Ballet «Queen Of Spades» by G. I. Banshchikov (to the Problem of Artistic Interpretation of the Story of A. S. Pushkin)

The subject of the research in the article is the chronotopic coordinates of the inner world of the story "The Queen of Spades" (1833) by A.S. Pushkin: the St. Petersburg "long winter night", the "locked door" and the numerical symbolism of time. All of them have previously been mentioned by domestic and foreign researchers of the text, but have not been analyzed in detail. In the present article, the specified chronotopic elements are considered systematically for the first time and studied in the context of Pushkin's work of the 1830s. In addition, the article focuses on the narrative organization of the text: the analysis revealed the specifics of the author's use of the lexemes "to seem" and "to appear" in the narrative fabric of the work. With the help of these lexemes, the author recreated the boundary spatio-temporal coordinates of the artistic world of "The Queen of Spades". The purpose of the study is to determine the chronotopic elements related to different genre models: a novella/non-fantastic story or a fairy tale/fantastic story; to understand the principles of interaction of genre elements and to comprehend the author's sense of life, which determined such a complex nature of the text. In this regard, a set of methods was used as an analytical tool: elements of genre and narrative analysis are in demand. As a result of the conducted research, it is concluded that the polygenre nature of "The Queen of Spades" is formed by the synthesis of genre elements and their controversy: in the inner world of a work of art, the fairy-tale chronotope "explodes" the everyday flow of life, and the everyday narrative narration slows down the energy of the fantastic and the fairy-tale. The polygenre nature of the text initiates an understanding of the chronotopic details of the work from several semantic angles simultaneously. At the same time, the narrator's point of view is a vital counterpoint, often expressed by the lexemes "it seemed" and "it appeared"; this narrative counterpoint is devoid of dogmatic omniscience, since the author is open to the entire diversity of Life. The results of the conducted research can be used for the lecture courses devoted to the study of the works of A.S. Pushkin and Russian prose of the 19th century.

The Capacious Greatcoat Ed Minus (bio) Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida edited by Robert Chandler (Penguin Classics, 2006. 656 pages. $17 pb) I did not know the name Robert Chandler until New York Review Books published, early in 2006, his translation of the monumental World War ii novel Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. Since I do not know Russian, I cannot speak with any authority about the fidelity of that translation. I can only say that I was seldom unduly conscious that I was reading a translation; and, when I forced myself to become conscious on that level, Chandler's English prose seemed to me closer to the best translations of Chekhov than to those of any other major Russian writer I've read (if you can imagine Chekhov devoting chapter after chapter to accounts of close combat). Of the forty-one selections in Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida, Mr. Chandler translated about half and cotranslated another eight. In terms of pages, twenty to thirty stories must have been a lark compared to [End Page vi] the nearly nine hundred pages of Life and Fate; but on another level the challenge might well have been daunting: keeping each of an alphabet of writers from reading less like himself or herself than like Robert Chandler. Collections of stories rarely profit from being read straight through, a caveat that certainly applies here, for many of these stories sound—stylistically—more alike than different. The exceptions are several stories that employ specific and distinctive literary devices. In Turgenev's "The Knocking" the peasant Filofey speaks with an accent close to cockney; in Leskov's "The Steel Flea" deliberate and amusing malapropisms abound; and the first-person narrator of Babel's "My First Goose" uses much harsher language than in any other version I've read of that much-translated masterpiece. The similarities are not just stylistic. Nearly all of the stories feel Russian, though it is not always easy to say just where the Russianness resides. But anyone who has read much of the incomparable literature of that unfathomable country will recognize the open and intense emotionalism, the unrelieved menace of brutal and often irrational authority, and the tendency to indulge in samovar philosophy fed by what Maksim Gorky called the "Russian bent for sadness." It is hardly surprising that the stories which seem least Russian are those set elsewhere: "The Gentleman from San Francisco" and "In Paris," both by Ivan Bunin (the former also boasts the most impressive committee of translators: S. S. Koteliansky, D. H. Lawrence, and Leonard Woolf—and the result, against odds, is close to perfection). It is also the case that these resemblances in form and content are genealogical. The aphorism "We have all come out of Gogol's greatcoat" has been attributed to half a dozen Russian masters of the short story and might well have been voiced by writers all over the globe. Not by Pushkin, however, whose story "The Queen of Spades" was published almost a decade before "The Greatcoat." Chandler's selections are arranged chronologically, and so he begins, inevitably, with Pushkin and "The Queen of Spades," which he calls "the greatest of all Russian short stories." He does not, unfortunately, defend that accolade, and I am not quite sure that it is easily defensible, though I should add that for me all of Pushkin's prose suffers by comparison with that charlotte russe of a poem "Yevgeny Onegin." Nevertheless I can think offhand of a dozen Russian stories for whose superiority I would argue: half a dozen by Chekhov, two by Gogol, several by Babel, and, preeminently, Tolstoy's "The Three Hermits." Chandler includes one Chekhov story, "In the Cart"; Gogol's "Greatcoat"; three by Babel; and one by Tolstoy, "God Sees the Truth, but Waits"; also one apiece by Lermontov, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky. The work of all these writers is readily available in English, and Chandler is to be commended for choosing in several instances a lesser-known but first-rate story over the more familiar anthology standard. Furthermore most serious readers will be especially grateful to Chandler for bringing to their attention a group of modern...

