Prose Works Research Articles

АНТИ-МІЦКЕВИЧ: РОЗРАХУНОК З ПОЛЬСЬКИМИ ЛІТЕРАТУРНИМИ ІДОЛАМИ У ПРОЗІ ВІТОЛЬДА ҐОМБРОВИЧА

The article considers the functioning of Polish national myths based on the images of iconic representatives of Polish literature, in particular Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Józef Ignatius Kraszewski, Boleslaw Prus, in the prose works of Witold Gombrowicz - the novel “Trans-Atlantic” and the memoir series “Diaries”. Gombrovych’s available means of embodying the goal - debunking the Polish national inferiority complex, as well as elements of linguistic and cultural stylisation in the author’s prose works are analysed. Examples of interpretation of figures from the modern and almost modern Gombrowicz literary world, including representatives of Young Poland and the interwar twentieth century, are given. Currently, there is a widespread view that national identity is a fully constructed phenomenon that lacks, so to speak, existential attachment. In other words, the national allegedly does not exist, although it is considered to exist by those people who are under the spell of the national idea. It is in this sense that national feelings are called myths, that is, myth here means deception of feelings and belief in fairy tales. In fact, the national reality is mythical, but mythical in another sense, in that we give this word after Losev. This can be interpreted as follows: the national living and vital is a synthesis of idea and life, and a synthesis with an element of “alienation”. Witold Gombrowicz considered the national myth as a part of Form, which is the main source and one of the most powerful factors limiting personality. In turn, the national myth is a form that prevents individuals from entering a broad cultural context and leads to their conservation in their own, limited environment.

ТИПОЛОГИЯ И СТРАТЕГИИ КРЕАТИВНОЙ РЕЦЕПЦИИ НА ПРИМЕРЕ АНГЛИЙСКОЙ ПОЭЗИИ И ПРОЗЫ ПОСТМОДЕРНА

The paper focuses on complex research and description of creative reception theory and typology. There are provided definitions of such terms as reception, creative reception, creative reception strategies, and others. The author builds the typology of creative reception on the basis of works by E. V. Abramovskikh, S. Ye. Trunin, M. V. Zagidullina, V. I. Tyupa, and M. Naumann. This typology includes two types (or levels) of creative reception, defined as classic and postmodernist. Each of the types is characterized by a number of strategies, i. e. ways of representing an artistically received text in one’s own work. The classic type strategies (formal, authentic, neutral and antithetical) focus primarily on plot transformation. As for the postmodernist level, the author singles out two strategies: congenial and play. The theory and typology of creative reception is substantiated with some examples of reminiscences and allusions to English and world poetry. The examples under analysis are taken from the following prose works by the outstanding English postmodernist writer John Robert Fowles (1926–2005): the novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), the collection of long short stories The Ebony Tower (1974), the philosophic book The Aristos (1964), and also the lyric collection Selected Poems, published posthumously in 2012. The collection has not been translated into Russian yet. Therefore, the poem under analysis (Islanders) has been translated into Russian by the author of the present paper. The paper also deals with indirect Biblical reception which is found in the allusion to the ivory tower. The allusion gave the title The Ebony Tower both to Fowles’ long short story and collection as a whole. The author of the paper draws a conclusion about the dominant creative reception strategies in the literary works under analysis and also about the possible use of the presented creative reception typology in analyzing works by other writers.

Полное и уменьшительное имя героини в прозе А.С. Пушкина

We consider which principle is guided by A.S. Pushkin, choosing to name the heroines of his prose works, the diminutive form of the name or the name and patronymic. Due to changes in etiquette standards and canons, the modern reader no longer grasps the meanings associated for readers of the Pushkin era with one form or another of the name. For this reason, this study is preceded by a voluminous introductory part devoted to etiquette standards of the first half of the 19th century; when working on it, we relied both on the works of historians and on literary works. The subjects of this study are the stories of A.S. Pushkin “The Squire’s Daughter” and “The Blizzard” (included in the cycle of “The Belkin Tales”) and the novel “Dubrovsky”. During the study, we conclude that the author’s choice of the form of the heroine’s name is not accidental and depends on a number of reasons, which include: the speech situation depicted in a particular episode of the work; the psychological state of the character, as well as his relationship with other heroes of the work; the perception of the hero through the eyes of the author or another character.

