Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Litteraria Rossica

Four Ways to Achieve Freedom. About the Heroes of Russian Literature

Wasilij Szczukin — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

This article contains criticism of the neoliberal concept of positive freedom. The author offers his understanding of the ideal of freedom, which is based not on economic, but on social and psychological criteria. The Hegelian understanding of freedom as a conscious necessity, according to the author, is unacceptable for modern man. It is difficult not to agree with Dostoevsky’s opinion that it is not the choice of benefit and goodness, but the obligatory nature of this choice that deprives a person of that incomparable sense of freedom (Notes from the Underground). Not only the holy spirit, but also the human spirit, blows wherever it wants, and not only where it is “necessary” or prescribed to blow. It is also impossible not to take into account the possibility of the spontaneous launch of unpredictable mechanisms of nature and culture, which Yuri Lotman wrote about in Unpredictable Mechanisms of Culture (1993). The author of the article identifies four types of positive freedom, which are expressed in the images of some heroes of Russian literature. These include skete life, described in the writings of Nil Sorsky and other Russian hesychasts, Karamazovism, Oblomovism, and, finally, “secret” spiritual freedom. The author expresses sympathy for the latter concept of positive freedom, incompatible with both anarchic tyranny and “blessed” passivity.

Russian Women’s Literature of the 18th–19th Centuries in a Historical and Critical Perspective

Weronika Jeleńska — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

This article is devoted to the history and reception of women’s literary works in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. The history of the development of women’s literature shows that it developed quite ambiguously and in “leaps and bounds”, which is explained by political and cultural changes, especially in the mentality of society. The origins of Russian women’s literature date back to the early 18^th century, when Peter I fought for the europeanization and cultural development of the whole country. Real change occurred only during the reign of Catherine the Great, who promoted the role of women in literature by being herself a writer. However, prevailing beliefs about the duties and role of women in society prevented them from occupying a prominent place in Russian literature. The position of women writers began to change at the beginning of the 19^th century, when women were allowed a place in literary activities and the concept of women’s literature was ﬁrst recognized. The 19^th century brought Russian women writers new spaces for creative development and was marked by the ﬁrst attempts to ﬁght for their rights (including through writing). Nevertheless, criticism of women’s literature, which was controlled by men, was still not favorable.

An Imitation of the Italian by Alexander Pushkin and The Hangman by Nikolai Markevich

Oleg Proskurin — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

This article presents a hypothesis regarding the possible source of one enigmatic episode in Alexander Pushkin’s poem An Imitation of the Italian (Подражание италиянскому, 1836). In this episode, demons (besy) liﬅ the corpse of Judas on their horns and laughingly drag him oﬀ to Satan. It is absent both in the Italian original, the sonnet Sopra Giuda by Francesco Gianni (1750–1822) and in its French translation by Antoni Deschamps (1800–1869), which served as the direct source for Pushkin’s imitation. Such demons do not exist in either the French or the Italian tradition. The article suggests that the source of Pushkin’s innovation is to be found in the poem Udavlennik (The Hangman) by the poet, musician, and collector of Ukrainian folklore Nikolai Markevich (1804–1860), published in the journal “Moskovskii Telegraf” in 1829 and included in his book Ukrainian Melodies, published in 1831. In the poem a Cossack who has committed suicide is carried oﬀ to hell on the horns of demons. Markevich was acquainted with Pushkin, having met him in Moscow in 1829. Ukrainian folk beliefs, poetically processed by N. Markevich, turned out to be perfectly suitable for expressing the characteristics of the Italian medieval consciousness.

Transcultural Film Adaptations as Cross-Cultural Dialogue

Anna Boginskaya — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

This article explores a transcultural ﬁlm adaptation, offerinf new avenues for discussing cross-cultural dialog. The article analyzes the transcultural adaptation of Doctor Zhivago, written by Boris Pasternak. The book was adapted in 1965 by British director David Lean, who cooperated with one of the largest American ﬁlm studios, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. This work considers the changing meaning of the text, which enters a new national culture, and explores how Pasternak’s novel was changed to ﬁt the new audience. Lean’s adaptation of Doctor Zhivago is analyzed as a dialogue of different cultures, which involve the “Hollywoodization” of Russian literature. The author emphasizes the intertextual and cultural dialogism of Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago and David Lean’s 1965 ﬁlm adaptation. The ﬁlm adaptation inserts the novel into much broader dialogic relations, for example, with movies of a speciﬁc era, their cinematic technics, and ideologies.