In his works, Shevchenko repeatedly mentioned the name of the Italian poet of the Renaissance Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), used reminiscences and quotes from his work, which indicates a high level of knowledge of "The Divine Comedy" author's legacy (c. 1308–1321). Until now, it was believed that all such references to the poetry by the famous Italian have long been carefully considered and thoroughly studied. However, a closer examination revealed a lack of details about the sources of Shevchenko's acquaintance with the famous poem. The traditional methods of literary source studies and methods of philological analysis applied in this study made it possible in some cases to bring to light, with a high degree of probability, the translations Shevchenko read and the publications he used, although absolute accuracy cannot be achieved here. The author of the article argues that Shevchenko knew the aphorism from the Fifth song in "The Inferno" used in a letter to Osyp Bodians'kyi dated November 15, 1852, not in Avraam Norov's translation, but in Dmitrii Min's translation published in 1843 in the journal "Moskvitianin". It is still unclear where Shevchenko found a quote from the song XVII in "The Paradiso" he used in a letter to Bronisław Zaleski (in the second half of June 1856). It was possible to discover that the poet knew this aphorism, most likely through Alexander Pushkin's novel "The Queen of Spades" (1833), first published in the popular journal "Biblioteka dlia chteniia" in 1834. As a result, the author rejected as unconvincing a hypothesis offered previously by commentators that Shevchenko knew "The Inferno" in a Russian translation by Elizaveta Kologrivova, published for two years in six installments, which the Ukrainian poet most likely did not know. In addition, her translation did not relieve artistic flawlessness (tercins in the original are reproduced in prose). Most likely, Shevchenko heard a lot about "The Divine Comedy", especially about its first part, and read some fragments available in the periodicals, in particular, as it was proved, in a translation by Dmitrii Min.

The article is devoted to the semiotics of the gothic story genre in its ironic transformation in Russian classic literature, in particular, in the compositional and axiological transformations found in “The Queen of Spades” by A. Pushkin. The relevance of the study is determined by the growing interest in understanding the nature of aesthetic semiosis, in the set of stable features of a certain genre, the conditions for their changes and demand in specific historical eras. The aim of the article is to analyze the semiotic parameters of the ironic mode that transforms the gothic tradition in A. Pushkin’s “The Queen of Spades”, but not affecting the value orientation of the protagonist. Research methods include historical, typological and comparative methods, as well as the method of philological interpretation and structural and semiotic analysis. The study identified semiotic components that mark not only the adaptation of gothic symbols and the whole genre of the gothic story in the first third of the 19th century to the tradition of Russian literature, but also the author’s intention of the inapplicability of a rational life strategy in the Russian national worldview. Transformations affect the traditional requirements for the space and time of the literary world, for the system of characters, for the motivation of their actions. At the same time, if the first two aspects appear in Pushkin in an ironic modus, largely successive to romantic irony, then the motivation for Hermann’s actions is resolved within the framework of the absolutization of the character’s value orientations: the hero’s actions are interpreted through stable values that characterize the national axiosphere. The author focuses not on the mysterious and extraordinary, but on the duality that permeates all levels of the literary world - from the motivation of the character’s actions to the explanation of the collapse of his hopes. Behind strong passions is the motivation of the actions and experiences of the hero, expressing the real nature of what is happening, which, nevertheless, does not prevent the realization of the motive of the case, which acquires the quality of an aesthetic sign in a literary text.

