William Blake in Contemporary Russian Literature and Culture

The article discusses the creativity of the English romantic William Blake comprehended in contemporary Russian literature and culture. These facts are quite significant, since many Russian thinkers and writers, such as Igor Garin and Merab Mamardashvili, mention Blake in their works. Blake, partly remembered as a symbolist and mystic, loomed large in the cultural universe of the Moscow mystical “Yuzhinsky” circle, members of which were, in particular, Yuri Mamleev, Yevgeny Golovin, Alexander Dugin, Yuri Stefanov. For them, Blake was an integral part of the great Tradition or ancient knowledge, lost by the civilization. Blake has been mentioned and quoted in the prose by Yuri Buida, Alexey Gryakalov, Ivan Ermakov, Ksenia Buksha, Oleg Postnov and in the poetry by Olga Kuznetsova, Maria Galina, Alla Gorbunova, Maxim Kalinin and others. Andrei Tavrov enters into a creative dialogue with the English Romanticist in his poetic cycle Lament for Blake (2018). Tavrov creatively renders Blake’s metaphysics of human physiology. The poem “Blake. Sparrow” shows an impressive fusion of Blake’s motives and lyrics. in particular, the multilevel character of the mythological world (from Ulro to Eden), conversations with Angels and traveling through the stars in “The Marriage”, the image of a sparrow and a visionary bird in general, images of insects guided through the night (“Dream”), the image of Milton like the meteorite in the heel of the narrator, the figure of Flaxman and the philosophy of creation by the word. In Tavrov’s work, Blake inhabits in a bizarre world of metaliterature, including Gogol and Derzhavin, Velasquez and Newton, Lear and Oedipus, Pan and Melchizedek. Blake, as the creator of overlapping worlds, becomes for Tavrov the key to the total poetization of the universe; where a transition is made from the hermetic principle “as above, so below” to the principle “everything in everything”. This principle turns out to be the most important for contemporary poetry. Blake’s paintings and drawings have become a part of Russian book culture: the famous engraving of the Creator God with a compass “The Ancient of Days” is often used in book graphics; the Moscow conceptualist Viktor Pivovarov, the author of samizdat, admitted that Blake inspired him with his experience in book printing. Blake’s influence can also be seen in the works of contemporary sculptor Alexander Kudryavtsev (1938–2011), namely, his ceramic fresco “The Creation of the World”. Thus, Blake, who came, among others, through the work of The DOORS and Jarmusch’s Dead Man, plays a significant role in the space of contemporary Russian literature. In these terms, the most significant of his works are “Songs” and “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”, as well as mystical revelations of prophetic poems and his creative life of a genius unrecognized during his lifetime in general.

From Lazarus to the Petrashevtsy: Imagining Siberia in the Allegorical Novel Citizens of the Forest by Nikolai Akhsharumov

The article examines the phenomenon of spatial imagination in the plot and composition of the allegorical story by the critic and writer, member of the Petrashevsky Circle Nikolai Dmitrievich Akhsharumov. Turning to the most generalized Siberian topos and ignoring the numerous ethnographic information accumulated both in periodicals and in special studies, the writer constructs a dystopian plot, drawing on the novels by N.G. Chernyshevsky and F.M. Dostoevsky. Special attention should be paid to the polemic of Akhsharumov with the novel Crime and Punishment, which began in a critical article and continued beyond its borders, in a literary text. Akhsharumov begins his work from the point and coordinates where Crime and Punishment actually ends. When in a Siberian settlement, a gold digger and hunter, a former convict Lazar implements an educational project: he gives animals a language (according to the method of Robertson and Wundt) and law, teaches them the social principles of community and creates a kind of phalanstery. The social experiment gets out of control and ends in failure: “citizens of the forest” begin to worship the personified symbol of animal primal fear – the Great Fly totem. An uprising flares up to defeat a forcibly cultivated democracy, which yields to authoritarianism and totemism. By choosing the totem of the Great Fly, the forest dwellers finally lose their civic consciousness, appearing in their natural form and at the same time showing that there is no place for people, whoever they are, in their world (neither for life, nor, especially, for resurrection ). Like most dystopias, Citizens of the Forest demonstrates several phases of a social project: the formation of a civil society, its heyday and fall. Akhsharumov shows how the harmony of the animal world flings itself on mercy of one person and the word given to him; how the mass instinct (instincts of survival, reproduction, etc.) prevails over the needs of each individual (cattle or creature, as follows from the text). Citizens of the Forest creates an alternative value architectonics, due to which the life path of the protagonist, largely corresponding to the Old Testament, personifies the non-possibility of the resurrection miracle. The article attempts to describe not only intertextual links to political literature, utopias of Fourier, Cabet and Owen, dystopias in the spirit of Hobbes’ Leviathan, but also biographical lines associated with portraits of the writer’s brother, Fourierist Dmitry Akhsharumov, and M.V. Butashevich- Petrashevsky. Akhsharumov created space from scratch. Turning to the most primitive model of the Siberian text, and starting from strong texts (most likely, Voinarovsky and Crime and Punishment), Akhsharumov intuitively determined its two limits: a short novel, which begins as a story of the New World, ends with a descent into the kingdom of the dead. Siberia, which became a part of an ideological project and showed opportunities for a utopian perception, turned out to be reversible and easily transposed into a dystopia. Thus, despite the low aesthetic quality and numerous formal flaws, Citizens of the Forest remains one of the most significant evidences of spatial imagination, allowing to see in the choice of topos both ideological (from Icaria to Phalanstery) and conditionally biographical equestrianism (from family legends to political jokes). Siberia, as a space of imagination becomes the topos of an experiment continued by the writer in his fantastic story “Wanzamia”, directly replicating Cabet’s “Icaria”.

