Spanish Carlism in Russian literature

The article outlines the cultural and national features of the development of Ukrainian and Russian literatures in the first third of the 20th century. The study clearly demonstrates that the development of Ukrainian and Russian literatures have followed typologically similar patterns. Common and distinguishing features in the literatures were the result of the specific historical conditions of their origin and existence, as well as cultural orientation. The national differences between Ukrainian and Russian literatures of the first third of the 20th century were due primarily to the search for the ways to assert the identity. Ukrainian literature was expressly focused on Western European, trying to perceive it without mediation of the Russian one. Western European artistic innovations coexisted with the local cultural specificity. Russian literature was less concerned with issues of national identity because it had a counter-effect on Western European literature. The interaction with the national cultural tradition was also different. Common features of the literary process of the first third of the 20th century include the development of literatures in the metropolitan environment and in the context of emigration. The literature developed in the context of emigration was created in a foreign-language environment, but positioned itself as a national literature, the existence of which was a priori impossible in the metropolitan environment. The leading feature of the literature of the metropolis followed the October revolution was the ideological and political oppression caused by the new relations between the authorities and the artistic culture. Identification of general characteristics and features of the evolution of Russian and Ukrainian literatures in the first third of the 20th century in terms of typological comparisons makes it possible to suggest that the literary and artistic realities of the era caused the affinity of issues in the formation of new ideological and artistic quality of both literatures and, consequently, their national forms, features.

In the article the attitude towards the Islamic religion and Muslims in the ancient Russian literature, first of all the Turks and also the relation to the Islamic religion and Muslim peoples in the literature of the Russian folk art is analyzed. The political, social, spiritual-cultural, literary-philological aspects of the attitude to Islam from ancient times are interpreted. The spread of Islam in Russia by the Khazars, as Turkic community, the positive effect of acquaintance with Islamic culture on Russian culture, relations with the East, statehood, Eastern culture, as well as the Islamic renaissance that began in the 7th-8th centuries AD on Russian culture are explained. In ancient times, the relation to Islam in Russian literature and culture on the formation and essence of philo-orientalism in Russian public opinion in later historical stages is noted. The translation of the Qur'an-i-Karim in Russian literature also has a rich history and the interpretation of this tradition allows us to clarify the historical, political, methodological, philological aspects of the translation of the sacred text and the attitude towards Islam in Russia in general.

This chapter aims to map Russian literary translation in Italy in the twentieth century and to reflect on how politics influenced publishers’ and translators’ choices. The increase of Russian literary translations into Italian is linked to the strong interest Italians had for Russia from the eighteenth century onwards, leading to a reception process unique among European literatures. After the October Revolution, many Russian exiles chose Italy as their second home and tried to propagate their culture there. The most important of these was the poet Viacheslav Ivanov. Thanks to his encouragement, the first rhymed Italian translation of Aleksandr Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin appeared. After World War II, Russian literature in Italy was identified with the Soviet Union; texts chosen for translation were intended to underline their political-social character. Left-oriented publishing houses, such as Editori Riuniti and Einaudi, focused their interest on the literature of the “Thaw” period and of the Twenties. For Feltrinelli, a small Milanese publishing house specializing in political texts, Soviet literature was a key element of ‘editorial strategy’. Publicity surrounding the 1957 world première publication of Doctor Zhivago, followed by Pasternak’s 1958 Nobel Prize, brought Feltrinelli huge success. In the following two decades the polarization of cultural political issues subsumed discourse on Russian and Soviet literature into academia. From the mid-1980s onwards, Russian literature gradually lost its centrality to Italian translation publishing, overwhelmed by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Thirty years after the end of Communist ideological influence, the initiative to celebrate Dostoevsky’s bicentenary in 2021 (and the many new translations that have appeared to mark it), show how, without Russian literature, Italy’s literary heritage would be irredeemably impoverished.

