Literary Context Research Articles

Introduction: Poetry and the Victorian Visual Imagination

Introduction:Poetry and the Victorian Visual Imagination Jill R. Ehnenn (bio) and Heather Bozant Witcher (bio) What might it mean to "see" poetry of the nineteenth century? Certainly, it might mean an act of generic visibility: reorienting conceptions of the Victorian age as equivalent to the rise of the novel to reconsider the centrality of poetry (an act of scholarly recovery that has been in process for at least the past decade). It might also gesture toward the visual possibilities of poetic language—the transportive effects of the imagination—and the interrelation of media, sensory modes (words, ideas, tastes, sounds, sights, spectacles), and the embodied experience that Victorian poetry is uniquely primed to explore. And, of course, it also conjures up the optical technologies that allowed for mechanical "seeing"—photographic and engraved images, the magic lantern, kaleidoscope, stereoscope, and others—alongside the so-called Golden Age of illustration, a moment in which literature—and particularly poetry and periodicals—is richly illustrated to join word and image. What might such thinking about the visual vis-à-vis Victorian poetry bring to the discipline of Victorian studies—indeed, English studies in general—especially now? Since the 1990s, the field of Victorian studies has emphasized the impact of visual culture on historical and literary contexts. As Kate Flint asserts in her The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (2000), the visual is a dominant mode of the Victorian period. Jonathan Crary questioned subjectivity by foregrounding the role of the nineteenth-century observer in his Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (1990). By tracing optical devices as "sites of both knowledge and power that operate directly on the body of the individual," Crary used optical experience and visual culture to reconsider what we mean by realism in the nineteenth century.1 Jonathan Potter furthers Crary's argument, showcasing the continual negotiation of Victorian subjectivities by focusing on the mediation of perceptual experience in his Discourses of Vision in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2018). Yet, these conversations about individual subjectivities and the intersections between the visual and verbal environs have largely explored genres other than poetry. This special issue, therefore, centers on the affordances of poetry as a [End Page 429] site of visual imagination. How might looking at the intersections of the Victorian visual imagination and the field of nineteenth-century poetry provide new insights into continued conversations surrounding both poetics and visual culture? What, then, might it mean to "look" differently at Victorian poetry? In the essays that follow, the contributors offer unique methodologies, case studies, and discussions about how new ways of looking provoke affective representations of others and one's own identity. But perhaps more broadly, these new considerations of poetry and the visual imagination offer disruptions to the so-called natural or normal order. When thinking specifically of the possibilities of Victorian poetry, Isobel Armstrong and Joseph Bristow both point to the genre's experimental and social nature.2 This experimentalism is extended with what Margaret Stetz terms "genre crossing" in her argument of genre at the fin de siècle, that in the 1890s, "everyone—reviewers, bookbuyers, other publishers, and authors—[were encouraged] to think beyond the law of genre and to experiment with writing that crossed boundaries."3 Even earlier, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, for instance, famously argued for a new poetic form when writing Aurora Leigh: not only an amalgamation of verse forms but "one that would adapt established styles to contemporary needs."4 Victorian poetry, therefore, is marked by its experimental nature and its publicly oriented focus on "contemporary needs." Indeed, one might argue that this public focus is further solidified with poetry's natural integration with visual culture and its situation within lived experience and sociality. Looking inward and outward, prompted by new modalities (and new combinations) in the visual and written arts, the Victorians, it seems, were natural disrupters. And what better time to be reconsidering the possibilities of disruption than in 2022, following a pandemic, an ongoing climate crisis, and the global rise of authoritarianism leading to the January 6 uprising, its aftermath, and the repeal of Roe v. Wade? In the Oxford English Dictionary, "disrupt," as a verb, is defined...