Russian-Language Poetry in Ukraine: Specificity, Authors and Modern Challenges

Elina Sventsitskaya — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

The object of this article is modern Russian-language poetry in Ukraine as represented by its main personalities. The author argues that Russian-language literature in Ukraine is afar from accidental phenomenon andthat it seeks to solve problems of creative self-expression in no way related to politics. It has never sought tosupport or glorify the authorities in Russia. Rather its goal has been the impartial analysis of the state of society. This paper examines the diversity of creative researchofthe poetry and its response to contemporary challenges. Tothis end the meaning and boundaries of“Russian-language literature of Ukraine “ are clariﬁed and shown to be determined by its connection to two East Slavic cultures at once and the integration of two mentalities in one author, which, naturally, is reﬂected in the poetics of their works. The work of the most famous contemporary poets is examined as to the diversity of their creative searches. The choice of poets is the importance given to the multi-directionality of their searches, as well as the representativeness of their work aspart ofthe literary process in Ukraine, i. e., its non-randomness in this context and its aesthetic qualities. The article not only demonstrates what Russian-language poetry of Ukraine is at the present stage, but also highlights the transformations it is undergoing in response to wartime challenges.

The Bilingual Poetry of Leonid Kiselev in the Dialogical Aspect

Tatyana Pakhareva — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

This article addresses the phenomenon of bilingualism in the poetry of Leonid Kiselev (1946–1968), which is analyzed as the basis for the internal dialogic nature of the Kyiv poet’s lyrics. The immanent dialogism of Kiselev’s poetic thinking is already manifested at the level of the lexical-syntactic organization of his poems (the abundance of interrogative constructions, addresses to a conventional interlocutor, etc.). But conceptually signiﬁcant for Kiselev was the dialogue with poets of all times and countries, among whom the Kiev poet chose his like-minded people and teachers, such as Taras Shevchenko, Osip Mandelstam, and Pavlo Tychyna. The article analyzes various ways of conducting poetic dialogue between Kiselev and these and other poets, oﬅen realized in a bilingual mode. It has been revealed that the interaction of Ukrainian and Russian linguistic and literary contexts in his poems is carried out with the help of bilingual verbal constructions (for example, the symmetrical use of Russian and Ukrainian equivalent prepositions in the poem The Tale of Igor’s Campaign); Ukrainian epigraphs to poems written in Russian; allusions (for example, a politically charged allusion to Nikolai Gumilyov’s poem Worker, which is read in the process of back-translating a line of Kiselev’s Ukrainian-language poem into Russian); and ﬁgurative dialogical exchanges between Kiselyov’s own poems written in Ukrainian and Russian.

3STRS by Luk Perceval. Reading Experience

Ewa Sadzińska, Aleksandra Szymańska — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

This article seeks to interpret the performance 3STRS by the Belgian director Luk Perceval, taking into account the poetics of Anton Chekhov’s plays. Attention is drawn to the preservation or omission of individual scenes, motifs, and dialogues, and to the spatial and temporal characteristics of the performance, the semantics of the title and the techniques used. Perceval’s heroes are in a hall, surrounded by glass walls that crush, double, reﬂect and expose the hidden essence of their tragic life. The tragic situation of the characters is enhanced by the sparse decoration, as well as music based on samples. The intensiﬁcation of the ugly, the lack of logic in the development of events, the unmotivated actions of the characters, the presence of a psychological vacuum, the inability of the characters to achieve mutual understanding, and the tragic ending bring Perceval’s interpretation closer to the theater of the absurd. Chekhov’s play is an impetus for the director to think about the topic of old age, not only personally, but also more generally, such as the aging of the European continent, migrants, euthanasia, low fertility, and the approach of a global catastrophe, as well as loneliness and the absurdity of existence, the inability of people to communicate etc.

