Enigmatic Text Research Articles

Russian and English folk riddles about animals

Folk riddles have recently become a fairly popular object of linguistic and linguocultural research due to their complex structural and semantic organization, which allows analyzing this folklore genre in semantic, structural and functional aspects. This study explores the description features of wild and domestic animals within the framework of an enigmatic text. The object of our research is to identify the presence of linguistic and cultural connotations in the description of wild and domestic animals and to trace the degree of taboo in using animal names in folk riddles. The tasks set are due to the fact that an archaic person’s life was largely connected with agricultural activities carried out with the help of livestock, as well as the need to protect themselves from wild animals attacking livestock. During the analysis of the linguistic material, we found that Russian and English folk riddles about animals were characterized either by omission of the subject of action in the descriptive part of the riddle, or the introduction of occasional vocabulary, which is largely consistent with the laws of taboo. In the Russian folk riddle, an occasional noun of this type is often introduced for the name of an animal: stuchikha (someone knocking), gremikha (someone rattling), with a rather transparent semantics that actualizes the initial action: (stuchat' – stuchikha, gremet' – gremikha). In the corpus of English folk riddles, we have noted a conversion transition (the verb lick transforms into the noun lick), as a result of which the noun also develops the meaning of the subject of a given action. In addition, we found the absence of a linguocognitive component in the description of animals, since the description of the denotation is mainly based on the actualization of a typical feature (the ability to bark, the presence of a certain number of hooves, horns, the ability to hunt animals).

Ting, minne og identitet hos Inghill Johansen II

In the second part of my article on Inghill Johansen’s short prose, the focus is on the conception of body memory. Past and present are merged in the body, and hence the narrator’s melancholy, if we follow Sigmund Freud’s conception of melancholy in his famous “Mourning and Melancholia” from 1917. According to Freud, a melancholiac is a person who identifies with the object he or she has lost. Furthermore, as Johansen’s narrator compares her life and writing with a black hole, she can be interpreted as a melancholiac who uses the black hole metaphor to formulate a poetology. The last part of this article tries to explain Johansen’s enigmatic texts as part of her poetological strategy.

Морфогенез образного параллелизма макро- и микрокосма в русских народных загадках

The aim of the study is to determine the features of the morphogenesis of macrocosm and microcosm figurative parallelism through the prism of the typology of structural and semantic modifications of the device, reflecting the dynamics of the people’s worldview. The scientific novelty of the study is due to the fact that, based on the material of more than 15,000 texts of the Russian folk riddles from scientifically authoritative collections of enigmatic texts, in line with the key idea for modern linguistics of the language anthropocentricity, a systematic comparative analysis of the main stages of the morphogenesis of the artistic microsystem of macro- and microcosm figurative parallelism has been carried out for the first time; regularities and stages of forming structural and semantic modifications of the device, reflecting dynamic processes in the language of folklore and artistic thinking of the people, are revealed. As a result, it is proved that the typology of figurative parallelism developed on the basis of riddles reflects the morphogenesis of the device; the identifying indicators of three main stages in the development of structural and semantic modifications of the device are determined: parallelism, which is realized on the basis of one of the compositional parts of the riddle; parallelism of images of two compositional parts of the riddle; a combination of the first two types of parallelism, demonstrating the evolutionary development of a figurative dyad into a figurative triad and forming a symbolic stereoscopy of images as a result of evolutionary processes implemented within the boundaries of the device under study.

The Waste Land: Eliot’s Neo-Empire

Thomas Stearns Eliot's The Waste Land is a mysterious enigmatic text in both its form and content which still invites many critics and reviewers to an infinite range of interpretations finding in it a striking departure from nineteenth century poetry and raising the flag of modernism and postmodernism. Its appearance in 1922 started a critical debate among critics who found it hard to place both because of the poet's complex artistic strategies and because of the poem's kaleidoscopic orchestrated structure. From this perspective, the present paper is mainly concerned with the poem’s kaleidoscopic structure highlighting the text's intertextuality, heterogeneity and multiculturalism. It seeks to re-read and investigate the poem from the perspective of Edward Said's Postcolonial theory proving that the poem’s encyclopedic structure achieves for the poet a form of Neo-Colonialism where the poet’s intellectual domination replaces the territorial one. The study concludes by showing that The Waste Land is an early example of postmodernism where the text becomes the poet’s Neo-empire.