Love's Next Meeting: The Forgotten History of Homosexuality and the Left in American Culture

I am thrilled to be reviewing a work of queer history in this journal. Too often the queer and labor movements seem separate, and this division is blamed on their historical emergence. Aaron Lecklider asserts otherwise. Love's Next Meeting turns to the archive and to literature to explore how sex, class, perversion, labor organizing, and antiracism interpenetrate.I'll focus here on the first half of the book, which has the most to say about workers. While acknowledging “the failures of the left to build a cultural movement centralizing sexual dissidence as a political concern,” Lecklider also locates and analyzes how queer people, queer desires, and queer concerns shaped leftist thought and activism (6). He implies that the failure to center sexual dissidence had the effect not of prohibiting queer engagement but, rather, of nurturing it, since queerness operates better as a campy style of critique than as a “political concern.”Chapter 4 focuses specifically on labor in part via the example, made famous by Alan Bérubé, of the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union. As more gay men were drawn to this work, they felt increasingly comfortable being identifiable and using the union to fight for their rights as gay workers. Lecklider points out that the union also challenged the homo/hetero binary by virtue of its class and labor alliances (122). Because the union embraced dissidence and militancy, it resisted the pull of middle-class assimilation. At least for a while.When workers seek to advance class ranks (to enter the middle class, usually) either by joining or by resisting a union, they do so by adopting middle-class sexual styles. Ultimately, these middle-class sexual styles—restraint, monogamy, separation between domestic and work spheres—come to define what gets read as gay, lesbian, queer.Lecklider devotes an entire chapter to the workplace. Often sexuality is understood as separate from work, and even from class, and this book brings them back together by examining archival and literary contexts in which “sex and labor were intertwined” (143). He finds numerous instances in which the radical nature of labor activism both feeds and draws from sexual deviance.As people without class privilege who occupied stigmatized (often racialized or feminized) jobs and risked association with the despised Communist Party, workers could forge queer and interracial alliances, since they essentially had nothing left to lose. During the 1940s, the Marine Cooks and Stewards went beyond enabling this radicalism to embracing it. “The tendency of members to associate with the dispossessed, rather than aspiring to respectability, suggests how tightly deviant politics was stitched into the fabric of the union culture” (121).This embrace of deviance as an organizing strategy has the potential to radicalize union efforts today, and this book's valuable lesson is that it's not new—it has a very long history. Labor historians Michael Goldfield and Toni Gilpin have documented this past practice, and Lecklider adds the crucial perspective of queer history. If “labor is a highly sexed enterprise” and if “leftists imagined labor as a site of queer possibility,” then Starbucks baristas, Amazon warehouse pickers, and the adjunct faculty and janitors in my own local are adding a new chapter to an existing practice (143, 145). Solidarity appeals to workers whose conditions of labor isolate and stigmatize them, and the workplace brings all kinds of people together and provides them with a common experience, which can mute bigotry and foster community.So, history doesn't corroborate a division between queer and worker politics and activism, yet Lecklider acknowledges that recently they have swum in separate streams. Anti-fascism and the Cold War elevated consumerism and domesticity. When the left erased its earlier overlap with homosexuality, it “was not an unintended consequence of building a gay rights movement. It was a strategy born out of a commitment to rejecting a broader revolutionary struggle” (295). Separately, each could embrace capitalism, linked to middle-class sexual and social norms and to the myth of American exceptionalism. Love's Next Meeting offers an alternative history—labor's historic embrace of deviance—which serves as warning, as model, and as pure campy fun.

Problema transgumanizma v tvorchestve V. Pelevina (na primere romana «Transhumanism Inc.»)

The article presents the philosophical problems raised by V Pelevin in the novel “Transhumanism Inc.”. The definition of the concept of “transhumanism' in the historical and literary context is given. It is noted both the commonality of the artistic picture of the world with the novels “SNUFF” and “Iphuck-10”, and the development of the idea of the future human civilization. The hypothesis of metaverse concept is also proposed in this article.

SEMANTIC-SYNTACTIC ASPECT OF ANTHROPOCENTRICITY OF UKRAINIAN LITERATURE OF THE LATE 20TH – EARLY 21ST CENTURIES

The article deals with the lexical-grammatical nature of half-predicative appositive units as idiolect markers of Ukrainian literature of the late 20th - early 21st centuries, and the type of semantic-syntactic connection between the identified component of the separated substantive unit and the appositive unit. One-word half-predicative units have been described in relation to the signified component in terms of semantic and grammatical indices; phrasal, coordinating series and sub-appositive separated components have been analyzed by the nature of the morphological expression of an appositive unit. In addition, the models of half-predicative appositive units have been described by the valency of the appositive unit with the attributive syntaxemes. The research has proved grammatical interdependence between the identified component and the half-predicative appositive unit, which is manifested in the literary context. All selected examples to designate the denotative field “man” are composed by continuous writing out, which testifies their frequency and idiolectivity.