The Images of Dante’s Inferno in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead

The House of the Dead was repeatedly compared with the first part of Dante’s The Divine Comedy even in F.M. Dostoevsky’s lifetime. However, his contemporaries usually focused on general analogies, while later scholars paid more attention to the narrative features or individual reminiscences. This research studies the main aspects of the artistic structure of the Dante code, constructing the space of Hell in Dostoevsky’s novel. 1. The organization of space. Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov, the narrator in The House of the Dead, recreates a three-dimensional image that resembles a gradually narrowing funnel: from a bird’s-eye view, where the prison is seen in its entirety, the focus slowly descends, passing to smaller objects, and finally reaching the “three boards”, which limit Goryanchikov’s personal space. The same principle is employed to construct the space of Hell in Dante’s poem. In The House of the Dead, there is another significant indication of the spatial affinity of Dante’s hell and Dostoevsky’s katorga – active imagery associated with cobwebs and spiders. In the centre of the system of images associated with the designated semantic network is the parade- major, the head of the fortress and the owner of the inmate web. 2. The character system as an element constituting the space of Hell. The character system of The House of the Dead follows the compositional principle of Divine Comedy, where sinners are located in different circles in accordance with their main passion. There are three circles in the prison: the first is formal, according to the court decision; the second is informal, internal, formed by crafts and occupations; the third represents Goryanchikov’s perspective as an exponent of human and humane judgment, which distinguishes another person’s moral state. 3. Torment. The House of the Dead demonstrate a hierarchy in describing the tortures, while freedom becomes a fundamental category to embody the most important motif of physical and moral torment connecting Dostoevsky’s novel with Dante’s experience. The bodily torment ceases to be only the torment of the body to become a pain of the soul, comparable to physical torment, so the soul suffers and burns. Hell as a moral topos was the key for Dostoevsky. In The House of the Dead, he chooses the same way as Dante in The Divine Comedy: vivid corporeality conveys an esoteric metaphor of moral suffering and deep inner movements of the soul.

Peter the Great in the Memoirs of Marquis de Dangeau and Duc de Saint-Simon

The article for the first time compares the image of Peter the Great in the memoirs of two contemporary French writers Philippe de Courcillon, Marquis de Dangeau (1638‒1720), and Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon (1675–1755). Both Saint- Simon’s continuity in relation to Dangeau’s memoirs and the methods and techniques of their original literary processing are shown. The influence of the writers’ world outlooks and their political views on their interpretations of the figure of Peter the Great is revealed. For Dangeau, Peter the Great was a “curious case”, while for Saint-Simon he was the model of an enlightened monarch, a reigning ascetic striving for knowledge and transformation of his state. In this capacity, Peter the Great is opposed to the depraved and pleasure-seeking French court of the era of the Regency. It has been proved that Saint-Simon stood at the origins of “Peter’s myth” in France. The differences in the poetics of the memoirs of Dangeau and Saint-Simon have been revealed. Dangeau’s laconic and fact-based style emphasizes the mastery of the psychological portrait and the breadth of generalizations of the moralist and thinker Saint-Simon.