Маркеры интертекстуальности как средство выражения адресованности немецкоязычных авторских энигматических текстов конца XVIII - начала XX в.

The aim of the study is to determine the features of intertextuality markers in authorial enigmatic texts as one of the means of expression of addressing. The study is novel in that it is the first to present the types of intertextual markers and the features of their functioning using the material of authorial enigmatic texts. The analysis of German-language authorial enigmatic texts confirms that intertextual markers along with various types of addresses, linguistic units with the semantics of a hint, paratextual elements serve as a means of verbalisation of addressing. As a result, four types of intertextuality markers have been identified and characterised: allusive realities and facts, proper names, phraseological units, titles. It has been found that these intertextuality signals are characterised by varying degrees of explicitness in the text and possess a significant pragmatic potential. The relationship between the identification and decoding of an intertextual marker and the successful decoding of the enigmate has been revealed.

JOHANNES VETULUS DE ANAGNIA’S PLATONIST MODEL OF MUSICAL TIME

In the second half of the fourteenth century, the Italian music theorist Johannes Vetulus de Anagnia wrote a treatise named Liber de musica. Extraordinarily complex and replete with theological digressions, this work has to date remained little understood. Examining Liber de musica through the lenses of practice and philosophy sheds new light on this enigmatic text. Vetulus’s theory is in certain respects innovative, but in others it is conservative. Vetulus theorised a unique but impractical system of mensural divisions that synthesises and exhausts some of the central conceptual principles of contemporaneous performance. He makes sense of these divisions within a Platonist intellectual framework that reimagines Trinitarian theological concepts in a musical context. Approaching this treatise as far as possible on its own terms reveals that Vetulus developed a symbolic epistemology of music in which a mutual reciprocity could emerge between the tripartite structures of music, nature and the divine.

Crafting Interiority, or the Evolutionary Objectivity of Vibrating Worlds: An Introduction to Adolf Behne’s “Biology and Cubism” (1915)

Sublimating the transgressive atrocities of modern warfare in an enigmatic text written within a year of the outbreak of WWI, art historian and architectural theorist Adolf Behne (1885-1948) takes recourse with humanity by tracing the uncanny thresholds between the human and non-human as proliferated by contemporary theories of biology. Disguised as a manifesto-like book review of biologist Jakob Johann von Uexküll’s Building Blocks of a Biological Worldview (1913), Behne’s “Biologie und Kubismus” (1915) engages Uexküll’s pluriversal worldview to complicate straightforward dualisms between artifice and nature, subtly imbricating the geopolitical and biopolitical spheres with the expressions of modern art. Dismantling impressionist art as lacking external-natural parallelism, Behne’s text champions expressionist art, whose forms and shapes evolve organically from a biologically-encoded creative interiority, as “true” art. A critical introduction to the author, text, and context prefaces the first English translation of “Biology and Cubism” more than a century after publication in the editorial outlet of artist-gallerist Herwarth Walden’s influential syndicate Der Sturm.

Fiat Lux/Fiat Lex: A Canticle for Leibowitz, Reason and Law

Walter M. Miller Jr’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) is an enigmatic text. It is a depressing tale of the evitability of technoscientific civilization ending in apocalypse, a comedic story of ignorant monks producing gold-embellished illuminated copies of electronic circuit blueprints and an ambiguous examination of the tensions between faith and science. This paper reads A Canticle for Leibowitz as an examination of legality. Drawing inspiration from Carl Schmitt’s observation that Catholicism has a “juridical logic,” this paper identifies that A Canticle for Leibowitz brings to life, and questions, the Thomist worldview of reason, reasonability and layered orders. It is a novel that brings to life, but also interrogates, Catholic intellectualism. It is tempting to conclude that Miller argues for a Thomist ethic of responsibility to temper technoscientific self-destruction. However, that is not where the novel ends. Its endings are hopeful, notwithstanding the nuclear holocaust in the final pages. There are suggestions of new nomoi: In the diasporic human extra-terrestrial colonies, ministered to by a nomadic Church, and a radiated Eden inherited by humanity’s prelapsarian successors anticipated in the coming to life of Rachel.