Critical reception of existential prose of the interwar decades in Ukrainian literary criticism

The article deals with peculiarities of critical expierence of existential problems in the interwar Ukrainian prose works. The topicality of the article is caused by the lack of special studies on this problem. Its purpose is to determine the evolution and stages of the scientific-critical reception of existential discourse in the Ukrainian writing of the named period. In the course of the analysis it has been revealed that the first positive reviews, which emphasize the intellectual and psychological dominant of the works, date back to the twentieth years marked by the relative freedom of self-expression. From the 1930s to the end of the 1980s the works of modernist writers almost completely disappear from the scientific and reading space. In this paper it is emphasized a situation in a totalitarian society where criticism, serving the dominant ideology, acquires the characteristics of a political structure. Ignoring the fact of the functioning of modernism in Ukrainian culture meant a simultaneous turning away from the manifestations of artistic representation of individual existence. Artificially interrupted process has been compensated by literary studies of the representatives of Ukrainian diaspora which underline a high level of prose works by M. Khvylovy, V. Pidmohylny, V. Domontovych etc., their congeniality with European writing. The third stage dates back to the nineties and continues to this day. It is marked by the study of Ukrainian literature from the point of view of the latest methodologies. One of the research areas is reading texts in the projection of the philosophy of existence. The analysis of critical works proves the notable progress of our scholars towards the comprehension of existentiality as a historically and culturally determined phenomenon in the Ukrainian art space. Existential discourse is unanimously regarded as an organic component of modernist processes, marked by the shift of attention from the external reality to the internal life. of The literary critics active search has resulted both in the diversity of the scientific and methodological spectrum of research and the broadening of the visions of the artistic and aesthetic context in which this discourse operates.

KATEGORIA MIEJSCA AUTOBIOGRAFICZNEGO W PROZIE MICHAŁA GŁOWIŃSKIEGO: PAMIĘĆ, WYOBRAŹNIA, PRZESTRZEŃ

The article is devoted to the analysis of Michał Głowiński’s memories of prose using the category of autobiographical place. The author of this term, Małgorzata Czermińska, proposes a new interpretative quality within geopoetics. In the article „Autobiographical places. The geopoetics proposal” details and discusses in turn the types of autobiographical sites referring to various examples. Czermińska’s concept is confronted with Głowiński’s prose works. Places and spaces turn out to be an important element of the memory prose of the author of „Circles of Strangeness”, and the category itself is a valuable tool that can be used to interpret it.

Великая война и сибирская память: Георгий Вяткин в американской поэтической антологии 1916 года

The essay is dedicated to a rather extraordinary episode in the literary biography of the Siberian poet Georgy Vyatkin (1885–1938), when one of his poems was translated by the American social worker Alice Stone Blackwell (1857–1950) and published in 1916 in the magazine “The Russian Review.” The authors carefully reconstruct political and ideological contexts of this publication, directly linked to the United States’ entry into the Great War. They pay special attention to the literary and social activities of Alice Stone Blackwell. They discuss what place Vyatkin’s poem “To the Descendants’ took in Vyatkin’s literary biography in the time of the Great War. In 1914 he became a front-line correspondent for the Kharkov newspaper “Utro.” By 1915 he was drafted as a “ratnik” (soldier) by the army, and further served as an assistant within the medical and nutritional detachment under the command of another poet, Sasha Chernyi (Alexander Glikberg; 1880‒1932). Throughout the Great War, Vyatkin created an œuvre of literary works in verse and prose, which also includes his poem “To Descendants,” that was published in the magazine “Europe’s Messenger” and translated into English. Vyatkin revised some of his war poems after the Revolution, and adapted them to the circum- stances of the Civil War, from the perspective of the “White” press. At the same time, he became the Secretary of the War Archives Commission, which was created in 1918 under the leadership of the folklorist Ivan Ulyanov (1876–1937), who collected evidence of the modern memory of the Great War.