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.

Intercultural Philosophy: An Experience of Thematization. (Book Review: Stepanyants, M.T. (2020) Mezhkul’turnaya Filosofiya: Istoki, Metodologiya, Problematika, Perspektivy [Intercultural Philosophy: Sources, Methodology, Problems, Prospects]. Moscow: Nauka – Vostochnaya Literatura. 183 p.)

In the reviewed book, intercultural philosophy is considered as a development of comparative studies. Marietta Stepanyants shows that, in the framework of comparative studies, stable stereotypes of perceiving the cultures of the West and the East have developed. Intercultural philosophy as an alternative to Westcentrism proceeds from the recognition of the equality of cultural and philosophical traditions and of the possibility to convert categories into another conceptual language. Intercultural philosophy embodies the protest potential of modern culture and the origins of a new civilization project.

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.

“Subalterns” of Colonization in the Scholarly, Journalistic and Literary Heritage of Nikolai Yadrintsev

Modern postcolonial studies have developed the definition of internal colonization as a system of regular practices of colonial government and knowledge within the political boundaries of the state. On this scale, relations are formed between the state and its subjects, in which the state treats its subjects as subdued in the course of the conquest, and its own territory as conquered, mysterious, and requiring settlement and “inculturation” from the center. At the same time, the main elements of imperial domination, implemented through coercion, are cultural expansion, hegemony of power, ethnic assimilation within the state borders. The Russian culture of the 19th century formed the plot of internal colonization. It was built around the conflict between the “Man of Power and Culture” and the “Man from the People”. The latter is positioned in the article as a “colonial subaltern” – a disadvantaged, marginalized individual (group) with limited subjectivity. The concept of the subaltern, which is based on A. Gramsci’s idea of hegemony as a variant of voluntary acceptance of relations of domination, suggests that the dominance of the “Man of Power and Culture” is based on the consent of the governed rather than on the methods of violence and genocide. The assertion of the fact that Russia is created through self-colonization and self-sacrifice, and Russian identity is both that of the sovereign and of the subaltern, requires adequate argumentation through rereading and interpreting the plots of internal colonization. In the center of internal colonization are the well-known events of Siberian history: exile and katorga, resettlement, non-Russian question, social life of the borderland, etc. The literary heritage of Nikolai Yadrintsev (articles, poems, feuilletons) provides an opportunity not only to reconstruct the images of “colonial subalternity”, to reconstruct significant episodes of the collective biography of subalterns or to rank them as the indigenous population, old-timers of the region, resettlers from European Russia, but also to hear the voices of the “subalterns” themselves. The postcolonial perspective of the study of the literary works of Yadrintsev, a representative of the liberal segment of the Russian sociopolitical discourse, opens up prospects for identifying the practices and forms of resistance of the voiceless subalterns, the mechanisms of their oppression by both the colonialists and the traditional patriarchal power. When formulating the key findings of the study, the author takes into account that “subalterns”, as a category of the internal colonization process, are initially in double exclusion: their “invisibility” and “inaudibility” is replaced by the right of competing political actors to represent the interests of the subaltern. This invariably creates the danger of perceiving subalterns as coherent political subjects.

The Myth of the Eternal Return in Eremey Aipin’s In Search of the Primordial Land

