“Russian” and “Soviet” Plot in the Literary Works of Yoko Tavada

In the article the concepts-signified as “Russian” and “Soviet” expressed in the works of the German-Japanese writer Yoko Tavada (born 1960) are touched upon. The concepts signified as “Soviet” and “Russian” do encompass everything that is connected with Russian culture, literature and the Soviet Union. The empirical material for the given depiction were the essay and novel by Tavada “Suspicious passengers of your night trains” (2002, 2009). Based on the example of this novel the attitude of the younger generation of the socialist countries of late 1980s to the Russian language is revealed. The transition of the socialist bloc (Yugoslavia) is described on the example of clothes (jeans, aluminum fork, and pizza), the younger generation (good manners vs. bad manners), and language skills (English vs. Russian). The heroine’s journey along the Trans-Siberian Railway (Moscow – Irkutsk – Khabarovsk) enabled the author to reveal the micro-historical realities of the last decade of the Soviet era. The plot of the novel showed that in the last decades of the Soviet era there was already a “nostalgia” for household goods, the style of clothing and music, and Western pop culture (Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Presley). During the contact with the main character, the Russian soul (benevolence, openness, hospitality) and low standards of eco-awareness and disrespect for non-smokers in public transport (train) are revealed. The Soviet era is also confessed at the level of smell and food (garlic, cheap cigarettes, onions, black bread, porridge, soup butter drips, vodka, etc.). In the course of the narrative and communication with the surrounding people the Siberian “real” world is indicated, i.e. the poverty of the interior of the Siberian villages of the Soviet era. In the course of describing the Siberian expanse its natural and climatic constants such as cold, snow, bathhouse and birch, the latter as a symbol of all of Russia with its mythological stratum, were presented. The attributive cycle of the Siberian natural-climatic and “material” world is completed by the theme of androgyny opened up in the Siberian bathhouse, which is a space for identifying all types of physical things, that is, of female and male in woman and man.

Day Stars and Pervorossiisk by Olga Berggolts in the Light of Poetic Cinematograph

The paper considers the book Day Stars and the narrative poem Pervorossiisk by Olga Berggolts from an interdisciplinary perspective. The works were screened by Igor Talankin and Evgenii Shiffers. According to the author of the research, it is these films that define meaning-making mechanisms of Berggolts’s creative activity. A night dream mode of film narration is determinant for I. Talankin’s Day Stars; the search for the form, which is able to communicate the book structure as well as a whimsical game of human memory, comes to the fore. The film making became a testing site for Evgenii Shiffers where his religious and philosophical ideas were performed. The film Pervorossiyane is not just setting an event line in terms of visual patterns but the narrative poem reproduced via a film and thought solely in a religious and drama mystery light.

Active Processes in the Syntax of Modern Russian Speech in the Aspect of Linguo-Semiotic and Linguo-Cognitive Interpretation

The paper examines the ways of implementation and syntactic organization of the discourse of the Russian segment of the Internet as a syncretic phenomenon that organically combines the principles of actualizing oral and written forms of communication. The methods of linguosemiotic and linguo-cognitive analysis of discourse as an information flow, based on the ideas of Yu. S. Stepanov, V. Z. Demyankov, U. Chafe and others are applied in the work. The research material is text data extracted from the Russian National Corpus and obtained by the method of continuous sampling based on the results of the author’s own Internet monitoring. The study shows that the syntax of Internet speech is not reduced to the process of hybridization of traditionally existing oral and written forms of language existence. In the usus of the information environment of the informal Internet, their own norms are developed, which are organic for the conditions of communication offered in this environment. The specific role of syntactic models of parcelling, segmentation, stringing techniques, graphic abbreviations, and other paraverbal means in informal Internet communication is analyzed. Also, special attention is paid to the originality of the punctuation design of speech on the Internet, the emergence of new punctuation norms. The author came at a conclusion that the Internet discourse is a new equal third form of language existence, along with the traditionally distinguished oral and written forms.

Chekhov’s Plays as the Basis of Metatheatral Performances in the 2010s

Chekhov’s drama has retained its constant popularity throughout the twentieth century and the first two decades of the twenty-first century and has an unbroken scenic history. In modern theater it performs several functions: 1) of a literary basis for the-atrical action, carefully preserved by the director (traditionalist approach); 2) of a kind of material that can and should be adapted, modernized, adjusted to the urgent range of acute problems and to today’s scenic language (avant-garde, post-dramatic approach). One might argue that Chekhov’s drama transitions into the category of “proto-text” or “metatext”. Productions of Chekhov’s plays are often the ones that become the realm of the most radical theatrical experiments when their “familiar” “proto-text”, their basis and foundation are, so to speak, factored out from them: his drama remains in the domain of literature, of reader’s attention while the theater moves ahead – into the area of new scenic opportunities which are only tangentially

The Literary Madness: Language as an Indicator of Insanity in the Fiction of the 20th Century (1920s)