A new disenfranchised type of person in Ukrainian and Russian small prose of the literary emigration of 1919–1939

This article deals with the evolution of a disenfranchised type of person in the works of small prose of Ukrainian and Russian emigration writers in the period between 1919 and 1939. In the stories by V. Leontovych and V. Fedorov the type of disenfranchised person is presented and formed under the conditions of the Bolshevik Regime. Thus, the characters of the works find themselves in situations of alienation or conflict with the Bolshevik authorities: among these we encounter Sarah Solomonivna, a professor, the nationalist Kost, Olexander Levenets (stories by V. Leontovych «Sarah Solomonivna», «Hynut Mriyi», «Vyhnantsi»), and the peasant Varenyk (stories by V. Fedorov «Sud Varenyka»). These disenfranchised individuals have no place in the new society. The stories show how these individuals perceive hostility of the new order, the last one catching them all up gradually, and how each of these characters is being subjected to tests and trials by the new government. The attitude towards the protagonists from their neighbours and colleagues changes, giving place to arising suspicion and distrust. The main characteristics of the new type of disenfranchised person of the 20–40s are alienation from both the politics of the new government and from the native environment, accompanied by a deep mental fatigue caused by the painful loss of the motherland, the last one developing into existential loneliness.

Н.И. Новиков — издатель поэзии А.П. Сумарокова

Among other things, the outstanding enlightener Nikolai Novikov (1744 –1818) contributed to Russian culture as the editor-publisher of the Complete Works in Verse and Prose by Aleksandr Sumarokov (1781 –1782, 10 vols.; 2nd ed.: 1787, 10 vols.). It was the first attempt of publishing the complete works of a modern Russian author. A part of Sumarokov’s papers Novikov had at his disposal were lost about the time of Novikov’s arrest. The paper examines the importance of Sumarokov’s poetry published in periodicals for Novikov’s edition; in the course of the study the manuscripts of these poems (preserved in the St. Petersburg archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences) were consulted. A special attention is paid to the editorial history of Sumarokov’s eclogues. Concurrently, some aspects of later editions of Sumarokov prepared by G.A. Gukovskii (1935) and P.N. Berkov (1957) are considered.

«ПОВОРОТ ВИНТА»: ГЕНРИ ДЖЕЙМС КАК ПИСАТЕЛЬ И КАК КРИТИК

The article considers the story by Henry James (1843 – 1916) «The Turn of the Screw» (1898 – first edition, 1908 – second edition) in connection with the emergence of a new type of narrator in the writer's late prose. The worldview and creative method of H. James are formed under the influence of the philosophy of pragmatism, which became widespread at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries thanks to the works of the writer's elder brother, the philosopher William James (1842 – 1910). The core of pragmatism is the pluralistic concept of William James based on the assumption that knowledge can be realized from very limited, incomplete, and inadequate «points of view» and this leads to the statement that the absolute truth is essentially unknowable. The epistemological statements of William James's theory is that the content of knowledge is entirely determined by the installation of consciousness, and the content of the truth in this case depends on the goals and experience of the human, i.e. the central starting point is the consciousness of the person. Henry James not only creates works of art, but also sets out in detail the principles of his work both on the pages of fiction works of small and large prose, putting them in the mouths of their characters – representatives of the world of art, and in the prefaces to his works of fiction, as well as in critical works.

"Implausible and Inappropriate"? A defense of Dickens's A Christmas Carol

This article considers, further to the seasonal appropriateness of Dickens's choice of title for A Christmas Carol, the ways in which this decision proves itself suitable for a work of prose and not poetry. By placing the Carol in its historical context alongside the Victorian Christmas carol, it becomes clear that both the considerations and aims of the novella are closely allied with those of the Victorian carol, demonstrating on a basic level the suitable nature of Dickens's choice. However, there are also deeper considerations regarding how musical principles, suggested by both the title and Dickens's decision to name the chapters "Staves," interweave in Dickens's prose to create a complex and nuanced analogy, and an ultimately enduring and endearing work.

A Study on the Strategies for Translating Modern Chinese Essays into English: A case Study of Zhang Peiji's Selected Modern Chinese Essays