Типы заголовков в немецкоязычных авторских энигматических текстах

The article is devoted to the study of the types of titles in enigmatic texts written by German authors in the late 18th – early 20th centuries. It considers the views of domestic and foreign researchers on the functional potential of the title in the structure of a text. The following functions of the title are described: naming, attraction, content-shaping, intertextual, decoding, text-forming, and aesthetic. In addition, linguists' views on the title as one of the means of expressing the orientation of a text toward a particular addressee are outlined. As part of research on the preconditions for the emergence of titles of German-language riddles, the paper focuses on the role of the collection of riddles by Roman poet Symphosius in the development of German-language enigmatic texts and the influence of the works by epigrammatic poet Marcus Valerius Martial on it. The empirical research is based on the methods of component, contextual, and stylistic analyses. A corpus of titles was formed with the help of the directed sampling method. The study of the semantic connection between the title and the enigmatic text encoded in the title made it possible to identify three types of titles: metaphorical enigmatic titles, classical titles, and dedicatory titles. The title-metaphor type is represented by two subgroups. One subgroup consists of titles-metaphors whose motivation is obvious without reading the enigmatic text. Titles-metaphors of the other subgroup, on the contrary, represent an additional mystery for the addressee. Classic titles serve as a semantic convolution of the enigmator; titles-dedications express the addresser's intention through in addressing a particular individual. It is concluded that the title as an atypical structural element of enigmatic text demonstrates semantic diversity and creates an additional pragmatic load for this type of text.

The Sources of Aleksander Pushkin’s “The Tale of the Golden Cockerel”: the West, the East, or Russia?

The essay focuses on A. S. Pushkin’s last fairy tale, which he wrote in 1834, during the “Boldin autumn” period. Researchers have offered diverse interpretations to this complex and enigmatic text that embraces Russian folk themes interlaced with both western European and eastern imagery. Suggested rationalizations of “The Tale of the Golden Cockerel” have relied on Theodor Benfey’s “indianist theory” or on the local identity context, while other numerous diverse interpretations have pointed to conspiracy theories, the ideas of freemasonry, dystopianism, and the criticism of the absolutist rule. Still others saw this fairy tale as a covert autobiography, or a display of disguised eroticism in the spirit of the folk laughter culture, or as being influenced by the ideas of Islam, or as hinting at Russian mystic and ecstatic sectarianism. Having endeavored to examine the sources of “The Tale of the Golden Cockerel”, the author approaches it based on the comparative-historical method with the help of literary anthropology. According to L. L. Selivanova, the great poet composed what would be accepted as a genuine Russian folk fairy tale by creatively reworking all the available western and eastern material, Russian lubok culture, and even literary hoaxes.

“I Counted Sun’s Faces” in the Short Recension of 2 Enoch

Abstract 2 Enoch without any doubt is one of the most interesting and enigmatic texts of Slavonic Pseudepigrapha. Since the publication of the first fragments of it in the middle of the 19th century, there has been a protracted debate on all the questions concerning the history of the pseudepigraphon. And the “astronomical information” in it is possibly one of the most mysterious parts of 2 Enoch. The contents of the two main recensions are quite different in the chapter dealing with astronomical material. The paper studies the fragment, in which, in the short recension, it is literally said: “I [Enoch] counted Sun’s faces”.

Stonais po leipen zaidiantẽ:kitokia XV a. baltiško teksto interpretacija

The article deals withan old handwritten text found in the book Logica parva, finalised in 1440 in Canea, a city of Crete (presently, Chania). After the overview of the versions of reading and translation proposed by Stephan Kessler and Stephen Mossman, and Ilja Lemeškin, all the words in the text, their spelling, and their interrelations are analysed and compared with the respective materials of all Baltic languages; the possibilities of different interpretation of the words and word combinations in the enigmatic text are looked for.

