Russian Fiction Research Articles

The Journalist and the Photographer: Janet Malcolm's Still Pictures

The Journalist and the PhotographerJanet Malcolm's Still Pictures Brian Dillon (bio) Janet malcolm, who died at the age of 86 in June 2021, was above all a payer of close attention, an extreme noticer. Obituaries and appreciations of her work reminded us that she practiced an exacting, even unsympathetic sort of attention: Malcolm, according to a cliché on which her mind might have snagged, "cast a cold eye" on her subjects, whether they were murderers, television personalities, wayward Freudians, great artists, or morally ambiguous journalists (among whose number she counted herself). What else should we call her? Essayist, critic, biographer, celebrity profiler: in Malcolm's case they all reduce to the rigors and lures of reporting. [End Page 110] She was certainly renowned for this precise reportage, but in her writing there are other kinds of exactitude—other styles of attention due. In her most daring profiles during her long tenure as a staff writer for The New Yorker, Malcolm frequently "senses" something about her interviewees, providing the reader with some intuition, quality, more or less occult truth about the people she describes. Frequently this mysterious "sense" depends on strictly visual cues, details Malcolm gives us with a nicety and ease that seem immune to distortion. Her distinctive ability to reflect on images and appearances comes into focus in a new book, Still Pictures, a posthumously published memoir of sorts. It is composed of twenty-six essays or chapters, most departing from or (rarely) staying close to a single photograph in her possession. The subtitle is "On Photography and Memory," a phrase that immediately summons photographic ruminations in the work of Marcel Proust, Vladimir Nabokov, Roland Barthes, and W. G. Sebald. And in invoking those writers, she reminds us that images may be diversions from reality. The book is also a reflection on the nature and desirability of autobiography. As Malcolm has it, autobiography contends peculiarly with memory. In a short essay from 2010 called "Thoughts on Autobiography from an Abandoned Autobiography," she writes: "Memory is not a journalist's tool. Memory glimmers and hints, but shows nothing sharply or clearly. Memory does not narrate or render character.…If an autobiography is to be even minimally readable, the autobiographer must step in and subdue what you could call memory's autism, its passion for the tedious." Still Pictures may not be an autobiography, as it is all about memory, its passions and errors. It's possible that photography operates here—and in modern autobiography in general—as a way to indulge or excuse what Malcolm calls (with a dated turn) the "autism" of memory. An excuse not to be tedious but to tarry with details without racing to judgment. To allow a kind of drift, a vacation from acuity. That in Malcolm's case the rest cure does not take is surely no surprise. She remained wary of the genre, its longueurs and indulgences, the unwarranted settling of scores. [End Page 111] Click for larger view View full resolution Janet Malcolm photographed with a camera, date unknown. Courtesy Janet Malcolm and Farrar, Straus and Giroux. [End Page 112] This predilection for details plays out in her writing more generally—she sometimes wrote about images, but she always wrote about appearances. She inherited this commitment from nineteenth-century fiction: a belief that the first task of the narrator is to detail her characters' appearance and dress, the fixtures and fittings of their home or work. Such details open a royal route to the delineation of character and morals. How often does Malcolm note that this or that person she has met or interviewed reminds her of a minor character in Russian fiction? The genius of the method includes those moments when she is forced to admit she got it wrong and has misread the appearance in question. One of the risks: that she is looking from some hampering vantage, with her own tastes and prejudices in the way. Another, that this becomes the representative Malcolm trick, and we stop trusting it. When she was interviewed by Katie Roiphe for The Paris Review in 2011, she made sure to leave the room so that her interviewer could take notes...

The Wind Motif in the Language of M.Y. Lermontov's Works

The article is devoted to the motivic analysis of literature. The object of the study is the linguistic means reflecting the components of the wind in literature, and their identification in Lermontov's texts. The subject of the study is the most significant works of Lermontov in the 1831-1841s, including words with the semantic component ‘wind'. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that it attempts to identify the linguistic means of implementing the wind motif in M.Y. Lermontov's poetic and prose texts. The purpose of this work is to determine the artistic role of these words and identify their stylistic features. To achieve this goal, the continuous sampling method, the method of classification, analysis and generalization are used in the course of the work. Thus, the presented material allows us to conclude that motivic analysis is especially promising when studying Lermontov's work. The motif of the wind performs an important symbolic function in his works: the wind is not only the movement of the air, but also a symbol of freedom, will, happiness, life's adversities and emotional experiences. Russian literature results can be used in the process of learning the language of Russian fiction, including the work of M.Y. Lermontov, they are also important for mastering the vocabulary of the Russian language.