Chinese prose has a long history. During this period, various famous artists have created many excellent works. Prose is a very important literature and art form which takes writing as creation and aesthetic object. In ancient Chinese literature, prose just like verses and parallel writings, does not pursue rhyme and sentence pattern. This is prose in a broad sense. And I would like to talk about prose in a narrow sense. In modern Chinese literature, prose refers to a literary genre which is in parallel with poetry, novel and drama. The major characteristics of prose are the sincere feeling and the beautiful language. After May 4th Movement, the social literature form was influenced by the New Culture Movement, a number of splendid writers in our country created a good deal of excellent works of prose. These are the precious treasures of Chinese literature, carrying the Chinese spirit and culture. But it is a pity that academics at home and abroad have done few researches on the modern Chinese essays translation, and the study about it is rare. The research on Chinese prose translation study, however, is far from enough. The Chinese prose translation study has lagged behind the other literary genre study all the time. Mr. Zhang's two series of "Modern Chinese Prose Selection" translations are his classic masterpieces. The selected works are all famous prose of young intellectuals after the May 4th Movement in China. The essays in them are of profound significance and full of characteristics of the times. So this article tries to explore Professor Zhang Peiji's translation art style in combination with prose selection. The fact that Professor Zhang has successfully translated also proves that the Chinese can make a great contribution in the Chinese-English translation career. The author also expects that Chinese scholars and translators will actively participate in the translation career, and to learn from each other's strengths in future translations. Really let Chinese culture go to the world as soon as possible.

Display of national identity in modern Palestinian literature

In the first half of the twentieth century, Palestine was shocked by serious political, social, and literary changes. The writers felt the need for a new type of literary work that could capture and express current historical events and circumstances, as well as in order to move towards change. Literature has become a kind of barometer of the mood of the nation. With the beginning of the new century and the change in the political situation in the country, the Palestinian national identity undergoes changes, losing its sharp political color, which was also reflected in literature. The writers’ thoughts are not only ideas about national independence, political freedom, they give way to topics such as economic life: wealth and poverty, the labor market, consumer protection, as well as women’s freedom, political and ideological contradictions. The article discusses the main meanings of the concepts of “identity”, “national identity”, and their reflection in the works of young Palestinian writers such as Ziyad Khaddash, Jamal al-Qawasmi, Ibtisam Azem, as well as in the work « في حضرة الغياب » (“In the Presence of Absence”) of the classic of Palestinian literature, Mahmoud Darwish, in the context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The main aspects of national identity are highlighted in the discourse of prose works of these writers. Key words: national identity, Palestine, Israel, new generation, new subjects, alienation, homeland.

Deserto: Zwischen den Welten by Luis S. Krausz

Reviewed by: Deserto: Zwischen den Welten by Luis S. Krausz Dagmar C. G. Lorenz Luis S. Krausz, Deserto: Zwischen den Welten. Vienna: Sonderzahl, 2017. 132 pp. Luis Krausz's Deserto offers a highly personal introduction to the Brazilian post-Shoah Austrian-German-Jewish community, and it challenges genre boundaries. This intriguing prose work examines ways in which an extended family copes with the trials of exile and uncovers effects of the Shoah and Nazi persecution in the generation of the grandson. Anecdotes, historical information, and a wealth of cultural insights pertain to the youthful narrator's journey from his native São Paulo to Israel and England. In these different settings he encounters members of his family and the Ashkenazic diaspora. The narrative perspective blends adolescent naiveté and an adult awareness, past and present. In the account the norms of the diaspora society become visible, as do the distinct traditions to which his relatives subscribe—Reform Judaism, Jewish orthodoxy, and secular cosmopolitanism. Not without a transgressive bent, the narrator notes the extraordinary traits of his society from an insider's point of view. His trip enables him to gain distance from Jewish São Paulo with its bourgeois homes hidden behind hedges and the cemetery [End Page 114] of Vila Mariana as the residents' final destination (16). Moving "zwischen den Welten," Krausz's narrator increasingly assumes the role of an affectionate, erudite interpreter. Krausz draws a cultural and historical panorama that extends beyond Central Europe, notably Vienna, into the destroyed world of the shtetl, where the Ashkenazic communities originated. Krausz's earlier novel Verbannung (2011) focused on the formative years of the narrator in Jewish São Paulo, but Deserto suggests an impending departure. The narrator is identified as the grandson of exiles, who, like the author, is beholden to the high culture of Austria and Germany: classical literature, music, and the humanities. To him, Europe represents an unattainable ideal as well as a forbidden fruit. Deserto foregrounds the narrator's travels to Israel and England and the exile milieu in which his relatives live. Like his parents, they escaped National Socialism, and like the Ashkenazim in Brazil, they assimilated themselves superficially while maintaining Jewish values and identity as expressed through their attire, practices, and food as well as a language rooted in pre-Shoah Vienna and Berlin speech. References to post-Enlightenment history and the ideal of Bildung epitomized by Heine, Freud, Zweig, Schnitzler, Mann, and Wassermann establish an intellectual cohesion in Krausz's novel. From German-Jewish literature and his elders' accounts, this Brazil-born grandson has constructed a text-based identification wiTheurope that instilled in him a longing for the mysterious "drüben" and for the past. Integral to this cultural profile are furthermore an appreciation for Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms; proficiency in German and classical languages; and the etiquette of the European bourgeoisie. Krausz also specifies language registers and accents that identify distinct groups within his circles, for instance the "altvertraute Wiener Vorkriegsdeutsch" (95) or the Jewish "Jargon," the Yiddish-accented German that the sixteen-year-old narrator understands but does not speak. For those who can afford it, the lifestyle of the exiles includes a household with maids, tailors, and pastry chefs from the territories of imperial Habsburg, Viennese-style furniture and soups, pastries, meat dishes, even "panierte Schweinsschnitzel" of the cuisine of Old Vienna, and the Jewish delicacies hamantashen, kugel, and tsimmes. In his memory book Die Tante Jolesch oder Der Untergang des Abendlandes in Anekdoten (1975) Friedrich Torberg mourned and celebrated Ashkenazic culture, which he considered forever lost. Krausz subtly revises the notion of finality and replaces it with a notion of diasporic dispersement evident [End Page 115] from the perpetuation but also the repression of Ashkenazic patterns. Cultural cohesion, he suggests, requires transparency as well as taboos, for example, traveling to post-Nazi Austria or Germany or breaking the silence about the Shoah and Eastern Jewish life. Uncle Richard's taboo-breaking but enjoyable trip to the Salzburg Festival is one example. It stands in contrast to Uncle Eugen's avoidance of a collection of Yiddish folk songs and early Zionist dances, which he keeps intact but does not share or...

