PLOT ELEMENTS AND MOTIVES OF THE NOVEL “CHEVENGUR” IN PLATONOV’S SHORT STORY “POTUDAN RIVER”

The relevance of the article is determined by the researcher of the semantic poetics of Platonov’s story “Potudan River”. We carry out an analytical review of the lifetime criticism and articles of modern researchers about the story, on the basis of which we formulate the purpose of the study, due to the need for a new approach to the interpretation of the work and the identification of the principles of its poetics. The novelty of the article is determined by the identification of the multilayered symbolism of the title of the story, which allows to establish the insufficiency of the conclusions that the content of the “Potudan River” is limited to the family theme. At the level of micropoetics we reveal symbolic details that connect the content of the story with the motive of love for the distant, medical and construction subjects and revealing the planetary scale of the author’s thinking. For the first time, it was established that Platonov’s story “Potudan River” was written based on part of the plot of the novel “Chevengur” – the love story of Alexander Dvanov and Sonya Mandrova. We show that the heroes of the story “Potudan River” Nikita Firsov, Lyuba Kuznetsova and Nikita’s father are doubles of the characters in the novel “Chevengur” by Sasha Dvanov, Sonya Mandrova, and Zakhar Pavlovich. The connection of the image of Lyuba with the archetype of the bride is considered. The paper reveals for the first time the intertextual connections of the story “Potudan River” with the poem “The Bronze Horseman” and the novel in verse “Eugene Onegin” by A. Pushkin, in the texts of which the writer found material for modeling the ordinary fate of the hero. Multi-level connections of the content of the story “Potudan River” with Platonov’s artistic world, which is a complete metatext, are found, which opens up new opportunities for determining the role of the editing technique and the principles of returning to the plots and motives of the works of the 1920s, as well as their transformation in the writer’s work of the 1930s.

DEMYTHOLOGISING SOCIAL FICTIONS IN ANGELA CARTER’S REINTERPRETATIONS OF FAIRY TALES

The paper focuses on culture stereotypes embodied in fairy tales and the ways of their representation in twice-told tales. The awareness of pressure of stereotypes in culturally central texts led to their persistent revision by the 20th century women writers. In “The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories”, Angela Carter appropriates some of Charles Perrault’s classical plots calling it a “demythologizing business”. The paper studies “social fictions” regarding women scrutinized in Carter’s reinterpretations of Beauty and the Beast plot. As their overall structure analysis testifies, critical approach to conventional culture’s concepts of gender predetermines the mode of narration - “stories about fairy stories” and female character perspective. These allow for the use of metacommentary that centres on economic issues concerning young women. Alongside with their fears, these issues are thematised by foregrounding recurrent motifs and law words. As the research shows, the major female character’s motivations that their flat prototypes lack are exposed; the 1st person narration also absent in the pretext permits the author to articulate criticism of “social fictions” underlying classical fairy tales through the female character’s mouthpiece in feminist terms. The introduction of a foil triggers the female character’s self-discovery and the multiple reinterpretations of the same plot shattering its ruthless changelessness provide new life scenarios for her.

MODERN RUSSIAN POETRY IN OLYMPIAD ASSIGNMENTS IN LITERATURE

The article discusses approaches to a holistic analysis of poetic texts of the 21st century at Literature Olympiads. The main aim of this academic activity of senior schoolchildren is to teach them to demonstrate their own understanding of a poem through considering it as an integral unity of elements and analyzing the most essential features of its artistic structure. The author answers the following questions: what knowledge, skills, competences are tested by assignments on contemporary poetry? What poetics features of modern literature require special attention and how to teach senior schoolchildren to carry out analysis correctly? How can “Olympiad” poetry be of interest to a modern secondary schooler? On the material of the poems by Polina Barskova, Alexei Tsvetkov and Vladimir Gandelsman the article shows possible ways of text analysis that have formed in practical work – primarily in the Sirius educational center (Sochi). The author uses P. Barskova’s poem “Happiness” (2001), included in the tasks of the final stage of the 2019 Literature Olympiad, to show the methods of work with subtext / intertext and subject structure. The relationship between the object-based and symbolic plans, of the empirically “true-to-life” plot and the biblical subtext are in the focus of attention during the analysis of A. Tsvetkov’s poem “The experience of the end of the world” (2019). V. Gandelsman’s poem “In the morning, right after dawn, I am at the foot…” (2018) was offered to students at a trial competition in “Sirius”. The article contains excerpts from the works of secondary school students, showing how they interpreted the poem.

