The Role of Work in the Life of Loránt Hegedüs (1872–1943)

Purpose of the study. Loránt Hegedüs was a remarkable historical figure in interwar Hungary. As a politician, economist, publicist, and belletrist, he influenced contemporary politics, economics, public life, literature, history, and religion. This study aims to understand the role of work in Hegedüs’ life; in other words, the study provides a deeper understanding of what work meant for Hegedüs, which stood behind his extraordinary performance and productivity. In addition, the study addresses further questions as to what factors influenced Hegedüs’ career choice and how, which occupation was the most significant at each stage of his life and why, as well as what his daily schedule looked like and what his working method was. Applied method. The main research question, what role work played in Hegedüs’ life, was examined chronologically and systematically throughout Hegedüs’ entire life story, in close interaction with the socio-cultural context. Levinson’s model provided the theoretical framework of the research. The Levinsonian theory interpreted man’s work as the primary base for his life in society and allowed studying individual and society (in Levinson’s words self and world) together. Based on Levinson’s theory, four periods of Hegedüs’ life were examined. A variety of sources, Hegedüs’ published writings, other contemporary publications, personal records, and a family chronicle, were used to answer the research questions. Outcomes. Work played a decisive role in Hegedüs’ entire life especially in his social integration. On the one hand his exceptional abilities, his unique family (its members, financial background, social affiliation, religion) together with his upbringing, on the other hand external circumstances (changes in politics, economy, and society) shaped Hegedüs’ idea and choices about work. As a result, Hegedüs established clear and strong values about work in adolescence and interpreted work as a duty owed to the community. In this context, his long-term goal was value creation, and his legacy, which he considered essential to support the next generation. Changes in the external world, especially challenges in work or limited possibilities for work, were reflected in the pattern of Hegedüs’ periods of life.

Kajetan Kraszewski a kwestia unicka na Podlasiu w świetle Silva rerum. Wybrane problemy

The article presents Kajetan Kraszewski’s opinions on the Uniate Church in Podlasie, included in his Silva rerum. The views of the author of Kronika rodzinna (Family chronicle) are confronted with the statements of the researchers (mostly historians, literary scholars and linguists) within the broad context of the political, social and cultural life of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the partition periods. By comparing research literature and excerpts from Silva rerum, the article analyses the effects of the Union of Lublin and the Union of Brest for the peasant community of Podlasie in the 1860s and 1870s. As presented in Kajetan Kraszewski’s Kronika, the tragedy of the followers of the Uniate Church in Podlasie resulted from the social and religious conditions that fuelled the divides during the time of the Russian partition (divide et impera). Kraszewski’s Silva rerum constitutes an image of the distance with which peasants treated Podlasie’s Uniate Church members, similar to the latter’s during the “masters’” uprising of 1863 (“in the masters’ uprising – we stayed aside watching”).

“A distortive glass of our distorted glebe”: mistranslation in Nabokov’s Ada

This article examines the theme of mistranslation in Nabokov ’s Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle in the context of the novel’s multilingual style. Focusing on a selection of deliberate mistranslations carried out by the cen-tral protagonists, Van and Ada Veen, the article demonstrates that such playful mistranslation serves a function that is much more significant than mere parody. Though, on the surface, the mistranslations parody those forms of ‘paraphrastic’ or ‘free’ translation that Nabokov and his cha racters consistently critique throughout Ada, each instance of deliberately ‘bad’ translation also contains extremely inventive forms of interlingual mutation and play which have aesthetically-productive defamiliarising effects. The article relates those instances of explicit mistranslation to the overall style of the novel, arguing that problems of interlingual transfer and communication are intrinsic to the multilingual aesthetic of the novel as a whole.

Family Chronicle Traditions in Contemporary Far Eastern Literature

The questions of the content and genre poetics of the works of the Khabarovsk writers V. V. Sukachev (“At the hearth”) and T. I. Gladkikh (“Amur Cossacks Korenevs”) are considered. The relevance ofthe study is due to the value of the literary and regional studies material for the formation of a holistic picture of the national historical and literary process. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that the work of the named authors has practically not been studied, and their works, considered in the article, for the first time became the subject of literary study. Attention is paid to the themes and problems of the works that reveal the tragic events of the national history of the twentieth century: the deportation of the Russian (Crimean) Germans in 1941; post-revolutionary fate of the Amur Cossacks. The experience of analyzing the genre specificity of works connecting family chronicle, parable, fictionalized biography, memoirs is presented. Comparative analysis of the works made it possible to reveal the commonality of the organization of plot and compositional elements inherent in the genre of family chronicles. Particular attention was paid to the specificity of the author’s approach in the artistic processing of historical and biographical material (methods of aestheticization and fictionalization of documentary material, the embodiment of the author’s image, describing the fate of generations, creating the image of the “ancestor”, the use of symbolism). In the process of analysis, the idea was substantiated that the works have a pronounced value component, asserting the absolute value of the human person.

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

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

Postcolonial Trauma in the 21st-Century English Female Fiction

The postcolonial fiction of the 21st century has developed a new version of family chronicle depicting the life of several generations of migrants to demonstrate the complexity of their experience, different for each generation. This article aims at investigating this tradition from the perspective of three urgent problems: trauma, postcolonial experience, and the “female” theme. The author uses the most illustrative modern women’s postcolonial writings (Z. Smith, Ju. Chang) to show the types of trauma featured in postcolonial literature as well as the change in the character of traumatic experience, including the migrant’s automythologization from generation to generation. There are several types of trauma, or stages experienced by migrants: historical, migration and selfidentification, more or less correlated with three generations of migrants. Historical trauma is the most severe and most often insurmountable for the first generation. It generates a myth about the past, terrible or beautiful, depending on the writer’s intention realized at the level of the writer or the characters. A most expanded form of this trauma can be found in the novel Wild Swans by Jung Chang, where the “female” experience underlines the severity of the historical situation in the homeland of migrants. The trauma of migration manifests itself as a situation of deterritorialization, lack of place, when the experience of the past dominates and prevents the migrants from adapting to a new life. This situation is clearly illustrated in the novel White Teeth by Z. Smith, where the first generation of migrants cannot cope with the effects of trauma. The trauma of selfidentification promotes a fictitious identity in the younger generation of migrants. Unable to join real life communities, they create automyths, joining fictional communities based on cultural myths (Muslim organizations, rap culture, environmental organizations). Such examples can be found in Z. Smith’s White Teeth and On Beauty. Thus, the problem of trauma undergoes erosion, because, strictly speaking, with each new generation, the event experienced as traumatic is less worth designating as such. Compared to historical trauma or the trauma of migration, trauma of self-identification is rather a psychological problem that affects the emotional sphere and is quite survivable for most of the characters.

Family Relics

Chapter 3 studies Marguerite Yourcenar’s distinctive synthesis of material mementos and personal recollections, historical documents and family relics. Yourcenar’s three-volume work Le Labyrinthe du monde (1974–1988) exemplifies a more general archival tendency in post-war autobiography; works by Perec, Barthes, and others also supplement personal testimony with documentary materials. Yourcenar’s trilogy marks a shift in her own practice from works that fictionalize history (Mémoires d’Hadrien, 1951), to a project that integrates “snippets of facts” within a factual composition. Yourcenar herself has a paradoxical place in this unusual autobiography, developing a family chronicle that attempts self-erasure even as it is organized around her relationship to the past. Developing a form of literary “necromancy,” Yourcenar’s writing mobilizes fictional devices to reanimate dead fragments of the past, while laying bare the work of research and reconstitution.