Поиск оснований русского Просвещения у П.Я. Чаадаева и И.В. Киреевского: к истории «Записки» П.Я. Чаадаева А.Х. Бен­кендорфу

This article analyses Pyotr Chaadayev’s “Note” (1832), a message addressed to Alexan­der von Benkendorf, who served as head of the secret police under Nikolas I. “The Note” is essentially a letter that supports Ivan Kireevsky’s article entitled “The 19th Century”, which Kireevsky published in his magazine – “The European” – and which provoked the secret police to close the magazine right after the publication of the article in 1832. “The Note” is a somewhat enigmatic text because it was signed with Kireevsky’s name, which for a long time made researchers believe that it reflected Kireevsky’s position. However, in the 1930s, researchers proved that the actual author of “The Note” was Pyotr Chaadayev, and that “The Note” contained his thoughts. “The Note” shows that it was the July Revolution of 1830 that temporarily undermined Chaa­dayev’s belief in Europe and made Chaadayev shift from the negative philosophy of Russian history and the Eurocentrism of his “Philosophical Letters” (1829–1830) to­wards the idea of Russia’s historical mission, despite Russia’s backwardness. This back­wardness was later presented in the text “Apology of a Madman” (1837) as the idea of Providence guiding Russia through history. The present article argues that in the early 1830s, Kireevsky did not share Chaadayev’s belief in Providence. “The Note” reads as a very ambivalent text because Chaadayev used it to both vindicate Kireevsky’s article, and to set forth his own philosophy of history. In the present paper, the author separates these two types of arguments and concepts which were tightly interwoven in “The Note”, but were in fact reflections of two different, although unstable and somewhat overlap­ping, positions of two philosophers.

Progressive development of enigmatic texts in linguistics

This article is devoted to the study of enigmatic texts as a special type of text. It deals with the origin of enigmatic texts, their distribution in different forms in different countries, the first collections of "riddles" and their authors. The article reflects attempts to explore puzzles not only as an object of folklore but also as a linguistic object.

U-7 Tawali-al-Anwar Sharh Durr-al-Mukhtar: a comprehensive analysis

The most monumental work of Shaikh Abid Sindh is Tawali-al-Anwar Sharh Durr-al-Mukhtar. This book is the most well-known work of all his books. In this article, a brief biography of Shaikh Abid Sindhi has been mentioned, along with his work on Durr-al-Mukhtar. Durr-al-Mukhtar is considered to be one of the most referred books in Hanafi jurisprudence. Most of the Hanafi Scholars made great contribution in the commentary of this book. One of them was Muhammad Abid Sindhi. He recorded precious pearls and knowledge from Noble Quran, Hadith and other authentic books. He cited a large number of Hadith in this commentary from Sihah-e-Sitta and other reliable and authentic books of Hadith to make this book more authentic and also verified the Hadiths from authentic book of Hadith and science of Hadith. He explained the enigmatic text and unfamiliar words. Tawali-al-Anwar deals with other areas like principles of Hadith and Ilm-ur-Rijal, This article aims to justify relevance and accuracy of explanation of the text by reviewing statements. Furthermore, his Comprehensive work and significance of this book is explained briefly.

Revealing unique inscriptions of a Nazi collaborator in Doodencel 601 of the Oranjehotel

During the Second World War the German occupants of the Netherlands made ample use of the Scheveningen prison near The Hague, popularly nicknamed the Oranjehotel. One former death cell in this infamous prison (Doodencel 601) has been preserved in its original condition, showing wartime inscriptions on the cell walls. Interestingly, a small section of the wall has been given an additional plaster layer, presumably covering inscriptions. Here, we report on the visualization of this enigmatic text, which so far had escaped the reach of historians. Our visualization methodology was threefold. First, we determined the cell-wall stratigraphy and its composition based on a sample cross-section. Second, we prepared a physical model wall, mimicking the layering of the original cell wall. Third, we tested a combination of raking light photography and infrared thermography on the model wall. Applying this methodology on the original wall revealed the inscriptions, including the author’s name Daniël de Blocq van Scheltinga, a prominent Nazi collaborator, as well as a calendar and an important date of his post-war trial in the fall of 1945. Our visualizations flawlessly dovetail with archival findings. Together, they offer an intimate view of an early post-war inmate of the Scheveningen prison, whose message was covered up once the cell was transformed into a war monument in 1946.