The Broken Voice: Reading Post-Holocaust Literature

The Broken Voice: Reading Post-Holocaust Literature

Reading comprehension of literary texts using a multimodal language–image approach

The importance of multimodal reading comprehension from multiple perspectives is particularly reflected in the theoretical work that has been published in recent times. Expanding the perspectives students use to make sense of these multimodal texts is an important part of comprehension instruction. The study focuses on the textual linking of language and image with the aim of promoting the textual productive and receptive use of images, assigning a relevant meaning to the image in the literary context of use, complementing the literary text with the visual message, integrating language and contextualised images and including them in the process of overall comprehension. The project presented here in the form of an experience report shows the results of and provides suggestions for the procedural application of a multimodal text–image approach to reading comprehension of a literary text. It is based on the reading of F. C. Delius' novel The Walk from Rostock to Syracuse. This text lends itself to being explored in a multimodal way, as it pre-supposes implicit knowledge that includes certain historical and cultural contextual references.
 Keywords: Images, intertextuality, literacy, multimodality, reading comprehension

The Conventionality and Novelty of Metaphorical Expressions in British and American Love Poetry: A Cognitive Approach

According to the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), metaphors are pervasive in everyday life, and most novel poetic metaphors are developed from conventional metaphors. Several examples and explanations have been provided to support these assertions; however, there has yet to be a systematic investigation into the conventionality and novelty of metaphors in literature. To partly fill in these gaps, the present study aims to explore which conceptual metaphors of love are frequently employed in British and American love poems and how the poets adapt them to bring novelty to their works. Love, one of the most highly metaphorised concepts, was chosen as the topic of the metaphors in this study, for there is a considerable resource of love poems available to be explored. The findings of the study reveal that there are nine conventional conceptual metaphors of love employed in British and American love poems. The conventionality and novelty of metaphors in poetry were then analysed in their respective poetic contexts, focusing on how the poets have adopted four techniques (extending, elaboration, questioning, and combining) to create novel expressions from conventional language. This study indicates that the knowledge of conceptual metaphors can help a person, especially a learner of a foreign language, to interpret poetic metaphors in literary contexts.

『새한글성경 신약과 시편』의 πίστις 번역에 대한 분석과 제언 — 갈라디아서를 중심으로 —

In this paper, we are exploring how the New Korean Translation The New Testament and Psalms (hereinafter NKT NT&Ps) interpreted the controversial word πίστις in the key passages of Galatians. It is reasonably clear that an interpreter is not free from his or her own historical setting, including modern theological issues and debates. So, in this paper, we first examine theological debates regarding the Greek word πίστις and some key expressions with it in Galatians. Then, we critically examine NKT NT&Ps’ interpretation of them and its theological position behind those interpretations. Finally, we want to make some critical suggestions for future amending of the translation or revisions.BR The Greek word πίστις is a very dynamic word. In the past, it used to be translated as faith in English without any particular nuances added, but now with its various implications. The semantic field of the Greek word πίστις is very dynamic. It includes faithfulness to covenants, cognitive acknowledgement of the proclaimed Gospel message and positive attitude toward it, mutual trust as a foundation for faithful relationship, and obedient life. Therefore, this word tends to include various implications depending upon its grammatical position, literary contexts, and theological orientation of the passages where it is found. On the basis of our examination of the NKT NT&Ps, it seems to be in fond of the objective genitive view and translate πίστις as faith without adding any further implication of it. Furthermore, the NKT NT&Ps emphasizes the verbal action of human faith toward the proclaimed Gospel message. In general, the author agrees with the NKT NT&Ps in its translation of πίστις and theological position toward its multiple implications. Nevertheless, in order to emphasize the dynamic semantic field of the word the NKT NT&Ps may have to add some more words in its translation rather than simply rendering of it as faith. Also, the NKT NT&Ps tend to translate key Greek expressions with πίστις in a rather rigid way. For example, in case of ἐκ πίστεως, it could be rendered as “on the basis of faith” as the NKT NT&Ps does, but sometimes, as “from/out of faith.” For the Greek preposition ἐκ mostly functions as source or origin. And in some places, the NKT NT&Ps changes the word order of the Greek expressions with πίστις to express the translators’ understanding of particular meaning of πίστις. In these cases, the NKT NT&Ps may add footnotes where it explains why it made those translating decisions. However, regardless of some controversial translations, it provides us with a very readable, reader friendly version of a Korean translation of the Bible. This makes us expect that the NKT NT&Ps will be especially welcomed by young generations of readers.