Dialogue – Monologue – Silence in Early Love Lyrics of Osip Mandelshtam

Oleg Lekmanov — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

In this article the reasons are discussed for early Osip Mandelshtam’s refusal to publish his poems about love. There is also a discussion about how the poet disguised the love theme in the lyrics written in the period 1909–1910. The poem “Silentium” is shown to be the key to Mandeshtam’s early love poems. In this poem Mandelshtam narrowed the theme down to Fyodor Tyutchev’s poem of the same name – “Silentium!”. Mandelshtam’s poem, unlike Tyutchev’s, is not about any one person as opposed to the rest of humanity, but about the poet himself and his rejection of erotic verse. This article goes on to compare the poems about love contained in the ﬁrst and second editions of Mandelshtam’s début volume of poetry Stone (Камень) with poems not included in this volume. It is shown that in these latter poems the poet expressed himself with less restraint. When choosing poems for the ﬁrst and second editions of Stone, Mandelshtam only occasionally and, so to speak, “illegitimately” broke the rule he had set for himself in “Silentium” regarding love lyrics: “May my lips acquire /primeval muteness”. This leads to the conclusion that love played, not an insigniﬁcant, but rather an excessively large role in Mandelshtam’s life, and that it was precisely for this reason that he feared assigning it too large a place in his poetry. Erotic emotion overwhelmed the poet and threatened to deprive him of the desire to write poetry and make him think of nothing but the satisfaction of sexual desire.

Silence in Elena Shvarts’s Creative Work

Kristina Vorontsova — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

This article delves into the intricate evolution of the notion of “silence” within the literary legacy of Elena Shvarts (1948–2010), spanning both her poetic compositions and prose, alongside insights from her diaries and memoirs that encapsulate the essence of the Second Leningrad Culture. Through a meticulous examination, a comprehensive typology and hierarchical structure of meanings aﬃliated with lexical elements derived from “МОЛК-” and “МОЛЧ-” are revealed. Shvarts’s artistic realm emerges as a tapestry interwoven with the themes of dialogicity and monologicity, wherein the concept of silence assumes a profoundly signiﬁcant role. This scholarly inquiry delineates the multifaceted dimensions of silence, discerning its positive, neutral, and negative connotations embedded within the poetic cosmos of the author under scrutiny. The article elucidates how silence, nuanced and layered, acts as a pivotal element within Shvarts’s creative sphere. The gradient of interpretations and manifestations of silence within her works reﬂects the intricate interplay between linguistic constructs and the profound emotional depths that Shvarts intricately weaves into her literary tapestry. This analysis brings forth a nuanced understanding of the role and signiﬁcance of silence evolving within the intricate fabric of Shvarts’s literary universe, from its nascent stages to the crescendo of her artistic expression.

Authorial Silence in Anton Chekhov’s Steppe and Seagull

John Douglas Clayton — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

The book Histoire du silence. De la Renaissance a nos jours (2018) by Alain Corbin oﬀers a starting point for an analysis of silence – in both its meanings as the absence of sound and the abstinence from speech – in the literary text. Fëdor Tiutchev in his poem “Silentium” speaks of the inner feelings that cannot and should not be uttered. However, in the last third of the 19^th century, when all forms of artistic expression were deeply aﬀected by scientiﬁc advances, new modes of expression of the ineﬀable appeared. In particular Anton Chekhov because of his medical training was inﬂuenced by contemporary developments in psychiatry, in which the speech of patients was seen to reveal their psychological traumas. His work as writer and dramaturg was thus radically changed by his analysis of patient’s neuroses. In The Seagull the dramatic text ceases to be a coherent dialogue and consists of characters exhibiting their psychological problems in their speech, while the playwright leaves it to the viewer to interpret them. Silence about the “elephant in the room” becomes a dramaturgical strategy. Hints as to how to understand the psychological undercurrents are scattered in the speech of diﬀerent characters. A careful reading reveals the importance of the play La Dame aux camélias as the key intertext. The author leaves it to the audience to divine that in Act Four Nina is in the ﬁnal stages of tuberculosis. Treplev’s playlet in Act One envisages a time when silence will reign overall.

Dialogue in the Plowing Ritual in Sergei Yesenin’s Story Yar and its Mythological Connotations

Konstantin Rakhno — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

One of the most striking episodes in Sergei Yesenin’s story Yar (1915) is the description of the folk ritual of ploughing a village against an anthrax epizootic. It is ethnographically accurate, based on the personal impressions of the poet as an eyewitness, and contains a number of important details that complement the records of the 19^th – early 20^th centuries. The ploughing that Yesenin saw in his native village belongs to the so-called occasional rituals, which are only resorted to during crises, such as mass illnesses of people and deaths of livestock, which were thought to mean failure in the world order. To stop the epidemic a balance had to be restored between the “human” and the “non-human”. Accordingly, the epidemic was thought of as evidence that the balance had been disrupted, and that the border separating people from the other world had weakened. The rite of ploughing was intended to renew it on the real and symbolic levels. Eleven naked innocent girls, led by a blindfolded married woman, circled the village with chants. They became participants in primordial creation. According to Yesenin, during the ritual walk they could kill any person they met who was deemed to personify the disease. Moreover, the dialogue between the blindfolded woman and the participants in the ritual reproduced ritual blindness, which made it possible to see another existence, and invoked the corresponding mythological characters such as Gogol’s Viy.