А. М. REMIZOV AND FOLKLORE: ON THE ISSUE OF RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

The article presents a critical review of research works on the topic “Folklore-literary interaction in the creative activity of A.M. Remizov” published in Russian. The study of the topic has been conducted mainly within the framework of literary criticism. Meanwhile, for a writer known for his commitment to preservation and innovative approach to traditional literary genres, folklore is one of the dominant sources of creativity. Currently, Remizov studies cannot boast of generalizing works on folklorism in the writer’s creative activity and on the influence of oral folk art genres on his artistic system, so one of the aims of the article is to attract scholarly interest to the issue and stimulate further research in this area. The publication gives a brief description of the current state of research on the problem, identifies the main vectors of its consideration and reveals the academic lacunae. The author analyzes the works, which deal with the creative heritage from the point of view of folklore studies and address the problems of the typology of folklorism and mythologism of the writer, clarify the range of folklore sources and the specificity of working with them, as well as the role and function of the author’s comments on the miniatures of Posoloni. These notes to the texts were created under the influence of a literary scandal related to the accusation of the writer of plagiarism. The assessment of the events around this incident by specialists in Remisov studies and folklorists does not coincide, the article outlines prospects for further research. The author undertakes a detailed description of the influence of the texts of calendar rite, spiritual verses, fairy tale, conspiracy-spell tradition, folk drama, children’s folklore and Russian folk pictures on the writer’s creative activity. For the first time, the author poses a hypothesis about the possible influence of the aesthetics of rayok (“World Cosmorama”) on the work of A. M. Remizov by the example of the fairy-tale novella “What is Tobacco”, which which depicts the reformatting of the apocryphal model by artistic means of lubok and rayok. The analysis of numerous studies made it possible for the author of the article to conclude that the writer’s creative activity does not only reflect the real diversity of folklore genres but also such specific features of them as oral format and variability. The results of the study can be used in the design of the course of the history of Russian literature and folklore studies of the beginning of the early 20th century, in the studies dealing with folklore-literary interaction, and in popularization and publication of folklore texts.

INTERPRETATION SPHERE OF THE AUTHOR’S VOCABULARY (ON THE MATERIAL OF THE BOOK “STONE” BY O. E. MANDELSTAM)

The scope of research in the article includes author’s vocabulary, or the vocabulary of the language of O. E. Mandelstam (based on the book of poems “Stone”). The research object is an author’s vocabulary entry as a system that has a structure and its own units. The basic research method is the method of poetic ideography as a kind of literary ideography and a type of general ideography in lexicographical perspective. The units under study are heterogeneous and diverse: these are units of a quantum and metafunctional nature. The former include units of prosody, lexical and conceptual units; the latter comprise units of a poetological and prosodic nature, as well as conceptual formations. The study reveals and characterizes typological features of the author’s vocabulary (of the language of O. Mandelstam), and introduces new features: poetological, prosodic, and interpretative. In general, the investigation is carried out within the framework of lexicography, ideography, textual studies, text linguistics, text hermeneutics, and text decoding (interpretation). The article establishes the operational order of description of poem units (the arrangement of the material in the author’s vocabulary is text-related), which corresponds to the set of systemic areas of the poetic text analyzed in the vocabulary entry: textual, poetological, prosodic, lexico-semantic, denotative, ideographic, and interpretative (based on the analysis of the system of functional-semantic field of vocabulary in a particular poem as the title unit of a vocabulary entry) spheres. The results of poetic-ideographical analysis correlate with the specific features of the poetic worldview of O. Mandelstam. The study suggests, illustrates, and analyzes a model and structure of a vocabulary entry of O. Mandelstam’s language. The degree of subjectivity/objectivity of the content of the interpretation sphere of a vocabulary entry is also determined. Furthermore, the authors conceptualize the nature, character, and structure of the interpretative sphere of a vocabulary entry. They analyze O. Mandelstam’s poem “Silentium”. The vocabulary entry contains eight structural elements. The logic of description and analysis of the units of the poetic text (by stanzas) is as follows: the title unit of the vocabulary entry – the poem → poetological information → prosodic information → semantic-denotative-ideographic information → interpretative sphere of the vocabulary entry. Interpretation of textual, general lexicographic, and ideographic information is performed with reference to the identification and analysis of paradigmatic (causative) series of conceptual formations implemented in the text word by word, line by line, and stanza by stanza (the units of interpretative analysis – vocabulary, phrase, utterance, complex syntactic construction and complex syntactic unity). Interpretation of conceptual formations is carried out taking into account the polysemy of the vocabulary. The interpretative sphere is the result of functioning of such a feature of the text as interpretability, or poliinterpretability, and also an outcome or generalized conclusion of the poetic and lexicographic study of O. Mandelstam’s poems.