Decimal Diaspora: Ten Exiles and a Medieval Construction of Jewish History

The present article reviews religious constructions of Jewish diaspora History in their long-term evolution and discusses a midrashic text that hints at a historical turning-point in the 12th century. In the Antiquity, gendered metaphors were most commonly used to characterize the troubled relations between God, the Land, and the people of Israel. Early medieval conceptions speculated about the cyclical repetition of deportation events and other calamities. That meant that that number rather than gender became the dominant organizing principle of the historical narrative in the later period. Since the medieval “Midrash of the Ten Exiles” expresses this new numerology most straightforwardly, the redactional history and literary context of this short text is the focus of this study.

В поисках симметрии. Андрей Битов и его последний роман

This paper aims to analyze the metanovel narrative strategies in the postmodern literary context, defined by the scientific outcomes of quantum physics. According to them the world is a system of integrated space and time which are mutually complementary. The symmetry of time and space in this sense becomes the groundplan for the structural components of Andrei Bitov’s last novel. Through these components: for instance, echo, mirror, duality, the written and the unwritten, real life in the text and life out of context, physical time and grammatical time etc., we can find out the main course of the narrative and to point out its consistency. The apparent scrappiness performs the purpose to prove the capital importance of the route, of the journey, and not its end, probably non-existent. Following this point of view, hints at other works and authors (from ancient Greek myths to Nabokov) are also meant to share the invisible web of coexistence and persistency of the literary process.

Picturesque Mediations: Adalbert Stifter, Washington Irving, and the Transfiguration of the Mundane

AbstractThis essay examines the Germanophone realist Adalbert Stifter's reception of Washington Irving. Pushing against the traditional narrative of German realism's apolitical provinciality, it argues that media technologies from the British picturesque tradition, transmitted by way of Irving, aided Stifter in obscuring his cosmopolitan and colonialist ideologies. Picturesque observational practices, which emphasized the imaginative and artistic “improvement” of reality, overlap considerably with German realist techniques of transfiguration, and Irving's and Stifter's texts both emphasize the epiphanic experience of life and art, of reality and its mediation. Linking the epistemological dimensions of both periods to early statistical thought and illustrating how the authors’ preferred genres of the sketch and study pull from the same artistic and media-historical discourse, the essay uncovers striking continuities between the Germanophone and American literary contexts, recasting German realism as fully enmeshed within the global context it seemingly disavows.

Queering Mennonite Literature: Archives, Activism, and the Search for Community by Daniel Shank Cruz