The Petersburg Tale is a specific genre formation within the framework of the Petersburg text of Russian literature. “The Queen of Spades” is traditionally regarded by researchers as Pushkin’s second (after the poem “The Bronze Horseman”) Petersburg Tale. However, the receptive history of the text indicates that this reading only emerged at the beginning of the 20th century. In this article an attempt is made to trace changing of the correlation between the readers’ reception strategies and the narrative strategies of the text at different times, and to describe the mechanisms of readers’ interpretation, which resulted in the transformation of “The Queen of Spades” from a secular short story (close to The Belkin Cycle) into the Petersburg Tale.

The article focuses on refraction of the Wertherianism in the art of opera in the last third of the 19th century. In the center, there are the reflections on the operas by J. Massenet and P. Tchaikovsky, some parallels between which were already recognized by the contemporaries of these composers. The Wertherian tendencies are also considered in a wider musical and historical context, which includes not only “Werther” and “The Queen of Spades”, but also “Tristan and Isolde” by Wagner, where for the first time, according to the author of the article, the image of the “New Werther” was captured. The author analyzes the parallels in implementation of the images of characters (Charlotte - Liza, Tristan - Werther - Hermann, Albert - Eletsky), the problems of the aforementioned compositions (in particular, the refraction of the ideas of Liebestod and free will). But the drama and music (especially the leitmotif system) have both similarities and differences due to some different properties of the national mentality. The author comes to the conclusion that the worldview of Massenet and Tchaikovsky had a lyrical basis, which caused the relevance of the “New Wertherianism” in the late 19th century.

This interpretive essay brings a poetic sensibility to bear on the lives and works of three major Russian writers. It is Ilya Kutik's contention that many writers are tormented by secret fears and desires that only writing - in particular, the use of certain words and images - can exorcise. Making this biographical approach peculiarly his own - and susceptible to the nuances of comedy, tragedy and critical equanimity - Kutik reads works of Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov and Nikolai Gogol, three Russian writers who were demonstrably subject to the whims, superstitions and talismans that Kutik identifies. Exposing the conjunction of literary effort and private act in writings such as The Queen of Spades, Dead Souls and A Hero of Our Time, Kutik's work aims to provide a new way of understanding these masterpieces of Russian literature and their authors, and a new way of reading the mysteries of life and literature as mutually enriching.

Slavonic and East European Review, 94, 4, 2016 Reviews Faggionato, Raffaella. L’alambicco di Lev Tolstoj. ‘Guerra e Pace’ e la massoneria russa. Viella, Rome, 2015. 433 pp. Illustration. Notes. Appendices. Bibliography. Index. €30.00. Lev Tolstoi’s Alembic: ‘War and Peace’ and Russian Freemasonry is the new book by Raffaella Faggionato, author of A Rosicrucian Utopia in Eighteenth-Century Russia: The Masonic Circle of N. I. Novikov (Dordrecht, 2005). On the one hand it takes further her investigation of the history of Russian Freemasonry up to the first decades of the nineteenth century (Appendix: ‘A Short History of Freemasonry under Alexander I’, pp. 372–90), and on the other is likely to be recorded as a milestone in the study of Lev Tolstoi’s masterpiece. As the title implies, it sheds light on the many masonic sources consulted by the Russian writer, and on the very different roles they played in various stages of his work. Well known even to the common reader is the story of how Tolstoi’s wife ‘copied out War and Peace seven times from beginning to end’ (Mirsky), and in the last seventy years several ‘layers’ of the author’s manuscripts have been published and studied by different scholars. Here Faggionato combines the results of a thorough investigation of a mass of documents from the Iasnaia Poliana and Russian State libraries and from Tolstoi’s Museum in Moscow, including diary entries, books and manuscripts Tolstoi purchased or read, notes he took, drafts, rewritings, annotations on copies and even printed proofs. She achieves important results, providing a key to understanding the evolution of Tolstoi’s artistic method, from ‘realistic’ to ‘mystical-symbolic’, as defined by recent scholars. This rich book is masterly arranged, from the many apt epigraphs to the very large and detailed, almost exhaustive bibliography, leaving an impression of convincing unity. Following an informative introduction, it is divided into five parts, each formed by two chapters of short paragraphs, whose titles define each step of the investigation, leaving the reader to ask why the impact of Freemasonry on Tolstoi’s masterpiece has not been stressed strongly before. As a matter of fact, in the final version of War and Peace, the masonic affiliation of Pierre Bezukhov plays a comparatively small role, and a series of patent inconsistencies in the description of persons and rituals could lead readers to think that Tolstoi had only a very superficial knowledge of Freemasonry, or that he used his sources to give a parodic image of it (V. I. Shcherbakov). But the books and manuscripts perused by Faggionato (let it be noted that in the ninety-volume ‘Jubilee’ edition of Tolstoi’s oeuvre the drafts regarding this aspect have not been included, while the new 100-volume edition is still very far from complete) reveal a very different story. SEER, 94, 4, October 2016 726 Faggionato begins with Tolstoi’s predecessor, Alexander Pushkin, as chronicler of the Russian nobility’s intellectual history, whose Queen of Spades is recalled in a crucial episode of War and Peace during Pierre’s visit to his dying father (1.1). A reconstruction of the considerable interest in the history of the late-eighteenth- to early-nineteenth-century Masonic movement by pedagogists, thinkers (A. Herzen) and historians (M. Pogodin) between 1856 and 1862 follows (1.2). Part two is devoted to Tolstoi’s earlier literary project on the Decembrist movement (1860–63) and his discovery of its deep Masonic roots (2.1), and anticipates the writer’s idiosyncratic use, in the final version of War and Peace, of ‘published and unpublished sources’ (on M. Speranskii, I. Lopukhin, M. Mudrov, F. Rostopchin, etc.), bought and collected at this stage. While real, historical figures were called to play an increasingly symbolic, often parodic, role, their ideas and words were eventually assigned to very different fictional characters (2.2). A pun repeated in the introduction to the Russian translation of one of the books bought in 1864, i.e. Miguel de Molinos’s Spiritual Guide, is seen as a possible source of Tolstoi’s decision to turn the final title from War and the Human Universe to War and Peace (in both cases ‘Voyna i mir...