The article explains the purpose of creating an exemplary program of the subject “Native literature (Russian)” connected with the execution of the Federal Law on Education, supporting the main aim of the core course in literature – the development of a competent reader, as well as reinforcing the cultivating function of school literary education and preserving the Russian language, literature and culture against the background of Russian multi-ethnic and multicultural society. The following objectives of the new subject acquire particular significance: perceiving literature as one of the main cultural values of the nation (which reflects its national character, history, worldview); ensuring cultural self-identification, becoming aware of the communicative and aesthetic power of the mother tongue based on the study of outstanding literary creations of the Russian culture, the culture of one’s ethnic group, world culture. The methodological background to the exemplary program rests upon the idea of an ideological nature and educational potential of the Russian literature. In creating the didactic model in question, the authors of the program used theoretical and practical research methods, as well as the cognitive and system- and activity-based approaches. The results of the research were as follows: validation of the legal and regulatory framework of the new subject and the primary goals of its study, elaboration of the principles – which are based on the system of value codes shared by the whole nation’s cultural tradition – according to which the contents and structure of the course are selected. The article demonstrates what distinguishes “Native literature (Russian)” from the school subject “Literature”, how each of the three content branches of the program contributes to the development of subject knowledge and skills from grade to grade, why this or that recommended literary work is included in the topic-issue units, and which forms of the final subject assessment are most preferable. The exemplary program of the subject contributes to solving the issue of national and cultural identity and understanding what role the Russian literature plays in becoming aware of the national traits of the Russian culture. It also fosters the comprehension of cultural concepts that are crucial for the Russian national consciousness and the development of one’s ability to transform his/her reflections on works of native literature into personal convictions and positive values.

Abstract: In recent years, scholars from various countries have begun to focus on the theme of the East in their literary studies, and more attention has been paid to the image of China in Russian literature. However, most of the studies on Russian literature in the first half of the 20th century focus only on the Silver Age, and pay less attention to the image of China in Russian literature of other eras. This article focuses on the early 20th century to the 1950s, when Russia interacted with China most frequently, systematically combing it with the specific historical background and international situation of the times, and presents a complete image of China in the Russian literature. The study found that although Russian writers of each era had different experiences about China, and their own writing intentions were different, even the images of China written by Russian writers of the same era presented different characteristics, Russian literature from the early 20th century to the 1950s consistently reflected the social realities of both China and Russia. In fact, the process that Russian writers from the early 1900s to the 1950s constructed a more realistic and complete image of China was also a process that literary creation broke through national stereotypes. The evolution of the image of China in Russian literature from the beginning of the 20th century to the 1950s reflects the process of mutual interaction between the cultures of China and Russia, and also symbolizes the macro-trend of the world's national cultures to continuously eliminate the barriers between them and mingle with each other.

This erudite and original study puts Russian and European literary works from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century into a productive dialogue with current trends in medical ethics and epistemology. While interactions between Russian literature and the medical field have attracted scholarly attention in the last two decades, Elena Fratto breaks new ground by applying the conceptual apparatus of the contemporary field of medical humanities to some canonical Russian texts. Her innovative approach yields a wealth of illuminating insights and striking connections. At the theoretical core of this study is the narratological approach to illness and death—the aspects of the human condition that share a number of concerns with literary texts, such as the organization of disparate events into a coherent whole, the ending, agency, and authorial control. While Michel Foucault’s theorization of medical authority, gaze, and institutions are key to the book’s methodology, Fratto productively engages with a variety of conceptual frameworks, including Russian Formalists’ narratological theories, Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation, as well as reader-response criticism. The book is written in a sophisticated yet clear and elegant style; it tells a compelling story of how literature and science attempted, in different but entwined ways, to address the changing concepts of human nature, health, and mortality at times of historical crisis. As Fratto mentions in the introduction, the book is organized structurally, rather than chronologically. The first two chapters examine the role of death as “a plot trigger, a prime mover of story lines” (p. 15). Chapter 1 traces fascinating connections between the discipline of criminal anthropology and Russian literature, as reflected in Cesare Lombroso’s examinations of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy as “degenerate geniuses.” While highly informative, this chapter suffers from some incongruence between its overarching theoretical theme and the actual discussion, as the section on Lombroso is rather marginally related to the topic of death and finality or narratological concerns. Chapter 2 focuses on the prospect of death, rather than death itself, as a plot generator. It offers an insightful discussion of Tolstoy’s most famous work about dying, his novella The Death of Ivan Il'ich (1886). Fratto brilliantly demonstrates how the novella both continues the ancient tradition of ars moriendi (the art of dying) and anticipates the concerns of present-day medical ethics, such as the entwining of physical and existential pain, the patient’s agency and humanity, and the distinction between illness and disease. The second section of this chapter focuses on the idea of uncertain endings, both in the sense of looming death and an evasive narrative closure, problematized by the serialized publication of novels in the nineteenth century. One such novel, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1875–77), is imbued with ambiguous temporality and teleology, as Anna is steadily moving toward an uncertain but seemingly unavoidable death. I was not entirely convinced by the analogy Fratto draws between Tolstoy’s tragic heroine and contemporary “previvors,” who, like journalist Masha Gessen, have to confront their own uncertain death due to a positive genetic testing, although I found the individual discussion of each case very illuminating. Chapters 3 and 4 take us to the early twentieth century, when the changing notion of the human being as not healthy by default but always fraught with disease is mobilized by emerging totalitarian regimes for their public health campaigns. Jules Romains’s satirical play Knock (1923), where a scheming business-minded doctor gradually acquires control over an entire village, is read as symptomatic of the anxiety in interwar Europe over crowd psychology and a manipulation of the collective. Fratto discovers similar strategies of surveillance and control in various early Soviet public health campaigns, in the course of which a paradoxical shift occurs, as the “patients” (citizens in a totalitarian state) are empowered to promote state health ideals and assume an active authorial position typically associated with a doctor. The last chapter continues to explore the challenge posed to the authority of the medical professional as it examines two literary cases in which doctors lose their control over the narrative to a hormone: Italo Svevo “Doctor Menghi’s Drug” (1904?) and Mikhail Bulgakov’s “The Heart of a Dog” (1925). Placed in the rich context of early twentieth-century fascination with endocrinology but also contemporary theories of posthumanism, this analysis raises important questions about the limits of humanity and subjectivity that were as critical in the early decades of the last century as they are today. The wide range of ethical, political, and cultural problems addressed in this book (including the author’s astute observations on the COVID-19 pandemic in the conclusion) will appeal to a variety of readers both in and outside Russian literary studies. This brief review can hardly do justice to this nuanced and richly interdisciplinary study.