Reviewed by: Queering Mennonite Literature: Archives, Activism, and the Search for Community by Daniel Shank Cruz Peter Miller Daniel Shank Cruz, Queering Mennonite Literature: Archives, Activism, and the Search for Community (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019) In Queering Mennonite Literature: Archives, Activism, and the Search for Community, Daniel Shank Cruz explores "how the queer theoretical project of the past thirty years has manifested itself within a Mennonite literary context" (2). Building his case on close readings of recent prose works by nine Mennonite authors, Cruz argues that "queer theory, which is concerned with the marginal in terms of both fighting oppression and investigating elements of culture that the mainstream ignores, helps illuminate a field [Mennonite literature] on the literary margins" (2). In one sense, as Cruz notes, North American Mennonites have always been queer. When the term is taken to mean "strange, odd, peculiar, eccentric,"1 it aptly characterizes a religious and ethnic group that has historically been viewed, and often presented itself, as functioning outside the cultural mainstream due to its commitments to simple living, pacifism, and adult baptism, and its skepticism toward nationalized religion. Tracing Mennonite beliefs back to their [End Page 106] sixteenth-century Anabaptist origins, Cruz proposes that "early Anabaptists' theology was inherently politically queer because disagreeing with the doctrines of the state church was a treasonous act" (10). On the other hand, when "queer" is taken in the more recent sense of denoting non-conforming gender or sexual identity, Mennonites on the whole appear far less queer. Most Mennonite congregations that now welcome LGBTQ members came to that position relatively recently and after sustained, often painful, campaigning by queer constituencies. Many conservative Mennonite congregations remain largely opposed to LGBTQ membership. Orienting his study around this tension—between what we might call Mennonitism's queer spiritualism and its anti-queer social praxis—Cruz identifies recent queer Mennonite literature as a site where traditional Mennonite ideals, such as "a rejection of binaries, the importance of creative approaches to conflict resolution, and the practice of mutual aid, especially in resisting oppression" (11), might be reclaimed and deployed in an increasingly diverse, multicultural present. Cruz offers lucid chapter summaries in his introduction, as does Maxwell Kennel in a 2020 review of the book,2 and rather than reprise those here, I want to consider a word from Cruz's title: Archives. "Two levels of archiving are present in the book," Cruz writes: "it investigates how the texts it studies archive the everyday ephemerality of queer experience, and it archives the books and their archiving endeavors" (25). Neither of these two uses of "archive" quite aligns with the conventional sense of the term. To describe a single book as an archive, whether that book is a work of fiction or an academic monograph, is to deploy "archive" in a figurative sense to mean preserve, document, or record. These are related concepts, to be sure, but they are less concerned with the issues of preservation, record hierarchy, public access, institutional politics, and so forth that bear on archives as such. Cruz acknowledges as much when he notes that "objects become archival in an institutional, and therefore more permanent, sense through their documentation" (18). This permanence, it bears mentioning, is not a physical condition per se. Had Emily Dickinson's poems remained locked in a chest after her death, stored, perhaps, in some Amherst attic, those queer (in multiple senses) manuscripts would likely still exist intact. Rather, the permanence an institutional archive can bestow is at root social, a function of the complex, evolving relation of staff people and technicians, the textual objects themselves, and their more or less public body of users. [End Page 107] I dwell on the social nature of archives, their blending of private value and public space, because it parallels the liminal social position that both Mennonites and queer people have long occupied in the United States. (The phrase "in the world but not of it" has long been a Mennonite mantra.) Yet as Cruz acknowledges, quoting queer theorist Maggie Nelson, "'the binary of normative/transgressive [… is] unsustainable' because eventually North American society will accept queer lives" (7). Indeed, queer identities have been increasingly embraced...

Encounters at the Mound in Old Norse Literature: Dialogues between Landscape and Narrative

Encounters at the Mound in Old Norse Literature: Dialogues between Landscape and Narrative

Eco-Mysticism in Pablo Neruda’s Selected Poetry

Eco-poetry as a modern literary theory is a branch of ecocriticism which focuses on the relationship between man and the physical world. Using the Latin American Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda’s selected poetry, this paper sets out to explore the themes of mystical and spiritual consciousness through eco-poetical evidence. This study utilizes the theoretical framework of eco-poetry to illuminate the dual ecological and mystical phenomenon, both in its theoretical and literary context. The thematic analysis of the study emphasizes the mystical and ecological spirituality or eco-mysticism of Neruda’s poetry. The finding indicates that Neruda’s poetries demonstrate man’s interdependence and spiritual interconnectedness with his environment. The finding also signals Neruda’s poetic quest of focusing on the significance of nature and poetry as a means for finding spirituality in the physical world. Keywords: Pablo Neruda; ecocriticism; eco-poetry; spirituality; eco-mysticism

Lebendiges Erinnern: Wie Geschichte in Literatur verwandelt wird by Sabine Scholl