АНТИЧНИЙ ТОПОС У ПОВІСТІ "ХУДОЖНИК" ТАРАСА ШЕВЧЕНКА

The article analyzes the use of individual names, images and concepts from the great ancient heritage in the story "The Artist" by Taras Shevchenko. The tale selected for the study, as well as other prose works of the writer, testified a thorough knowledge of their author in the history of Greek and ancient Roman culture and literature, skillful use of certain plots, characters from ancient times to characterize individuals, their personal qualities, or when the master as a highly educated art historian has told readers about fine art works by world-class artists or in other similar situations. Following the wise instructions of many of his friends, particularly the outstanding classicist painter, brilliant master of ceremonial portrait K. Bryullov, T. Shevchenko thoroughly researched the works of ancient historians, philosophers and poets, studied European languages, and in most cases he used topics from Bible, ancient Greek and Roman history for his paintings and art works. The ancient topos of the Ukrainian artist were formed first in painting, and later or in parallel - in words that accompanied throughout his creative career. Realizing ancient and life phenomenon, the writer has reproduced them through the prism of his own artistic vision; it is especially masterful in the tale genre. T.Shevchenko lived the inner life of his characters, worked out and applied a whole range of feelings and experiences, through which he resorted to demonstration of new and more significant means of artistic expression. In the story "The Artist" the author employed a lot of antique images that are connected with the direct artistic function of the story of the fate of a young artist, who in a short period of life turned from an apprentice "in a shabby greasy robe" into a trendsetter. The writer depicted the young author of paintings practically from the time of his redemption from serfdom until the last days of his life. In this tale the young artist overcame various difficulties, sufferings, found the strength and cleverness to develop creativity, at the same time he expressed respect and obedience to friends, teachers, mentors. The writer was leading his young artist through a number of different situations and simultaneously was presenting the great cultural importance of the ancient world. In his story "The Artist" T. Shevchenko revealed the fascinating and unique world of Hellenic antiquity, presented to the reader a great number of the ideals that he professed.