The title of the new novel by the Yugra writer Eremey Aipin In Search of the Primordial Land, first published in Russian in 2019, contains an obvious reference to the cultural tradition and suggests the possibility of a scholarly reading of a literary text from the perspective of mythopoetics. The novel organically continues the attitude characteristic of all Aipin’s previous works. This attitude clearly discerns the writer’s desire to see the essence of modern life realities through the prism of traditional values enshrined in the myths and legends of his people. In Aipin’s artistic picture of the world, myth does not just appear as one of its elements. It enters the very flesh of this world, constitutes its foundation, its pivotal ontological and axiological axis. Aipin does not limit himself to the role of a popularizer of the mythological repertoire of the Khanty people. On the basis of traditional images, plots and motives, he builds his own mythological paradigm, in which the system of national and universal values is superimposed on the personal life experience of the author and his heroes. This fundamentally determines the basic principles of Aipin’s artistic expression organization. The article aims to reveal the meaning-forming role of the myth of the eternal return in Aipin’s In Search of the Primordial Land and to characterize the means of its artistic actualization in the text. During the research, the results of the latest developments in the field of philological regional studies and mythopoetics were taken into account. The analysis of the novel in the context of the traditional culture of the indigenous peoples of Yugra shows that Aipin inextricably connects reflections on the historical fate of Russia with the fate of a person. Despite the fact that the novel is based on the dramatic events of a worldwide scale, it is full of high optimistic sound. According to Aipin’s idea, Russia, which is at the turn of the millennium, is experiencing a situation of the “second world flood”, since the human community lost its spiritual values. The protagonist of the novel is the artist Matvey Taishin. He goes through difficult life trials, but acquires the desired sense of being; he finds it in love and in the awareness of the need to continue life. Using the example of Taishin, Aipin convincingly demonstrates that the revival of Russia is impossible without recognizing its cultural and spiritual origins, without moving towards its own metal Primordial Land. It is this saving path, based on the return to the eternal, timeless values, that will give Russia the opportunity to realize its historical destiny and overcome the state of chaos and decay. The article is the first experience of a conceptual and contextual analysis of Aipin’s In Search of the Primordial Land in Russian literary criticism, which constitutes the novelty of the research.

Non-Russian Mythology and Folklore in the Volga Travelogue of the 19th Century

The Volga Travelogue is a large layer of travel essays in the 19th-century Russian literature. This layer has not become a subject of special research in literature studies. The “journey along the Volga” is distinguished by the wide diversity of issues and themes it discusses: the economic and industrial activities of the region, its cultural and historical sights, the uniqueness of the Volga region in an ethnographic perspective – of the multifaceted “Volga region resident”. One of the structural components of the travelogue is the Volga mythology and folklore: historical-geographical and cultural-ethnic information is supplemented with legends of the ancient Volga, Russian and non- Russian (Tatar, Mordovian, German, Kalmyk) legends. Describing the “non-Russian Volga”, writers refer to the national aspects of the life of different nationalities, the most important archetypes of their consciousness. A characteristic feature of N.P. Bogolyubov’s travelogue The Volga from Tver to Astrakhan is the non-Russian word as a marker of cultural identity: it is invariably present in the description of national customs. Telling about the “Mordovian places” of the Volga region, Bogolyubov describes specific rituals associated with the birth of a baby and with burials. The Muslim as a different national and cultural tradition of the Volga region particularly attracts writers’ attention. M.I. Nevzorov, in his Journey to Kazan, Vyatka and Orenburg in 1800, tells about the spiritual and religious experience of the Tatar people: writes about the ontological constants, acquaints the reader with epigraphic culture representing Muslims’ existential ideas about people and the universe. S. Monastyrsky, in his Illustrated companion along the Volga, presents Tatar legends about the winged snake Jilantau, about the “Black Chamber” and the khan’s daughter. These legends express the religious and poetic ideas of the people. Telling about the local cultural and mythological tradition is a characteristic feature of the Russian travelogue: an autochthon is represented by its ethnocultural identity. Folklore material functions in structural parallels – multilingual sources: V.I. Nemirovich-Danchenko, in his travelogue The Great River: Pictures from the Life and Nature on the Volga, gives two – Russian and Mordovian – versions of the legend about “Polonyanka”, and notes the particular poetry of the non-Russian text. In the combination of various – Tatar, Russian, Kalmyk – cultural and national constants of the lower Volga. German characterology is particularly expressed. A German legend associated with biblical material about the history of the prophet Elijah’s wandering through the desert to Sarepta of Sidon is fixed in the travelogues of Ya.P. Kuchin, S. Monastyrsky, and A.P. Valueva. The legend conveys the historical “memory of the place” – the foundation of the Sarepta colony. In the travelogues of V. Sidorov, N. Bogolyubov, descriptions of Buddhist Kalmyks, with their way of life, khuruls and gelyungs, are supplemented with Kalmyk legends about the Bogdo-Ola mountain. Folklore and mythology as categories of a non-native cultural text complicate the artistic system of the travelogue and contribute to the poetic comprehension of the poly-ethnic and poly-confessional Volga region.