Reviewed by: Lebendiges Erinnern: Wie Geschichte in Literatur verwandelt wird by Sabine Scholl Vincent Kling Sabine Scholl, Lebendiges Erinnern: Wie Geschichte in Literatur verwandelt wird. Vienna: Sonderzahl, 2021. 234 pp. Readers can be daunted by the immense literature that draws on history and by the academic journals devoted to the connections between them, especially when emphases change. In recent decades, writers have traced the experience of second-and third-generation Holocaust survivors, narrators traumatized in the aftermath of genocide and extermination. Novels otherwise as different as Maja Haderlap’s Der Engel des Vergessens and Doron Rabinovici’s Suche nach M. give accounts of devastation long after the immediate horrors, just as Georges Perec’s great autobiography W ou le souvenir d’enfance documents the nightmarish disorientation caused by a child’s loss of his father in war and mother in the camps. These works are grounded in what Sabine Scholl in Lebendiges Erinnern calls “die sogenannte Generationenerzählung, eine [End Page 152] Darstellung der Vergangenheit vermittelt durch Geschehnisse der eigenen Familiengeschichte” (12). The passage of time is erasing the possibility of so immediate an approach; events fade, but not their scars. Scholl links the work of this generation’s writers, mostly women, to Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory” (The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust), whereby “Nach-Erinnerung bedeutet keine leibhaftige Verbindung zur Vergangenheit, sondern wird mittels Imagination, Projektion und Kreation hergestellt” (11). “Autorinnen der Nachfolgegeneration bewegen sich frei durchs Material, verfügen darüber wie ein Regisseur” (11). Invention does not require the authority of documentation or depiction from sources; the imagination is a force powerful enough to recreate history as an author may experience it emotionally without personal involvement, as Hilary Mantel’s novels set in Tudor England testify. Accordingly, Scholl provides a “Kompendium,” an inventory of approaches and strategies that document the versatile means with which history is treated in literary contexts (10–11; 217–222). These range much more widely than would a commitment to documentary verifiability, from the relatively objective (“das Historische in Details, wie Farben, Kleidung [ . . . ] sichtbar machen,” 219) to the admittedly subjective (“das Ich des Autors als Ausgangs-und Endpunkt einer sich entwickelnden Geschichte in den Text einbringen,” 220). Clearly, then, Scholl’s operative word is “verwandelt,” accuracy being only one possible aim among a large array of strategies for requisitioning history. “Gerade die Leerstellen des Erinnerns fordern Autorinnen dazu auf, geschichtliche Ereignisse mit fiktionalen Mitteln zu rekonstruieren” (12), writes Scholl, as if this process were a brand-new development. But she might have traced an important continuity by referring to Perec’s book (1975), brilliantly “answered” by Laurent Binet in HHhH (2009). Her more immediate concern, however, is to help break the silence, the persistent, crippling, deliberate amnesia. As children, she and her contemporaries “erlebten vor allem gesammeltes Schweigen, das es erschwerte, Beziehungen zwischen den Generationen aufzunehmen, die Auseinandersetzungen ermöglicht hätten” (9). Hence the need for free invention and imaginatively grounded filling of gaps. This book is mainly the result of a series of conversations and interviews Scholl conducted at Vienna’s Alte Schmiede from October 2020 through September 2021 (230), and she is continuing with this project. The “forerunners” of the authors interviewed are Heimrad Bäcker and Edmund De Waal, among others, whom she discusses in her section “Verfahren und Vorfahren” (17–84) [End Page 153] as examples of authors faithful to history through individually guided, strongly imaginative reordering and focused concentration on one strategy. Bäcker’s approach in nachschrift, for instance, is “Sprache konzentrieren und ausstellen”—words come fully into their own when arranged as calligraphy and objects for display; De Waal draws on “Taktiles Erinnern” for historical truth in his acclaimed memoir Der Hase mit den Bernsteinaugen. The section based on the interviews is titled “Aus der Werkstatt” (85–216). In each chapter, Scholl records her interview with the author and precedes it with a short essay of orientation and commentary. What emerges is admirable for her succinct but clear way of introducing each work and author and a sense that she has gone to the essential questions about form and structure in each case. The range of topics, time...