УЧЕБНЫЕ ПЕРИОДИЧЕСКИЕ ИЗДАНИЯ В «ПРИДВОРНОЙ ПЕДАГОГИКЕ» М.Н. МУРАВЬЕВА И В.А. ЖУКОВСКОГО. СТАТЬЯ ПЕРВАЯ

In 1829–1831, Vasily Zhukovsky, a mentor to the heir to the throne, published two pedagogical journals Sobiratel’ [The Collector] (1829) and Muraveynik [The Ant Hill] (1831). Zhukovsky’s publishing project was greatly influenced by the traditions of court pedagogy associated with the name of Mikhail Muravyov, who taught Russian literature, Russian history and moral philosophy to Grand Dukes Alexander and Konstantin Pavlovich for many years. Muravyov wrote many prose works of an artistic and didactic nature, which were printed in a small number of copies in the Imperial printing house. One of all these publications is important: “Obitatel’ Predmestya, Periodicheskiye Listy” [The Inhabitant of the Suburbs, Periodical Sheets] (1790); it was published weekly and is the closest analogue to the court pedagogical journals of Zhukovsky. The publication is part of a prose cycle—a trilogy which also includes “Bernovskie Pis’ma” [Bernovo Letters] and “Emilievy Pis’ma” [Emil’s Letters], that Muravyov used in pedagogical practice. Muravyov tried to create a kind of a friendly community with his students, a small circle in which the sentimentalist model of communication of souls was to be realised. His prose was intended to contribute to the formation of this group space and therefore was saturated with the circle semantics. The latter particularly manifested itself in the correlation of the image of the main child character of the trilogy, Vasinka, with the personality of one of Muravyov’s students— Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich. Vasinka in “Emilievy Pis’ma” is an improved version of Konstantin. Vasinka has the same advantages as Konstantin and successfully fights with his shortcomings. However, the message of the trilogy is not so straightforward as to be limited by the boundaries of the circle. On the contrary, it tends to maximise universality, creating a kind of an encyclopedia of the universe, which includes people, nature, and works of art. There is no room only for urban civilisation. The diversity of the world in the trilogy is brought to the common denominator of the village idyll. Therefore, the plot of Muravyov’s narrative is weakened, because the idyll is essentially eventless. This is not a chain of events, but a series of images. This is what provides not only didactic “visibility”, but also the potential “mediality” of the text, gives the text the ability to be distributed in issues and integrate into life, merge with its chronological and everyday flow. The idyllic pictures of “Emil’s cycle” are brought together by the axiomatic level of the text. It is most clearly articulated in the conversation of the inhabitant of the suburb with Ilanov—a religious and philosophical discourse in which ethics is combined with metaphysics and cosmology. All these features of “Emil’s trilogy” were further continued and developed in Zhukovsky’s pedagogical journals. The following article will be devoted to a detailed analysis of this continuity.

Otherwise, Revolution! Leslie Marmon Silko’s ‘Almanac of the Dead’ by Rebecca Tillett