The article is devoted to the phenomenon of insanity in the artistic discourse of the 1920s. Such a literary reception is interesting because, on the one hand, it goes against the dominant clinical approaches at that time, which emphasized the medical aspect of the problem, and on the other hand, it anticipates the antipsychiatric philoophical theories, whereby the marginal figure of the madman was gradually included in the social space. Using the example of three iconic works of modernist literature, the article demonstrates how innovative techniques of working with language make the speech of a mentally ill person distinctly audible. Virginia Woolf in “Mrs Dalloway” conveys the disastrous experience of the First World War through the stream of consciousness of the mentally traumatized character Septimus Smith. Woolf puts an anti-militaristic appeal into the mouth of a madman and thus makes him the herald of a simple truth that reasonable people, however, prefer not to notice. Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s short story “Cogwheels” reproduces the experiences of the author, who feels the approach of insanity. Madness opens up as a borderline case that reveals its deep kinship with the source of writing, understood as a lack of form, lack of meaning, lack of creation. William Faulkner in the novel “The Sound and the Fury” gives the gift of speech to the weak-minded Benji, who doesn’t talk. His im-possible narrative offers an alternative to the linear logic, which clarify Benji’s confusing narration but fail to rival it in conveying the directness of human suffering or happiness.

The Expansion of the Preposition pro in Modern Russian Speech, or The Latest Russian Rhetoric

The article notes the tendency towards the preferred choice of the preposition pro (about) (instead of o) in modern Russian speech. The above said leads to a change in the compatibility of the accusative word form with the explanatory meaning, to an expansion of the range of verbs and nouns that control this form. The use of the word forms in names is updated (in different communicative spheres). Observations on the use of the so-called “The Accusative of theme” in media speech allowed us to identify different communicative intentions of the speaker, which are marked by the word form pro (about) N4: fixation of the topic, announcement, continuation and development, return to the topic, change of topic, forecast, clarification, accentuation. In addition, as part of the predicate, the word form with the preposition pro (about) is used as a means of the object of speech / thought characterization. In these syntactic conditions, a new way of defining the concept is formed: X eto pro (is about) N4, as well as a new question: What is X about? They are actively used in speech by adherents of the newest rhetorical canon – as opposed to the traditional one.

Metacriticism in Yu. S. Stepanov’s Language Philosophy

The article is devoted to the metacritical component in the scientific heritage of Yu. S. Stepanov (1930–2012) and its significant presence in modern scientific research. Metacriticism is understood as a method of an analytical revision of estab-lished linguistic concepts, opinions, and assessments related to iconic personalities and their views. This method is included in the tools of narrative linguistic historiography, along with the study of the full linguistic heritage corpus created by specific authors in a strictly chronological order, identifying a broad scientific context, ex-ploring the intellectual discourse of the era, a detailed acquaintance with the linguistic journals and collections of the period of interest, restoring the scientist’s library according to his / her writings, reconstructing his / her conceptual chronology, interviewing eyewitnesses of scientific events, students and opponents of key figures in the specific scientific school, etc. In this sense, metacriticism significantly expands its original boundaries as defined in the middle of the 19th century in the course of revising I. Kant’s critical ideas, and is represented in the works by Yu. S. Stepanov with his arguments about the accuracy of interpretations of classical concepts, terms and categories related to the philosophy of language in Russian and foreign scientific publications.

Semantics of Adjective 'radostny' and Conceptualization of the Emotional Evaluation

The article deals with the development and modification of the emotional evaluation of the adjective radostny (English – joyful) in terms of conceptualisation of emotions. The paper includes the comparison of its dictionary definitions, etymological data and interpretation in terms of emotional evaluation. Special attention is paid to the processes of conceptualisation of emotional evaluation by means of the extension of the adjective denotation sphere, denotative shift from perceptible objects to invisible objects, from form to content. As a result, the adjective radostny receives intellectual and aesthetic shades of meaning. The denotative shift referring to negative denotation modifies the dominant category feature – a positive evaluation component. It leads to the weakening and neutralization of the positive evaluation. The analysis of use, as applied to the examples in the Russian National Corpus, verifies the basic characteristics of emotional evaluation (subjectivity and uncertainty) and helps to identify its important characteristics (communicativeness, efficiency, attractiveness). The study takes into account the forms of objectification of radostny evaluation, time factor and typical genres.

Signifier as Signified: Predictive Concept of Semiosis of the Phonetic Plan of Speech

The subject of the article is the prognostic concept of semiosis of the phonetic plan of speech. Interpretation of a signifier is considered as an act of its predictive recoding, the result of which is the phonetic appearance of the word perceived by the addressee. Based on the position that language and speech are two sides of speech activity, the relationship between which can be described by relations of predictive interpretation, the article formulates the idea of the presence of interpretative – predictive algorithms for encoding the signifier in the language. Reduction and assimilation are con-sidered as such algorithms. The interpretation of these processes in modern linguistics is reduced to the statement of positional changes in phonemes in the speech flow. The positional principle in this approach becomes a sound law. Howevr, the law is a statement of regularity, but not an explanation of why this happens. The paper substantiates that these processes are the result of a substantial interpretation inherent in language as a means of communication.

Our Own Personal Jesus, or Phenomenon of “Walks on Water” by I. Kormiltsev

The research is based on the analysis of the poem “Walks on water” by I. Kormiltsev and consideration of this text as a song of the group “Nautilus Pompilius”. The interpretation of the text is based on comparison of the plot with the text of the New Testament, on analysis of the opposition of the two heroes, on consideration of separate images of the poem within the poetics of the whole creativity of the poet. The anthropological concept of “meme” as a unit of cultural evolution was involved to analyze the reasons for the popularity of this composition. When people listen to the song, they don’t perceive the meaning of the original statement, but only memes are perceived.