The Spanish Civil War of 1936–9 remains a theme of enduring interest and has generated an immense bibliography in numerous languages. Such attention is perhaps proportionately greater in the United Kingdom than anywhere else outside Spain, all of the major narrative accounts in English (by Hugh Thomas, Anthony Beevor and Paul Preston) having originated there, the first two appearing in two quite different versions a good many years apart. By comparison, even Spanish historians do not seem greatly interested in the First Carlist War (1833–40), a longer conflict that cost even more lives in proportion to the total population, though not such widespread economic destruction. Depending on how one counts, there were at least four different internecine conflicts between liberals and traditionalists in Spain between 1821 and 1876, making nineteenth-century Spain the ‘land of civil war’, but the First Carlist War was the mostly costly and also, in the long run, historically the most decisive. It has nonetheless failed to draw much attention outside the country, with the exception of John F. Coverdale’s The Basque Phase of Spain’s First Carlist War (1984), and this dearth made very welcome Mark Lawrence’s commendable account, Spain’s First Carlist War, 1833–1840 (2014).

In the article, based on the material of M. Gorky’s letters, the concept of “man and life” is considered and investigated as one of the deep categories of his philosophy of artistic creativity and philosophy of life. It is traced how the theme associated with man, with human life, was gradually mastered by Russian literature since the end of the Middle Ages and how it was transformed and solved in Gorky’s work at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. The thesis is formulated that, along with M.V. Lomonosov and A.S. Pushkin, Gorky is a symbol and embodiment of one of the most important periods in the development of Russian culture. It is proved that the purpose of literature, according to Gorky’s philosophy of culture, is to depict man as a creator and the highest stage in the development of nature. The qualities of a person that are integral to his social essence are identified and systematized. An assessment of the personality of the writer himself is given on the basis of numerous statements about him by domestic and foreign cultural figures. The role and significance of Gorky in Russian, Russian and world literature and culture is determined.

