The Crimean War in the Reception of Egor Kovalevsky and Leo Tolstoy

The article examines typological intersections between the early works of Leo Tolstoy and the works of the 1850s of Egor Kovalevsky. The theme “Egor Kovalevsky and Leo Tolstoy” has not been studied comprehensively and systematically in Russian literary criticism. The research develops from the history of personal relationships between the writers during the Danube Campaign and the Sevastopol events to a comparative study of the writers’ works created during the Crimean Campaign. Tolstoy’s “Sevastopol in December” and in Kovalevsky’s “The Bombing of Sevastopol” reflected the similarities in the authors’ concepts, themes and images. The article justifies that the central theme developed in the writers’ oeuvre was a person and their role in history. Similarities and differences in the portrayal of the heroic events of the defense of Sevastopol by the writers are considered. Kovalevsky’s essay and Tolstoy’s first story are closely linked by one idea – the sense of civic exaltation, national identity. In describing the Russian soldier, his character, the heroism of the defenders of Sevastopol, the writers follow the “truth of life”. Kovalevsky captures the names of the direct participants in the war. With one detail or episode of the last minutes of their lives, Kovalevsky draws the reader’s attention to the “ordinary heroes” of Sevastopol, emphasizing the importance of their individual feat. Tolstoy’s heroes, on the contrary, are nameless: it is the general mood of the defenders of Sevastopol that is important for the writer. There are common features in the narrative manner of the two writers: ways of depicting heroes, accuracy and imagery of landscape sketches. A few strokes and precise details convey the state of Sevastopol. The mood associated with the state of the city is emphasized by the details of the landscape. The similarity in describing the heroes’ and the narrator’s psychology is expressed through the image of fog. The features of the authors’ creative manner and the role of the narrator are analyzed. There is an obvious difference in the creative methods of Kovalevsky and Tolstoy. Describing real details with historical accuracy, Kovalevsky paints a romantic picture with bright “strokes”. Kovalevsky uses concrete real details most often as a way to emphasize a bright feature he has noted in life, while Tolstoy seeks to show (highlight) the quality of life rather than its specific feature. The difference between Kovalevsky’s essay and Tolstoy’s story is also in the assessment of the historical event. Describing the bombing of Sevastopol as a historian, Kovalevsky does not abandon moral and political generalizations. Thus, the manner of narration and the ways of depicting heroes testify that both Tolstoy and Kovalevsky solve one problem with different artistic means – to truthfully portray the reality and the person as the “center of history”. In search of a true depiction of Sevastopol, Kovalevsky, a historian and romantic writer, moved towards realism embodied in Leo Tolstoy’s story.

ALMA reveals a pseudo-disc in a proto-brown dwarf

ABSTRACT We present the observational evidence of a pseudo-disc around the proto-brown dwarf Mayrit 1701117, the driving source of the large-scale HH 1165 jet. Our analysis is based on Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array 12CO (2–1) line and 1.37 mm continuum observations at an angular resolution of ∼0.4 arcsec. The pseudo-disc is a bright feature in the CO position–velocity diagram, elongated in a direction perpendicular to the jet axis, with a total (gas+dust) mass of ∼0.02 M$\odot$, size of 165–192 au, and a velocity spread of ±2 km s−1. The large velocity gradient is a combination of infalling and rotational motions, indicating a contribution from a pseudo-disc and an unresolved inner Keplerian disc. There is weak emission detected in the H2CO (3–2) and N2D+ (3–2) lines. H2CO emission likely probes the inner Keplerian disc where CO is expected to be frozen, while N2D+ possibly originates from an enhanced clump at the outer edge of the pseudo-disc. We have considered various models (core collapse, disc fragmentation, circumbinary disc) that can fit both the observed CO spectrum and the position–velocity offsets. The observed morphology, velocity structure, and the physical dimensions of the pseudo-disc are consistent with the predictions from the core collapse simulations for brown dwarf formation. From the best model fit, we can constrain the age of the proto-brown dwarf system to be ∼30 000–40 000 yr. A comparison of the H2 column density derived from the CO line and 1.37 mm continuum emission indicates that only about 2 per cent of the CO is depleted from the gas phase.

Stylistic features of Cyrillic graffiti of the pre-Mongol period in Kyiv St. Sophia's Cathedral

The article examines the peculiarity of the concept of the linguistic style of the literature of Kyiv Rus, which is closely linked with the traditions of the scientific study of this very “red writing”. The specificity of Old Russian literature as medieval leads to its almost church character, and the specific "simplicity" in the structure of secular literary works of its own, such as "The Word of the Igor's Regiment," forcing researchers to engage in secular business texts, for example, the chronicles that are works of historical the genre. That is, in this case, the peculiarity of the concept of literary language reflecting the peculiarity of the notion of ancient Russian literature, which is by no means the "artistic" literature of the modern type, or fiction. Accordingly, the volume of materials that should serve to study the stylistics of literature of the Kiev Rus era is determined by the peculiarity of scientific ideas about the very literature itself and about the literary language in which it is created. These considerations make us propose as an auxiliary "meter" to study the style of literature of the Kiev Rus age the criterion of reflection or absence of certain poetics in the texts. As is well known, the phenomenon of poetics is legitimately extended to folklore, to contemporary business writing, and to non-folklore oral speech activity. Thus we get the opportunity to define in the same graffiti Kiev Saint Sophia's Cathedral style of church writing and oral canon, folklore and business law. But with such an approach, the bright feature of the stylistics of graffiti Sofia of Kiev in the comparison with the volume similar to the volume of graffiti texts of Novgorod Saint Sofia Cathedral is immediately striking: among the Kiev graphite there is practically no folklore of origin, not to mention the reflection of the pagan rituals that we find on the walls of the Novgorod Saint Sofia Cathedral. This conclusion can be reliably based on statistical data. But when the researchers find in the texts of the XI–XIII centuries. syllabic or "elements of sillabotonism", it is worth reminding of the very probable chance of an appropriate combination of sounds and syllables. It is much more reliable to refer some graffiti to the clerical poem. But we must not forget the hypotheticalness of such identification in general, as well as the fact that only the adaptation of the Byzantine poem to the Slavic language context can be considered.

Magnetic Fields in Quasar 3C147 on Milliarcsecond Scales

VLBA polarimetric observations of the steep-spectrum quasar 3C147 were made at four frequencies in the available 5 GHz band, from which polarization in one bright feature in the inner jet was detected. The rotation measure of this feature (~ 1300 rad m−2) agrees with the known high rotation measure of the source, which makes it possible to remove the Faraday screen pixel-by-pixel and obtain the intrinsic magnetic field structure. The arch shape of B vectors suggests that a relativistic and distorted jet is being seen in projection.