THE ESSAY “CHE-CHE-O”: SEMANTIC RESOURCES OF THE AVANTEXT

The urgency of the research topic can be attributed to the acute need to study the literary heritage of A. Platonov and numerous problems related to the theory and practice of scientific interpretation of his works in the light of the latest publications, source discoveries and textual and biographical facts. Of particular importance for the teleology of the writer’s style and the ultra-textual “poetics of revisiting” characteristic of his writing (the term coined by N. M. Malygina) are the works created in transition epochs. The strategies of A. Platonov’s writing as an artist and publicist, realized in the late 1920s – early 1930s in an implicit and open polemic with aesthetic declarations and dogmatic propaganda aims, in modern science are interpreted in various ways, including analysis of the semantic resources inherent in the avantexts. The article deals with the specific features of actualization, selection, comprehension, and editing representation of creative and semantic resources of avantext on the example of the essay “Che-Che-O”, published by A. Platonov in collaboration with B. Pilnyak in a “reassembled” edition, which significantly differed from the original one. The novelty of the article is determined by the proposed approach to the object of research. The study reveals the axiological role of autobiographical discourse for the formation of the avantext and the significance of the “Voronezh text” for the implementation of the final plan. It also discovers the lines of creative attraction, due to which writers with different understanding of the nature of essay writing and possessing personally specific composition techniques could cooperate. The study identifies the most important components of the creative idea, examines the sources reinterpreted by A. Platonov, including the works of A. Bogdanov, investigates the variety and multi-vector nature of discursive practices, compares the semantically significant episodes presented in the original manuscript and in the published text, and analyzes the intertextual connections and their role in different editions of the work.

“MANARAGA” AND OTHER WRITINGS (Some Aspects of the Russian Literature Model Formation in the Russian Book Market)

The article compares the functioning of Russian fiction works in the artistic narrative (“Manaraga”, the short story of Vladimir Sorokin) and in the space of the Slovak book market. It draws attention to the relationship between the works of fiction value and a certain literary space, that is, to the problem of a literary canon formation (pantheon) as an essential component of the literature system. The value in the text is understood as the cultural (symbolic) capital of a work of art, awarded to it by a certain institution, within which the work is functioning. To a certain extent, this perception is opposed by its identification in Sorokin’s short story with economic capital (the cost of individual publications) and the profit expectation from the sale of books by publishers, since these two antagonistic capitals – the cultural and the economic one – are, according to Pierre Bourdieu [Bourdieu 2010], an integral part of literature existence in the literary field. The value of works of fiction in these two systems is considered by the example of the Russian literature model and its hierarchy presented in “Manaraga” and on the basis of the Russian literature model that has developed over the past 30 years in the Slovak book market. The article reveals the parallels between these two systems, which indicate: firstly, Sorokin’s reflection on the Russian literature functioning in the space of world literature; secondly, the essential importance of the value attributed to individual literary texts (the status of a classical writer, or a representative of world literature), as an essential factor of the Russian literature model formation in the Slovak book market.

AUTHORED LEXICAL SYNTAGMATICS IN A SYSTEMATIC INTERPRETATION

The article considers a stylometric model of systematic interpretation of authored lexical syntagmatics (lexical compatibility) in the classical prose of the 19th century. The article compares the achievements of classical lexicology and modern corpus linguistics and suggest bigrams, i. e. pairs of words used in a common phraseological context, as units of lexical syntagmatics to study texts of great volume. Besides, the articles formulates the requirements for lexical bigrams involved in the lexical-statistical comparison of different individual styles. The article provides examples of original bigrams that recur in different works of the same author over many creative years (e.g., oblokotit’ golovu [to lean a head on elbows] in the novels by L. N. Tolstoy). The problem of cataloguing and systematic interpretation of such recurring stylistic “particulars”, which the author may use deliberately or unconsciously, and the reader may or may not notice in different texts, is posed. On the basis of 19th century classical prose (the works of L. N. Tolstoy, F. M. Dostoevsky, A. P. Chekhov, I. S. Turgenev and I. A. Goncharov), the authors perform a context lexico-statistical comparison of bigrams containing words frequently used by all authors (for example, chelovek/lyudi [person/people], golova [head], govorit’ [to speak], pervyy [first], vdrug [suddenly], dva [two], etc.) is studied. It is noted that each author can identify a different set of words appearing in the original contextual environment. The model of comparative analysis is examined in detail on the example of the contexts of words denoting a person: chelovek/lyudi [person/people], zhenshchina [woman] and rebenok/deti [child/children]. Such combinations as intelligentnyy chekovek [intelligent person], lenivyy chekovek [lazy person], imet’ uspekh u zhenshchin [to succeed with women], deti i vnuki [children and grandchildren] (A. P. Chekhov), nervicheskiy chelovek [nervous person] (I. S. Turgenev), poshchadit’ cheloveka [to spare a person] (F. M. Dostoevsky), kurchavyy chelovek [curly-haired person], nevysokaya zhenshchina [short woman], beremennaya zhenshchina [pregnant woman] (L. N. Tolstoy), zhenshchiny – sozdaniya (prekrasnye, nezhnye, slabye) [women are (beautiful, gentle, weak) creatures] (I. A. Goncharov) are small fragments of authored stylistic systems. The analysis reveals a striking difference between the syntagmatic characteristics of the works of different writers. Conclusions are made about a possible systematic presentation of the material in the form of an authored syntagmatic dictionary of the Russian prose of the 19th century.