The article examines the plot of reading and interpreting Mikhail Lermontov’s works by the reader-character of the novel Letters about Lermontov (1935) by Yuri Felzen, a writer of the younger generation of Russian emigration. The love conflict of the central character (he is the narrator, the author of letters to his beloved who left him) is overcome by the act of writing and the departure into the world of culture, the value center of which for him is Lermontov. Strategies for reading Lermontov by a writing character are close to the biographical method - no separation of the writer’s life and work, identification of the author with his hero (Pechorin, Demon, poetic lyrical hero). The purpose of learning Lermontov’s personality through his works (diaries, poetry, poems, the novel Hero of Our Time, etc.) is to find an existential landmark (perseverance and courage before the blows of fate) and an aesthetic principle (patience and sincerity in creative work). In self-identification with Lermontov-Pechorin, an act of self-knowledge, recognition of inconsistency with the ideal, and behavioral self-correction take place. The second line of letters about Lermontov is the formulation of the essence of literary creativity, the author’s version of the history of Russian literature and its fate in the modern world. According to the character of the novel, classical literature in the twentieth century becomes incomprehensible and unable to agitate, but, dying, it conveys its artistic discoveries to modern literature, which means that art continues to develop. Lermontov is the connecting link: he is a writer of the 19th century, but his works remain modern, because they were ahead of their time. Lermontov, according to the narrator-character, stands above Pushkin, he is the forerunner of Tolstoy and Proust, i.e., the literature of modernism that is capable of showing an incomplete world and a contradictory person, to which the central character of the novel aspires. Art in the author’s concept, as exemplified by Lermontov, is an act of self-knowledge necessary for the artist himself, but allowing one to go from observing about oneself to generalizing about human nature. Reading is the cognition of the Other and their way of being, it is approaching to the understanding of reality; reading is also the threshold for creating a text, one’s own way of being, built in dialogue with world literature. Felzen’s article “Lermontov in Russian Literature” (1938) is not development, but a concentrate of novel ideas. In critical discourse, Felzen evaluates Lermontov less categorically: he is equal to Pushkin in the sense of proportion, freedom from politics and religion. Felzen concludes: after the death of Lermontov, Russian literature was not free from the power of political and religious ideas (Gogol, Tyutchev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky). The author declares no conflicts of interests.

* This paper owes a great debt to my students in the National Opinion Research Center Training program, who did much to rekindle my interest in ideology. I would also like to thank Sidney Verba and Kenneth Prewitt for their intellectual contributions at various stages. The first draft of the paper was written while I was a research Fulbright Fellow at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands. I would like to express my appreciation to the Fulbright Foundation for support during this period and to the University of Leiden for supporting the research. Additional support for myself and for the research was provided by the National Science Foundation under Grant GS 3155 and the Twentieth Century Fund. The data reported in this article come from seven separate surveys and the organization and presentation was a mammoth job in data management. This task could not have been accomplished without the efforts of Carol Ann Lugtigheid, Eric Lugtigheid, John R. Petrocik, Jaap Rozema, and Jaap van Poelgeest.

When he arrived to the United States Vladimir Nabokov took a job as the university lecturer at Wellesley College and Cornell University. He taught Russian and European literature. In his lectures he presented a categorical and controversial opinions on literature, he divided it into masterpieces and works. In his opinion he created a hierarchy of literary resulted from his personal beliefs and preferences. In Russian literature, he praised works of M. Gogol, L. Tolstoy and Chekhov. He negatively assessed the achievements of F. Dostoevsky and M. Gorky. In the European literature he singled selected works of Marcel Proust, Joyce J. and G. Flaubert. In any case he pointed to the key values for his Works and methods characteristic of all his prose. Nabokov's lectures are the integral part of his literary achievements and they are writer’s literary philosophy.