MLR, .,   characters—a Victorian poet and scholar. While there is much original and compelling discussion here, it is worth considering whether the unusual literary context rather complicates the ultimate meaning of the work in relation to contemporary poetry, and whether this section would have been more profitably given over to the analysis of a handful of stand-alone dramatic monologues by contemporary poets. e subsequent two chapters, which focus on ‘Revisionist Mythmaking’ and postcolonial British identity, provide further well-informed and insightful analyses, both formal and thematic. In tracing the formal and effective features of the genre, Merk astutely observes the diminishing use of ‘setting’ and ‘occasion’, as well as the corresponding feature of ‘dramatic action’ in contemporary examples of the genre. Using Alistair Fowler’s work on literary genres, the final chapter addresses the question of whether the dramatic monologue has passed through the three stages required (formation, development, transformation) to become a ‘modal form’ (p. ). Challenging the temporal dimension of Fowler’s argument, Merk asserts that the dramatic monologue has developed and transformed, without ‘the proper genre having exhausted itself first’ (p. ). She concludes that the dramatic monologue can be seen as a ‘mode’ partly because it has characteristics which are ‘permanently valuable’ (p. ) and that its energies and features manifest themselves in a range of prose works. As this volume demonstrates, the dramatic monologue’s liminal existence is integral to its value. Its ambiguity and slipperiness are the source of its creative power and it continues to influence contemporary writers of prose and poetry alike. ere seems a lot more to be said about the contemporary dramatic monologue, and this is a much-needed and valuable contribution to the field. S H U S R-J Otherwise, Revolution! Leslie Marmon Silko’s ‘Almanac of the Dead’. By R T. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. . vi+ pp. £. ISBN – –––. Rebecca Tillett has been one of the most important and persistent advocates for the study of contemporary Native American and Indigenous literatures (see particularly her essential Contemporary Native American Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, )). roughout Tillett’s work, there is no text that she has returned to with greater frequency than Leslie Marmon Silko’s notoriously difficult Almanac of the Dead (New York: Penguin, ). Following closely on the heels of an edited collection, Howling for Justice: Critical Perspectives on Leslie Marmon Silko’s ‘Almanac of the Dead’, ed. by Tillett (Tucson: Arizona University Press, ), Otherwise, Revolution! represents Tillett’s first monograph devoted solely to Silko’s ‘problematic and contentious’ second novel (p. )—and it is a fitting culmination of her thinking to date on the text. Situating her reading within the history of Almanac’s mixed reception, Tillett builds most explicitly on the previous scholarship of David L. Moore, on witnessing and ethics (‘Silko’s Blood Sacrifice: e Circulating Witness in Almanac of  Reviews the Dead’, in Leslie Marmon Silko: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by Louise K. Barnett and James L. orson (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, ), pp. –) and of Joni Adamson, on Indigenous environmental politics and political activism (‘Indigenous Cosmopolitics and the Reemergence of the Pluriverse’, in Howling for Justice, ed. by Tillett, pp. –). By extending these lines of enquiry, she proposes ‘some useful ways of reading Almanac for the reader who is bewildered’ and offers ‘some potential “remedies” for some of the text’s long-standing and entrenched misreadings’ (p. ). In this, Tillett is lucid; as she argues, Silko guides her reader through the dangerous individualistic wilderness of the text to show how cooperation, community and the ability to acknowledge the human and natural world as a holistic whole provides a clear and sustainable ‘remedy’ for the disposability and sterility of late-twentieth-century capitalist culture. (pp. –) Methodologically, Tillett seeks to follow Silko’s lead, centring her analysis on the Earth. Indeed, Tillett posits from the outset that in Almanac ‘the Earth is the central “character” of an exploration of the ways in which “enlightened” scientific detachment is predicated upon a separation of humanity from the natural world’ (p. ). As such, Tillett’s argument hinges on the ways in which such an Earth-centred reading of Almanac most clearly...

The Czech Polonophile Edvard Jelínek and the Topic of Russia in his Work

In scholarly circles, the name of the Czech writer and journalist Edvard Jelínek is usually associated with interest in Polish topics. Most of his friends and scholarly contacts were Polish, which also was in line with his numerous publications concerning Polish cultural traditions. However, Jelínek also had significant knowledge of the cultural, political, and social life in other Slavic areas, which he utilized as the editor of «Slovanský sborník» (Slavic Proceedings), a journal focused on all Slavic areas (published in 1881, 1883–1887). In this article, we demonstrate that, mostly at the beginning of Jelínek’s career, Russian topics also appeared in his texts, mainly Russian literature, culture, theater, and the issue of the beginning of Russian-Czech contacts. He published these texts primarily after his first visit to Russia in 1877. In the 1870s, the retired Russian officer Nikolaj M. Yendogurov had a significant influence on him, helping him to understand some Slavic issues and to perfect his knowledge of Russian. Starting from the 1890s, he expressed his opinions regarding the Russian-Polish conflict in several texts. There, he disagreed with the Russification of the Polish cultural environment and drew attention to the language rights of the Polish people. However, his works were not anti-Russian in character, and he expressed appreciation for Russian culture. The issue of Russian-Polish relations also appears in his literary prose works, e.g. in the novel «Motýlek z Norské pohádky» (The Butterfly from the Norwegian Fairytale).

К описанию «филологического перевода» 1930-х годов: как сделан перевод «Жизни» Бенвенуто Челлини М. Л. Лозинским

The article analyzes drafts and preparatory materials for Mikhail Lozinsky’s translation of Benvenuto Cellini’s "La Vita" (1931), preserved in the translator’s archive. The specifics of Lozinsky’s essentially philological approach to the translation of this prose work written in the dialect of Florentine 16th century volgolies, is the fact that, benefi ting from the analysis of Cellini’s style in the works by Karl Vossler, Lozinsky had subjected his complete draft translation to scrupulous retrospective analysis, aimed at achieving systematic exactitude in reproducing the dominant of Cellini’s style — his syntactic solecisms. Materials of the «translator’s workshop» open up the path to the academic description of Lozinsky’s translation method.