ESTATES IN LEO TOLSTOY’S NOVEL “RESURRECTION”: FROM DENOUNCING LUXURY TO LIFE ON LAND

For the first time in literary criticism, the author of the article turns her attention to the image of the estate in Tolstoy’s later artistic work, showing the dynamics of the writer’s views on estate life, the image of an ideal estate, which for Tolstoy was always associated with the motives of work, family life, proper attitude towards the people, etc. It is noted that in 1880–1910, the estate theme in Tolstoy’s creative imagination was directly related to the problems of land ownership, proper management and correct and gradual path of the individual and their spiritual growth. The picture of estate life In Leo Tolstoy’s novel “Resurrection” is realized in two contrasting versions: luxurious existence of the upper class and the aristocracy, not supported by any content, and transforming into a new image of the working life of the intelligentsia and landowners on the land. The author demonstrates the facts of impoverishment of estate life at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries, which are introduced in the artistic world of the novel. It is proved that the idea in the work of inseparable connection of a person with the people around him and with humanity at large, which is the key conception of the novel, is directly related to Tolstoy’s understanding of the change of the forms of estate life, important and dear for the writer himself. Of great importance in the novel is the awareness of the characters of natural life, which is presented in contrast to civilization, which deviates from the basic laws of love and goodness. On the basis of an analytical comparison of the drafts of the novel and the final text, the author substantiates the importance of the estate theme for understanding the feelings of the protagonist and his inner life, for organizing the epic artistic world of the novel. The article illustrates the stages of the dialectical movement of Dmitry Nekhlyudov and the connection between the estate and family themes. The author rethinks some episodes of the novel that have received controversial interpretations in science and reveals the artistic links that connect different chapters of the work.

T. S. ELIOT’S “OLD POSSUM’S BOOK OF PRACTICAL CATS” IN THE CONTEXT OF “NURSERY RHYMES” TRADITION

This paper presents the results of a comparative study of the collection of poems Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939) by T. S. Eliot and the collection of children’s verses Mother Goose Old Nursery Rhymes (published in 1760), compiled and illustrated by A. Rackham (1913). Consisting of 15 poems, and distinguished by its frivolity against the background of other works by Eliot, the cycle Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats has been overlooked by both Russian and foreign researchers for a long time. Recently a surge of interest in this book of verse has been provoked by the release of a feature film Cats (2019) based on the world-famous musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber. This fact as well as the lack of serious academic studies of Eliot’s book of verse has determined the urgency and novelty of this paper. It is also important to show the involvement of this segment of Eliot’s poetry into the English literary tradition. The aim of this research is to identify the influence of Victorian aesthetics of nonsense on the poetry of T. S. Eliot’s cycle. The method of comparative analysis has been chosen as the main research method. Besides, structural-semantic and linguistic-cultural methods have been used. In understanding and interpreting the term “tradition” the author relies on Eliot’s aesthetics, in which this concept is central. The terminological unit “nursery rhymes” is used in its original traditional meaning since its historical and cultural background disappears in any Russian translation or scholarly interpretation. In the course of work, certain features of nursery rhymes have been identified in the poetic texts by the great Modernist. The study of the specificity of this genre (the playful atmosphere of the text, the special rhythms and forms of coding historical events, animalistic perspectives, the use of various repetitions and imitations, the creation of author’s occasionalisms and unusual names of characters, etc.) confirms strong influence of the tradition of English nursery rhymes on T. S. Eliot’s works.