The Seduction of Narrative Desire: An Unnatural Reading of Hermann Broch's

Abstract: Unnatural narratology enhances reader-response theory. In particular, Henrik Skov Nielsen's interpretive praxis can account for texts that resist normal methods of reception, even when they do not adhere to the narratological definition of unnatural. To demonstrate this flexibility, this article adapts Nielsen's praxis to Hermann Broch's Der Tod des Vergil ( The Death of Virgil , 1945), an enigmatic text that puts notions of conventional reception to the test. At first glance, the work flirts with readers' narrative desire, the compulsion for a mimetic, plot-driven interpretation. Nevertheless, subtle semiotic signals unfold through reading that cue an anti-mimetic reading. Against the progressive unfolding of plot, these signals instigate a montage-like reading process in which readers must speculatively reconstruct relations of meaning on their own. Through this speculation, they create a nonlinear "counter-plot," which reconstitutes the unfolding of meaning into a repetitive, labyrinthine practice that spoils narrative satisfaction. Readers thus performatively experience firsthand a demonstrative critique of narrative desire. Nielsen's method can thus account for novel and strange forms of reading, such as "coquettish" texts like Broch's. In this regard, this method contributes to existing discourses on deliberate difficulty as aesthetic tactics.

Анаграмма как энигматический жанр

This article studies structural-semantic and compositional aspects of the poetic anagram, which reflects the cognitive and linguistic picture of the world, as well as the national conceptual sphere. It is noted that the anagram genre originated in Russian poetry in the 1820s on the pages of the magazine “Blagonamerenny”. It published the first theoretical justification of such enigmatic genres as a riddle, a logogriff, a charade and a homonym. Its author was the famous statesman N. F. Ostolopov. It was he, as well as other poets, who actively collaborated with “Blagonamerenny”, who tested and introduced into the everyday life the genre varieties of the anagram: homonymanagram, charade-anagram, anagram-logogriff. They were not only a part of the poetic experiment, but also reflected the literary life of the era and had a polemical orientation. In order to decipher the coding part of these enigmatic texts, the addressee had to have a common with the addressee level of cognitive and linguistic thinking. At the same time, a distinctive feature of the anagram genre is its dialogical structure (subject-addressing system). Besides, the compelling (imperative) formulations are integral compositional elements, which serve as an appeal to the reader, where the author gives the necessary recommendations for the correct conversion of the encoded description. The author proposes first classifications of anagrams based on the ways of representing enigmatics (encrypted words) and on the methods of creating the coding part (interpretation field). There is a conclusion that the anagram is a culturally marked type of the text, characterized by stereotypical nature, associativity, precedence, semantic completeness, direct transformation of the encrypted meaning.

Christian Doctrine and the Old Testament: Theology in the Service of Biblical Exegesis

Christian Doctrine and the Old Testament: Theology in the Service of Biblical Exegesis

Housel and hyhtplega: The Play of the Eucharist in the Exeter Book

This article examines the productive difficulties with which the Exeter Book riddles generate a state of mind appropriate for theological meditation, by considering the reversed violence of Eucharistic remembering and the ludic pleasures of the enigmatic text. I examine closely Riddle 85, which has been unanimously solved as ‘fish and river’ on account of its clear debt to the twelfth Aenigma of Symphosius, and, having acknowledged the attractiveness and the limitations of the one other commonly suggested solution, ‘soul and body’, propose a new solution, ‘the housel inside the body’. This proposed solution shares with ‘soul and body’ the meditation upon the material encountering the immaterial, but it better accounts for the seeming interchangeability of the two parts of this riddle’s solution, by considering the mutual inhering of Christ and communicant in the Eucharist. I read Riddle 85 in the context of AElfric’s writing on the Eucharist, and also consider the hyhtplega, or joyful play, by which Christ leaps in Christ II, and by which the would-be riddle-solver must contemplate simultaneously a multiplicity of solutions.