Purpose of Article. The article raises the question of the evolutionary character of the archetypes of female characters in Tchaikovsky's operas, thereby emphasizing the newest nature of the readings of opera classics. The methodology is an integrated approach and is based on the use of analytical and comparative methods. Science novelty. The solution of the series of questions occurs through a critical analysis of already known provisions regarding the concept of operatic archetypes and an explanation of our own understanding of this phenomenon, supported by an analysis of the main characters of the three versatile operas by P.Tchaikovsky («Evgeny Onegin», «Queen of Spades», «Iolanta»). The primary focus on three archetypes of the opera genre - lyric (Iolanta), tragic (Lisa) and dramatic (Tatiana). In the mentioned operas, the composer, based on a scripted literary source, offers a little different interpretation of the libretto, shifting the focus of attention to female characters. At the same time, male characters recede into the background, shading the evolution of the main female characters. Conclusions. In the conclusions, it was mentioned that the subject of the article extends to the musical theater as a whole, touching upon the problems of modern world's opera singing.

This book gazes through the lens of music to find an unusual perspective on Russian cultural and literary history. It discusses six major works of Russian music from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, showing the interplay of musical texts with their literary and historical sources within the ideological and cultural contexts of their times. Each musical work becomes a tableau representing a moment in Russian history, and together the works form a coherent story of ideological and aesthetic trends as they evolved in Russia from the time of Pushkin to the rise of totalitarianism in the 1930s. The book discusses Glinka's Ruslan and Ludmilla (1842), Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov (1871) and Khovanshchina (1881), Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin (1878) and The Queen of Spades (1890), and Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony (1934). Offering new interpretations to enhance our understanding and appreciation of these important works, this book demonstrates how Russian music and cultural history illuminate one another.

Research objective – to make a comprehensive analysis of the Countess image created by the authors of the “Queen of Spades” opera – P.I. Tchaikovsky and his librettist M.I. Tchaikovsky. The methodology of the study is based on the analysis of the means of verbal and musical languages together with the use of the literary and musicological sources. The scientific novelty is due to absence of a special study devoted to the analysis of the Countess image despite a great number of the musicological and theatre studies literature. Attention has also been paid to the life prototypes of the Countess from A.S. Pushkin novels and to the comparison of the literary character of the source material with the opera. The practical value of this study lies in a possibility to visualize the Countess’ character by the opera director and performers in exact matching with the intentions of the authors of the musical piece created by verbal and musical means with great persuasion and true to life as contrary to the so-called “director’s” stage performance. Conclusions. The conducted analysis results in rethinking of the image of the Countess that has been established in the scientific literature and in its advanced characteristic, which makes it possible for the performer to treat this character closer to the opera concept. Analysis of the voice part of the Countess reveals a possibility to perform it, preferably, by a contralto singer, not by mezzo-soprano. The Countess is represented as a quite realistic character presented multilaterally and combining various character traits that are explained both by declining years and by peculiar traits of this particular personality in accordance with her social status, background features and personal qualities. The character of the Countess created by German’s imagination and existing in his consciousness only is embodied in his voice part cues, by expressive themes passing, mainly, in the orchestra and, particularly, by musical instruments that do not require a naive scenic illustration.