Reviewed by: All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature by José Vergara Anna Maslenova All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature. By José Vergara. (NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies) Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2021. xiii+254 pp. $54.95. ISBN 978-1-5017-5990-1. José Vergara's monograph studies the reception of James Joyce in work by Russian authors Iurii Olesha, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrei Bitov, Sasha Sokolov, and Mikhail Shishkin as a pathway for analysis of themes of fatherhood, history, and literary heritage in Russian literature. Vergara explores how Russian writers assimilated the Shakespeare theory expressed by Joyce's character Stephen Dedalus in the 'Scylla and Charybdis' chapter of Ulysses, which argued that a writer can choose [End Page 275] his own father by reinventing his past through text. Although not all Vergara's examples of intertextual connections between Russian texts and Joyce's œuvre are equally convincing, they collectively provide valuable insight into the evolution of intertextuality in Russia over the course of the long twentieth century. The first chapter examines Olesha's contradictory reaction to Joyce in his novel Envy (1927). Feeling compelled to conceal his interest in modernist techniques (considered suspicious in Soviet Russia), Olesha was overtly negative about Joyce. Vergara, however, reveals numerous parallels between father-and-son characters in Envy and in Ulysses: namely, Buck Mulligan/Andrei Babichev, Leopold Bloom/Ivan Babichev, and Stephen/Kavalerov. Olesha's viewpoint, however, is more pessimistic than Joyce's: unlike Stephen, who has reinvented himself as his own father figure, Kavalerov fails to do so and thus remains an outsider within the Soviet system. Vergara's next case study examines Nabokov's many parallels with Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in his novels The Gift (1938) and Bend Sinister (1947). Vergara demonstrates that Nabokov, who famously despised biographies romancées, also disapproved of Stephen's creative approach to Shakespeare's life. In The Gift, Fyodor, like Stephen, wants to connect with a literary forefather (Pushkin), but instead of distancing himself from his biological father, he merges these two father figures in his unfinished biographical novel. Vergara suggests that Fyodor ultimately abandons this novel because he respects the inviolability of his fathers' life stories. Krug in Bend Sinister, on the other hand, does not hold back from manipulating Shakespeare's life story. For this crime he is punished by the death of his son, which triggers Krug's madness. Andrei Bitov's protagonist in Pushkin House (1978), Leva Odoevtsev, also attempts, less successfully than Nabokov's Fyodor, to establish relations with his forefathers. Written during the Khrushchev Thaw, Pushkin House addresses the issue of belatedness. Leva, estranged from his biological father, searches for other father figures but fails to fill the gap. The novel, described here as a 'disorientating amalgamation of sources' (p. 77), also attempts but fails to bridge the temporal chasm between Soviet Russia and the West. Its main emotion is anxiety about Russian literature's lack of innovation, a weakness causing its authors to lag behind those of the West. Sasha Sokolov's Student So and So in A School for Fools (1973) is unaffected by that sensation of belatedness. His unusual disease allows him to travel in time and simultaneously exist in the past, present, and future. A School for Fools contains fewer direct references to Joyce than Sokolov's later novel Palisandria (1985), but Vergara finds stylistic debts to the Irish writer in the stream-of-consciousness, structural play, and 'forking characters' that Sokolov employs. For Sokolov, language is a substitute reality where Student recognizes himself as both descendant and progenitor of his antecedents. Through language, he escapes from his own epoch, where his father tries to re-educate him with Soviet newspaper propaganda. Vergara's final case study looks afresh at Shishkin's novel Maidenhair (2005) with a reading of the same author's essay 'More than Joyce'. Here, Shishkin offers an unconventional interpretation of the Ouroboros symbol in Finnegans Wake, [End Page 276] arguing that while the past creates the present, the present can also (re)generate the past by reworking previous texts. Looking backwards, for Shishkin, allows...

Originally published in 1996, this collection of fascinating essays by leading western and Russian specialists gives an overview of key issues in Russian women's writing and of important representations of women by men, between 1600 and the present. This volume contributes to the contemporary feminist project of rediscovering many hitherto unjustly neglected Russian women writers and sheds further light on the literary construction of women's identity by Russian men. It combines a study of the history and biography of women writers with close readings of literary texts, and explores certain controversial issues in Russian women's literary studies such as whether there is a separate women's literary tradition in Russia, whether the treatment of the woman question by Russian male writers reflected women's interests and experience, and whether a feminist reinterpretation of Russian women's literature is possible or even desirable.

Political Cynicism: Measurement and Meaning

The Russian literature was relatively late in heeding attention to the social type of the doctor. Nameless medical doctors gradually appear in the novels of the first half of the 19th century, typically as episodic persons without characters. They are educated and intelligent people, thus pleasant to communicate with, and if necessary, medical help can be obtained from them. One of those who endowed their doctor heroes with names and human characters was A. I. Herzen. His works about Dr. Krupov fostered the subject of medicine in Russian and European literature. They are the legacy of Goethe’s Faust and Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time. Like Faust, Dr. Krupov is a philosopher who poses global questions, and like Werner, he is an ideologist, a skeptic, a reasoner and a materialist. Krupov’s theory that the world is insane, everyone is mentally ill, and the society, rather than patients, needs to be treated is actually not as unambiguous as it seems, if you believe the opinions of the character himself and the critics who wrote about Herzen’s story. The uncertainty of the author’s attitude to Krupov’s theory endows the text with ambivalence, a certain playfulness. Contradictions of political ideas and the impossibility of their execution are overcome in Herzen’s works about Dr. Krupov by literary means, such as irony, satire, parody. Herzen came to favor literature over medicine in treatment of social diseases.