Goodbye, homo sovieticus: Considerations about the Svetlana Alexievich’s Documentary Novel Secondhand time

Anna Stępniak — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

This article concerns the problem of the phenomenon of the Soviet man – a product of the Soviet era, who is a complex, ambiguous and tragic ﬁgure. Svetlana Alexievich devotes the fifth book in the series Voices from Utopia to the Soviet man. On one hand, people brought up by the “red” civilization (as Alexievich deﬁnes them) were shaped by participation in revolution, wars and violence, which makes them ready to inﬂict it. On the other hand, they are fanatically attached to communist ideals, even when they have failed them. They ﬁnd it diﬃcult to ﬁnd themselves in the new reality. They are also incapable of using freedom, democracy and prosperity properly. The image of homo sovieticus in Alexievich’s documentary novel is depressing and sad – it is diﬃcult to understand someone who has survived the camps, torture, loss of relatives and the collapse of the empire, who patiently endures suﬀering inanticipation of happiness that he has never known, and who misses the USSR with its imperfections and enslavement.

Dialogue with Cultural Tradition: Contextualizing Fear in Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s Novel The Big Green Tent

Tünde Szabó — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s works are characterized by the large number of references to the most diverse cultural phenomena of the depicted era. Her novel The Big Green Tent is dedicated to the generation ofthe dissidents of the 1960s, including their role in the cultural life of the era of the “thaw” and the “stagnation”. L. Ulitskaya evaluates the activity of this generation precisely because they “were the ﬁrst generation in Russia to overcome the fear of power”. Therefore, one of the most important components of the plot is the problem of “initiation by fear” and the possibility of overcoming it. This article considers the contextualisation of fear, the cultural and literary background, on the basis of which the fear of the heroes is comprehended. Based on the Hungarian philosopher Ágnes Heller’s concept of emotion, fear is perceived to be acomprehensive concept, combining three diﬀerent types of feelings – aﬀective, cognitive-situational and, thirdly, when the feeling becomes apersonality trait. Corresponding to these types, the contextualization of fear in the novel takes place on three levels. First, in speciﬁc situations ofthe depicted world, where the hero’s fear manifests itself as an “animal” feeling and the emphasis is placed on overcoming it. Second, fear is the subject of the hero’s reﬂections and meditations, in which its literary context is created. Third, on the author’s level, thanks to various intertextual links, the very image of the hero acquires symbolic signiﬁcance. Thus the contextualization of fear activates awide range ofcultural traditions, with which Ulitskaya’s novel enters into afruitful dialogue.

Woman as Victim of Manipulation: The Example of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Netochka Nezvanova

Patrik Lekeš — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

This article analyzes the relationship between daughter and stepfather in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Netochka Nezvanova (1849), perceiving the presence in it of symptoms of three socio-psychological phenomena – the Electra Complex, codependency, and gaslighting. Dostoevsky sees man as a “mystery” and explores the “bottom of the human soul”. Using the material of Dostoevsky’s novel, the article demonstrates the productivity of the psychological approach to Dostoevsky’s work. It seeks to place this classical text of Russian literature within the paradigms of modern psychology and to show the author’s mastery and insight in describing the above-mentioned socio-psychological phenomena already in the 19^th century, although they were determined by modern science only at the turn of the 20^th–21^st centuries. This analysis also allows us to think about the main character as a victim of manipulation. Symptoms of each of these social-psychological phenomena are present in the behaviour of Netochka. All these forms of manipulation are the result of her stepfather’s addiction. However, it remains moot to what extent they are present in the psyche of the protagonist.

From the Editors

John Douglas Clayton, Natalia Vesselova — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Anna Stępniak, Gatunkowe i stylistyczne wyznaczniki listów miłosnych Borysa Pasternaka, Łódź: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego 2020, 304 ss

Urszula Cierniak — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100