumilev and Esenin based on the romantic heritage have been identified. The removal of the metaphysical vertical and the courageous optimism of the final part of the poem suggest that it belongs to neo-romanticism. This study allows us to clarify the idea of the aesthetic orientation of Simonov's early work.

Towards a spatialized utopia: romanticism and everyday life in the Marxism of Henri Lefebvre

The presence of the spatial element in the reflections of Henri Lefebvre does not merely result from work involving the translation and adaptation of critical thinking developed up until his time. The realization that not even the highest expression of the critical tradition had sufficiently noticed this crucial dimension of life was one of the connecting points between theoretical advance, represented by the spatial orientation of critique, and the effort to renew the utopian horizon. A very distinct assimilation of the early work of Marx and the proximity to revolutionary romanticism, particularly of Nietzschean extraction, rendered a decisive impact on Lefebvrian conception. Practice, body, pleasure and instincts, recovering their place in the critical social imagination, went on to become the basis for the re-foundation of a theoretical-practical program that involved the formulation of the notion of the right to the city. The perspective of appropriation thus replaced the vague emancipatory statements of the subject's philosophies.

Avangarda revizitată (I)

There is plain filiation between the atmosphere and the general configuration of the movements we call the historical Avant-Garde and the spirit of the revolutionary Romanticism. Literary theorists and critics brought it to the fore, both organically – insofar as the similarities between the two paradigms are spelled out by the dynamics of the history of sensibility and taste – and typologically, in its mythological and thematic redundancies, in reiterating acute polemical gestures and attitudes or in manifesting violence against tradition. This study aims to articulate the artistic and political duality defining these two artistic paradigms, by using comparative evaluation and by illustrating canonical notions such as subject, revolution, progress.

From Metaphor to Metonymy

This chapter explores the 1946 criticism of Sergei Eisenstein's and Vsevolod Pudovkin's films about Ivan the Terrible and Admiral Nakhimov. It investigates how Eisenstein's and Pudovkin's films defined the status of Russia's most important director named Mikheil Chiaureli, who directed “Admiral Ushakov” in 1953. The chapter emphasizes how historicism had to become part of Soviet aesthetic doctrine, part of the system of flexible, dialectically contradirectional principles of Socialist Realism, and to become a hybrid of “the truth of life” and “revolutionary romanticism.” It discusses the historicism of Leninist teaching as a scientific conceptualization of actual historical reality based on a correlation of man with history. It also explains Socialist Historicism, which is the artistic conception of life from the standpoint of the Communist ideal that facilitates a vivid reproduction of life in its historical perspective and historical retrospection.

The Power of Grammar and the Grammar of Power

This chapter looks into the political dimension of the “discussion about language.” It mentions Nikolai Marr's predominant theory in linguistics. It also compares the two major ideological campaigns in the late-Stalinism era in biology and linguistics, which indicates that realism and revolutionary romanticism remained a principal balancing element in the politico-ideological project of Stalinism. The chapter highlights Joseph Stalin's urgent political signals that speak out against the Marrist concept of “linguistic revolution.” It analyzes the arguments surrounding Marr in both the early 1930s and the early 1950s that revolved around Stalin's “Marxism.” It also discusses Stalin's “new theory of language” that was proclaimed at the cusp of the 1930s as a true embodiment of Marxism in linguistics.

Gesamtwissenschaftswerk

This chapter examines the aspects of political romanticism. It focuses on the 1948 campaign centered on the biological theories of Lysenko, Ol'ga Lepeshinskaia, Gevorg Bosh'ian, and others that were revealed in science fiction novels, plays, films, and popular science literature. The chapter explores romanticism as a component from the very beginning of Socialist Realism, which proclaimed “life in its revolutionary development” as its object. It explains how Socialist Realism absorbed revolutionary romanticism and transformed it into state romanticism, which assumed its definitive shape in the late-Stalinist era. It also highlights the materialization of Socialist Realism into phantasms and agronomic miracles produced by the magical science of the “people's academician,” Trofi m Lysenko.

Lyuben Karavelov: the Bulgarian narrator, journalist and revolutionary

The article is about Lyuben Karavelov (1834–79), the preeminent Bulgarian writer who worked in the era of the Bulgarian national revival, an author of tales, short stories, ethnographic essays and political articles. Almost all of his creative life was spent in exile: he lived in Russia, the Serbian Principality, Austria-Hungary and Romania and published his works not only in Bulgarian, but also in Russian and Serbian, influencing the development of literary movements wherever he was located. In his creative evolution, he moved towards a realistic representation of life, overcoming the tendency typical of Bulgarian writers at that time to write with elements of sentimentalism and revolutionary romanticism. He wrote the best Bulgarian story of that era, “Bulgarians of Old times”. Many of his works reflected the influence of N.V. Gogol, N.G. Chernyshevsky and M. Vovchok, and contributed to the formation of realism not only in Bulgarian but also in Serbian literature. His influence would have been much greater if he had not died at the age of 45 from tuberculоsis immediately after the liberation of Bulgaria from the Ottoman yoke.