Текстологические заметки к «Невоенному дневнику. 1914–1916» Д.С. Мережковского (по архивным материалам из РО ИРЛИ)

The author of the article for the first time produces a detailed textual analysis of the collection of D.S. Merezhkovsky “Non-War Diary. 1914–1916” (1917), relying on archival materials from the RO IRLI (Pushkin House). For most of the articles that made up this book, various documents have been preserved: preparatory notes and extracts, draft and white manuscripts, typescripts, newspaper clippings. Their value is determined not only by the tasks of textual criticism, but also by the history of literature and interpretive poetics. As a result, it became possible to outline in more detail the pre-press history of a number of articles and fill in the gaps in our understanding of them. On specific examples, we were able to characterize the logic of finalizing texts by a writer (from a manuscript to a newspaper publication and then to a collection); clarify ideas on the problem of distinguishing between censored / editorial and author’s excluded fragments in Merezhkovsky’s articles; expand knowledge of the sources he used. Documentary evidence of the author’s direct participation in the compositional organization of the book is given, and the dynamics of structural solutions is revealed. Thanks to additional facts, we supported the conclusion about the creative nature of the changes introduced in the preparation of the “Non-War Diary. 1914–1916” taking into account the changing socio-political background and “fluctuations” in the views of Merezhkovsky. Finally, the analytical review of archival materials from the RO IRLI helped expand the historical and literary context of Merezhkovsky’s speeches and reveal the writer’s hidden polemics with his contemporaries.

ANDREY PLATONOV IN SEARCH OF IDENTITY: FROM THE “FACTORY OF LITERATURE” TO MASTERY

The article examines the transformation of A. Platonov as a writer — from his statements expressed in the article “The Factory of Literature” (1926), to the novels in tge 1930s (“Kotlovan” (“The Pit”) and “Vprok” (“For the Future”). Despite the ironic tone of the “Factory of Literature,” Platonov presented in it his view of the struggle of literary groups in the mid-1920s and joined the debate about the artistic method of the new Soviet literature, its form and content. The writer was deliberating on the ways to create a work that meets not only the social order, but also the criteria of genuine art. Exaggerating LEF terminology and constructivists close to it (factory, semifinished product, raw materials, useful product, object, fact montage), Platonov stops at an important preparatory stage — notebooks — and reveals his own methodology of working with them, including with the help of installation. Notebook entries are divided into several groups: brief descriptions that help define the images of the characters in the fiction text and show their dynamics; phrases that have passed into the text without modification or with minor changes; notes left in notebooks, as they are uncensored — later Platonov “hid” these ideas in the subtext of his work.Thus, Platonov’s path is traced from the ideas of the “Factory of Literature” — through notebooks — to the artistic text of the 1930s. In the novels of the 1930s, the writer continued to reflect on the LEF understanding of art: the concept of “life-building,” production in literature, the idea of the need for a “second profession” for a writer, expressed by V. Shklovsky and B. Arvatov. All this expands our understanding of the political, philosophical and literary contexts of the stories. However, as he followed the ideas of the Lefists at a certain stage of his work (synthesizing them with the ideas of other literary groups), Platonov was searching for his path to mastery, his creative method. At first, he believed in the need to create a “factory of literature,” but in the 1930s he was already doubting the possibility of building not only a common “proletarian house,” but also a literary factory. Doubt as a kind of artistic “method” of the writer (N. V. Kornienko) found its expression in the stories “The Pit” and “For the Future,” which became a metaphor not only for the new Soviet society being built, but also for new literature.