Mina Loy’s Critical Modernism by Laura Scuriatti

Reviewed by: Mina Loy’s Critical Modernism by Laura Scuriatti Tara Prescott-Johnson MINA LOY’S CRITICAL MODERNISM, by Laura Scuriatti. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019. 314 pp. $85.00 cloth. Both Mina Loy and her complex and compelling oeuvre simply will not stay put—she delightfully defies categorization at every turn, despite increasing numbers of critics who insist on trying to pin her down, to fix her location, genre, style, beliefs, ethnicity, and cultural and national [End Page 359] identity. Loy has been claimed by both British and American critics, but she was fluent in several languages and, although born in London, spent formative years of her life in Italy, France, Germany, Mexico, and the United States. Academia’s lingering insistence on classifying works of literature by time period and nationality minimizes two important motives of her work: the resistance to labeling and the critique of social, political, and artistic movements. Laura Scuriatti’s Mina Loy’s Critical Modernism seeks to release Loy’s work from the constricting confines of literary time periods and fields and argues that Loy’s “critical modernism,” her tendency to explore lots of affiliations without claiming any of them, is an essential trait of her work deserving much further exploration. Scuriatti grounds her study in archival work, particularly Loy’s manuscripts in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, as well as the Fondazione Primo Conti in Fiesole and the Harold Acton Library at the British Institute in Florence. As she notes, “Part of the work of rediscovering Loy has been that of assembling a corpus, of creating an oeuvre out of a large quantity of unpublished and unedited material” (p. 4). Scuriatti continues the recent work of Sara Crangle and others in attending to the unpublished and lesser-known works in addition to the popular poems published by Loy’s editor and literary executor, Roger Conover, in The Lost Lunar Baedeker (1996). Mina Loy’s Critical Modernism provides easy-to-follow and succinct summaries and analyses of Loy’s poems, short prose works, plays, novel, and unpublished fragments to substantiate Scuriatti’s claim that it is Loy’s “eccentric” form of modernism, not just her personal or artistic “eccentricity,” that deserves attention. Instead of relegating Loy to the “marginal corner of modernist scholarship” that has been reserved for “eccentrics” (who, unsurprisingly, tend to be women), Scuriatti argues for considering Loy’s work a “critical gaze into the very heart of the modernist and avant-garde canon” (p. 16). To support the reevaluation of Loy, Scuriatti delves into the historical, cultural, and literary contexts of Loy’s work, including in-depth explorations of the avant-garde, Futurism, Surrealism, feminism, and modernism. She also provides insightful forays into Loy’s conceptions of genius, autobiography, and self-reflexivity. Scuriatti’s strongest contribution, both to Loy studies and to modernist studies, is her attention to the Italian contexts of Loy’s work—especially Italian feminism and avant-garde magazines like Lacerba. Loy was fluent in Italian, and though critics have delved into her poetic integration of Italian and other languages, many have neglected the influence of Italian writers. Scuriatti argues that editors who have collected and published works by Loy, who titled an autobiographical poem “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose,” have shaped our understanding of her by emphasizing the “Anglo” nature of her work at the expense of the “Mongrel.” In looking at [End Page 360] the texts Loy was writing toward and against during her Florentine years, critics often focus on manifestoes that are available in English translation. This narrow selection, of course, Scuriatti notes, leaves a lot out. Scuriatti delves into some probable influences from Italian texts and provides her own translations, which are unfortunately buried at the back of the book in the endnotes. Readers who lack Loy’s familiarity with Italian may easily miss some of the most striking examples, such as Scuriatti’s translation of Giovanni Papini’s “Il massacre delle donne” (The massacre of women), published in 1914 in Lacerba. The misogyny of Loy’s lover is often mentioned in biographies or in close readings of the many works where Papini appears as a character or foil, but...

«ЧЕЛОВЕК ПИШУЩИЙ» И «ЧЕЛОВЕК ТВОРЯЩИЙ» В ПРОЗЕ А.П. ЧЕХОВА 1880-1888 ГОДОВ

The article discusses a number of prose works by Chekhov, created between 1880 and 1888, with the focus on “persons who write” and “persons who create” as important characters there, in association with nature as the center of Chekhov’s literary universe. If a “writing person” arises in his works to be dissolved in narration and storytelling, his “creative persons” instead seem to be formed there by some indefinable secret power spread in the nature.