Early Edition of Ellis’ Collection Cross and Lear: A Study in Reconstruction

The paper is dedicated to the last period in creative work and biography of Ellis (Lev L’vovich Kobylinsky, 1879–1947), a symbolist poet and theoretician of art. In 1930s Ellis was actively writing on various historical, literary, religious, philosophical and esoteric subjects and continued to work on his poems and translations. The article provides excerpts from the Ellis’ letters to the artist Nikolai Zaretsky, on the basis of which the stages of Ellis’ work on his third and last book of poetry and translations titled Cross and Lear during the 1930s can be clarified in some detail. In the Addendum Ellis’ poem “Death and a Knight (Old Engraving)” is published.

An early edition of Andrey Bolotov’s memoirs (from the archives and manuscripts section of the State Historical Museum)

The history of the creation of Andrei T. Bolotov’s memoirs has been little studied. In par­ticular, the stages of his work on this text are not entirely clear. This article is an attempt to shed light on one aspect of this problem. Bolotov’s personal fund (No. 349) in the Archives and manuscripts section of the State Historical Museum contain a manuscript of Bolotov’s memoirs entitled “Part 2”. It differs significantly in its essential characteristics (paper, de­sign, size, composition, title, division into sections, etc.) from most manuscripts of Bolotov’s memoirs. The study presents a textual analysis of this manuscript and compares it with the text of memoirs published by Mikhail Semevsky, — the most complete printed edition of The Life and Adventures of Andrei Bolotov. The stages of Bolotov’s work on the manuscript are considered; a comparative analysis of lexical units, stylistic preferences, and the content of the manuscript is carried out. The results obtained suggest that the undated manuscript is the earliest version of the memoirs, supposedly written in the late 1770s.

Aristotle's Lost Homeric Problems

This volume consists of a set of studies focused on various aspects of a relatively neglected subject: a lost work of Aristotle entitled Homeric Problems. Most of the evidence for this lost work consists mainly of ‘fragments’ surviving in the Homeric scholia (comments in the margins of the medieval manuscripts of the Homeric epics, mostly coming from lost commentaries on these epics). But other sources have been neglected. The book has three parts. The first deals with preliminary issues: the relationship of this lost work to the Homeric scholarship that came before it, and to Aristotle’s comments on the Homeric epics in his extant Poetics; the evidence concerning the possible titles of this work; a neglected early edition of these fragments. In the second part, our knowledge of the Homeric Problems is expanded through an examination in context of quotations from (or allusions to) Homer in Aristotle’s extant works, and specifically in the History of Animals, the Rhetoric, and Poetics 21 (to each of which a chapter is devoted). Part III consists of four studies on select (and in most cases neglected) fragments. The volume intends to show (inter alia) that Aristotle in the Homeric Problems aimed to defend Homer against his critics, but not slavishly and without employing allegorical interpretation.

The First Edition of the Vsevolod Ivanov’s “Armor Train 14, 69” (1922): The History of Early Reception

The article is devoted to the history of the reception of the first edition of the story of Vsevolod Ivanov “Armored train 14, 69”, created by the writer in 1921 and first published in the first issue of the magazine “Krasnaya Nov” in 1922. The first edition is known in two versions: magazine and book: the story came out as a separate edition in the summer of that year. Until 1932, the story was printed in the first book edition, with minor variations. The same edition formed the basis of the modern scientific publication (2018). After 1932, the text of the story, which retained its “classic” name, was repeatedly redone by the author with the participation of editors and censorship. The article collected information and quotes from reviews, reviews, and reviews primarily from 1922–1925. It is shown that the first critics paid special attention to the politics and ideology of the story and its author. Only a few of them appreciated the truly revolutionary poetics and aesthetics of the story, written by the author in line with the plot and narrative experiment of the literary group “The Serapion Brothers”, to which Vsevolod Ivanov joined immediately after moving from Siberia to Petrograd. In many responses, the story was compared with the novel by Boris Pilnyak “The Naked Year”, excerpts from which were printed in the same issue of the magazine. Party and proletcult criticism was satisfied with the propaganda potential of the story, its “usefulness” for agitation in favor of the Soviet regime. However, both in the Soviet Union and in exile they often drew attention to the fact that the "red" and "white" ("White Guard") lines developed in the early edition on an equal footing, in the plot counterpoint. In later editions, the feeling of equality of two lines gave way to an unequivocal advantage in favor of the “reds." The author’s ideology was often read as peasant or neo-people’s (“Scythian”, “Socialist Revolutionary”), which also caused doubts among the literary ideologists of the country of the victorious proletariat. A simplification of the psychological portrait of the characters was noted, which was fundamentally important for the “Serapion Brothers”. The most insightful judgments about the story belonged to the member of this literary group, critic and literature historian Ilya Gruzdev and futurist poet Alexei Kruchenykh. Both drew attention to the dialectical interaction of storylines with extra-plot elements (phonetic zaum, imitation of vernacular and accents, onomatopoeia, etc.).

Iron Age landscape and society The settlement patterns

That the character of settlement across Iron Age Britain was far from uniform is well known, although Hawkes’ (1931, fig. 1) plotting of the distribution of hillforts was not expanded upon for many years, with key studies such as Harding’s (1974) The Iron Age in Lowland Britain and the early edition of Cunliffe’s (1974) Iron Age Communities in Britain lacking distribution maps of settlement types. Cunliffe’s (1978, fig. 16.2; 1991, fig. 20.6; 2005, fig. 4.3) eventual mapping of four settlement character areas across Britain was therefore a seminal piece of work, although the whole of eastern England fell within a single zone characterized by ‘villages and open settlements’, while Bradley (2007, fig. 5.14) suggested that eastern England was a landscape of ‘open and wandering settlements’ (Fig. 3.1). In contrast, Hill (1999; 2007) has suggested that while the East Midlands and his ‘northern Anglia’ (Norfolk and northern Suffolk) were characterized by clusters of agglomerated settlements and large ‘open villages’, parts of his ‘southern Anglia’ (i.e. what is referred to here as the Northern Thames Basin) has ‘little evidence for densely settled communities’ in the Middle Iron Age. He suggested instead that the ‘apparently empty areas’ in ‘southern Anglia’ were ‘probably exploited economically and agriculturally in a much less intensive manner by relatively few permanent settlements . . . and, especially, by people visiting them’ (Hill 2007, 22). Hill’s (2007) view that ‘southern Anglia’ was a sparsely settled and peripheral area has not, however, stood the test of time and what is in fact striking is just how much Iron Age settlement has been discovered there through recent developmentled archaeological work. The most intensively investigated area, at Stansted Airport and the nearby new A120, for example, comprised a landscape littered with small enclosed farmsteads consisting of one or two roundhouses associated with a small number of four-post granaries (Havis and Brooks 2004; Timby et al. 2007a; Cooke et al. 2008). The character of these settlements is clearly suggestive of permanent occupation, while their density suggests that this was far from an empty landscape that was seasonally exploited by outsiders.

Man of the Land: Unearthing the Original Noah

The original biblical Noah was not affiliated with the Flood. An early edition of J told of a devastating famine that afflicted the entire earth from the days of Adam and Eve until it was brought to an end on account of Noah. The Proto-J narrative was supplemented with a version of the popular Babylonian Flood story, ironically transforming a story of drought into a tale of torrential rain. It is this Noah who is referenced in Ezekiel and Deutero-Isaiah – not the familiar Flood hero.