A Study on the Cultic Backgrounds in the Old Testament for Paul’s Concept of ‘Reconciliation’

본고의 목적은 바울이 말하는 그리스도의 십자가 화목(평화)행위의 구약 제의적 배경 및 관련 본문들의 내용상의 특징을 살피려는 것이다. 첫째, 그 동안 학자들이 제시한 예수의 십자가 ‘화목’행위에 대한 다양한 구약 제의적 배경 이론들(번제와 속죄제와 같은 속죄 제사들, 출애굽, 유월절, 시내산 언약에 근거한 선지자들의 새로운 언약 체결과 평화언약 등)을 비판적으로 다루었다. 이러한 분석은 구약의 다양한 제의들의 이미지와 개념을 가지고 예수의 십자가 사역(희생 혹은 속죄)을 설명한다는 점에서 중요했다. 둘째, 바울의 화목 본문들(롬 5:1-11; 고후 5:11-21; 엡 2:11-22; 골 1:13-23)의 내용을 모든 구절들의 공통점과 각각의 독특성들을 간략하게 살펴보았다. 그것은 하나님께서 예수의 십자가를 통하여 유대인들과 이방인들과 심지어 우주삼라만상에 이르기까지 하나님과 화목하게 하며 삶 속에서 그 화목을 누리고 화목의 복음을 전하는데까지 이르는 것이었다.The purpose of this paper was to examine the meaning of Christ's act of reconciliation (peace) on the cross in Paul's writings with various cultic backgrounds in the Old Testament, and its own literary contexts. First, it dealt with the various Old Testament-related liturgical background theories for Jesus’ reconciliation at hi cross (some sacrifices such as burnt offerings and sin offerings, the Exodus, the Passover, the New covenant based on the Sinai covenant, and the renewing covenant of peace in the Prophetic books, etc.). This paper also explains the work of Jesus on the cross in light of various Old Testament sacrifices. Second, the core concept as well as the peculiarities in Paul's reconciliation texts (Rom. 5:1-11; 2 Cor. 5:11-21; Eph. 2:11-22; Col. 1:13-23) were briefly discussed. In short God made his reconciliation through the cross of Jesus for making people even to all the universe reconciled to Him and for making his people to preach the gospel of reconciliation and enjoy it in their life.

Thoughts of Awakening by Sivavakkiyar

Intellectual thoughts and memories have existed in Tamil literary contexts from the very beginning. Moreover, the Siddha literature is full of criticism of superstitions, physical realism, anti-idolatry, anti-Manu, anti-false rituals, and encouragement of virtuous deeds. For the sake of simplicity, this article can analyze the rational ideas embodied in Sivavakkiyar's poems within the three categories of thought, word, and deed. The word "Dravidian" and its principles are not intended to scratch the feelings of the individual. It is a denunciation of slavery, the concentration of power, and superstitions. Such qualities can be seen in the spiritual box, as a form of rationalism, as an anti-caste and anti-religious key, as a woman's reverence, as the peeling sun of false ascetics, and as the saffron that celebrates the body and mind.

«Черный хлеб науки…»

The review of the encyclopedic dictionary M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin and his contemporaries focuses on the relevance, the essential uniqueness and practical applicability of the publication. The dictionary, dedicated to the contemporaries of Saltykov-Shchedrin, is a philological event of great consequence. Any research of the writer’s oeuvre in the social, historical, political, and, by all means, literary contexts makes it possible to consider the author’s biography, his creative intentions and the particulars of their actualization in a consistent manner. This is particularly relevant for Saltykov, whose life and works are permeated with the pathos of acute actuality. Each encyclopedia entry in the dictionary serves both as a piece of information about a new character and the integration of the biographical and literary particulars shedding light on various stages of Saltykov’s creative work, on the ways and means facilitating the formation of his political stance, his literary views and his creative mind in general. Historical, literary, cultural, social, political contexts of Saltykov-Shchedrin’s biography and oeuvre are expanded by means of the names, one way of another mentioned in the satirical confessions of the writer or in his epistolary legacy. The projection on the writer-satirist helps to shape a new image of those who seemed to be just the backdrop, against which significant events took place. It is emphasized that the book is addressed to both a professional literary scientist, and to an average reader. The authors of the articles introduce new information concerning Saltykov’s biography, his literary ties, his view of the public life, culture and art of Russia and foreign countries into scientific circulation. A number of articles start featuring historic, literary and textual elaborations. Dictionary entries are based on under-published and archived materials. For the first time the corpus The chronicles of the life and oeuvre of M. E. Saltykov is given. A significant part of the dictionary work has been done by the scientists of Saratov National Research State University I. V. Kabanova and I. A. Knigin.