A key feature of the study of Russian opera has been its interest in ‘page-tostage’ adaptation of canonical works of literature. Behind this research story, in many respects, there is only the fact that a significant number of Russian operas are really based on literary primary sources. The contribution of philologists who have studied this subject on a par with specialists in the history of music also played a role in its credibility. This logocentric approach overlooks, however, another tradition, one in which the libretto is the product of a negotiation between agents and where the relationship between the source text and operatic adaptation is attenuated. The work that most fully subverts the ‘pageto-stage’ tradition and fully incorporates the librettist as a co-creator of the finished composition is The Rake’s Progress, with music by Igor Stravinsky and words by Wystan Hugh Auden and Chester Kallman. It may seem eccentric to see The Rake’s Progress as a Russian opera, yet as this chapter argues, it is certainly an opera shaped by aspects of Stravinsky’s Russian origins, upbringing, and education, and somehow spoken ‘in translation’. In particular, it engages in a series of intertextual dialogues with the legacy of Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades.

In this eagerly anticipated book, Boris Gasparov gazes through the lens of music to find an unusual perspective on Russian cultural and literary history. He discusses six major works of Russian music from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, showing the interplay of musical texts with their literary and historical sources within the ideological and cultural contexts of their times. Each musical work becomes a tableau representing a moment in Russian history, and together the works form a coherent story of ideological and aesthetic trends as they evolved in Russia from the time of Pushkin to the rise of totalitarianism in the 1930s. Gasparov discusses Glinka’s Ruslan and Ludmilla ( 1842), Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov ( 1871) and Khovanshchina ( 1881), Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin ( 1878) and The Queen of Spades ( 1890), and Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony (1934). Offering new interpretations to enhance our understanding and appreciation of these important works, Gasparov also demonstrates how Russian music and cultural history illuminate one another.

In this eagerly anticipated book, Boris Gasparov gazes through the lens of music to find an unusual perspective on Russian cultural and literary history. He discusses six major works of Russian music from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, showing the interplay of musical texts with their literary and historical sources within the ideological and cultural contexts of their times. Each musical work becomes a tableau representing a moment in Russian history, and together the works form a coherent story of ideological and aesthetic trends as they evolved in Russia from the time of Pushkin to the rise of totalitarianism in the 1930s. Gasparov discusses Glinka's Ruslan and Ludmilla (1842), Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov (1871) and Khovanshchina (1881), Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin (1878) and The Queen of Spades (1890), and Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony (1934). Offering new interpretations to enhance our understanding and appreciation of these important works, Gasparov also demonstrates how Russian music and cultural history illuminate one another.

Book description: Pushkin’s status as the founding father of Russian literature owes much to his stylistic and linguistic innovations across a wide range of literary genres. But equally important is the influence he exerted on his successors via his exploitation of myth in its widest sense. His poetry, prose and drama frequently draw upon myths of classical antiquity, myths of modern European culture – grand narratives such as the Don Juan legend and Dante’s Inferno – as well as uniquely Russian myths, particularly those associated with St Petersburg and its founder Peter the Great. It was through the elaboration of such myths that Russia attained to a sense of both its cultural uniqueness and its inscription in the broader context of European culture. The contributors to Alexander Pushkin: Myth and Monument explore these myths from a variety of critical viewpoints and highlight the specific ways in which Pushkin uses myth – among these his recurrent emphasis on the symbolism of monuments and statuary, famously referred to by Roman Jakobson as Pushkin’s ‘sculptural myth’. Alexander Pushkin: Myth and Monument is the second volume devoted to Pushkin published in the SSLP series, the first being ‘Pushkin’s Secret’: Russian Writers Reread and Rewrite Pushkin. A third volume – Pushkin’s Legacy will follow.