Image of a Chinese Revolutionary in the Era of the Civil War in the Far East: An Ideological Aspect (Based on the Novel My Great Brother by Ilya Chernev)

The aim of this interdisciplinary article is to analyse the image of a Chinese character, as well as reflect the historical facts of the presence of the Chinese in Russian fiction. The article focuses on the ideological context. The authors refer to My Great Brother (1954), a historical and revolutionary novel by Ilya Chernev. The novel highlights the main stages of the revolutionary struggle of the Amur and Trans-Baikal proletariat. Most of the key characters in the novel are Chinese people. In the article, following H. Gьnther, the authors single out four diverse characters, the Chinese, that reflect the participation of foreign revolutionaries during the civil war: a proletarian, a warrior, a victim, and a politician. The “historical” component of the article confirms that workers who were subjects of other states and stayed on the territory of Russia were recruited into armed formations to fight counter-revolutionary forces, taking an active part in the partisan movement, and supplying the partisans with food, medicines, and ammunition. The article identifies the reasons why the Chinese joined the revolutionary associations: liberation from exploitation, socialisation, but at the same time, the ideological instability of the Chinese revolutionaries due to the motley social composition and poor knowledge of the Russian language. The article discusses the artistic means Chernev employs to portray the Chinese characters. It is proved that the novel is an example of a work commissioned by the state. Even though the novel My Great Brother has not gained fame, its value is determined by the material itself underlying its artistic canvas. The participation of Chinese citizens in the civil war remains one of the little-studied topics of Russian history, and in literature, the novel My Great Brother is the only work of fiction on this topic.

Образ русского духовенства в творчестве А.П. Чехова

The study is devoted to the consideration of the images of representatives of the clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church in the artistic work of A.P. Chekhov. The relevance is due to the problem of rejection of society from the Church in the second half of the XIX century. The purpose of the study is to show the features of the image of church life in the works of art by A.P. Chekhov. With the help of tables, the types of clergymen and their assessment by the writer and his characters are demonstrated. The relationship between secular society and the clergy that developed in the second half of the 19th century is considered. In the writer’s work, it is impossible to single out negative, positive or transitional types of clergy, since often the assessment of one or another clergyman by one of the characters and/or a group of persons in the narrative is subjective, which cannot be said about the narrator, whose assessment is often positive and sympathetic. The conclusions made by protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann in a lecture recorded on audiotape in the 1970s are analyzed and substantiated. in San Francisco. It is concluded that only A.P. Chekhov in the second half of the 19th century managed to truly discern and depict in Russian fiction a “living” priest with his essence: the inner spiritual world and relationships with others.

On the Special Function of Adverbs in the Structure of an Utterance (the Role of the Secondary Predicate)

The object of the article is the processes of inner speech (in the understanding of L.S. Vygotsky), during which the future utterance is formed. One such process is syntactic structure compression. In particular, of interest are polypropositive utterances in which adverbs play the role of a secondary predicate. Examples from Russian fiction are analyzed (from I. Shmelev to A. Bitov), in which a complicated meaning is hidden behind the syntactic structure of a simple sentence. It is concluded that adverbs with the meaning of physiological or mental sensations, moral assessment, compliance with a cultural norm, etc. are most inclined to the function of a secondary predicate. However, the different word-formation background of such adverb leads to its ambivalence and, in accordance with this, to different interpretations of the proposition behind it. In general, the ability to “pack” a whole proposition into one word makes the adverb a full-fledged participant in the processes of speech activity.

Влияние русской художественной литературы на представление о жизни и смерти в русской философии

The article is devoted to the study of the influence of Russian fiction on the formation of the idea of life and death in Russian philosophy of the 19th−20th centuries. The author names modern Russian scientists who directly or indirectly affect this topic in their scientific works. The article justifies the need to conduct this study to deepen the existing knowledge about the origins of Russian philosophy, as well as to apply the results obtained in the educational process of a modern university. Analysis of the Russian philosophers’ works allows the author to establish the criteria for the difference between philosophical works and artworks, to search in the works of S. N. Bulgakov, N. A. Berdyaev, S. L. Frank and A. F. Losev for the names of Russian writers and poets whose literary work contributed to their interest in existential issues. It is emphasized that the formation of the idea of life and death in Russian philosophy took place not only under the influence of the impression received by philosophers from acquaintance with the fate of the heroes of fiction, but also under the influence of information about the biography of the classic authors of Russian literature that created them, as well as the main motives of their artistic creativity.

Рецепция Пруста в России в 1920-е гг.

The article traces the history of the reception of Marcel Proust’s works in Russia, which began in the 1920s. The problem of studying the perception of Proust’s literary heritage, which has not yet been fully investigated, is of particular importance, since it allows us to touch upon a number of important issues of theoretical and historical-literary plans. Proust as an object of research is chosen here not by chance. In the world literary space there are special constant values, which, if to compare with various artistic phenomena, allows us to understand their artistic value, to follow the change of axiological parameters that determine the state of a particular stage of the literary process and to identify the main directions of development in it. Reception in the Russian culture works by Proust, which, of course, is one of such values, deserves special attention and study, since it reveals important moments not only in the creative activity of the French writer, but also in the development of Russian fiction and literary criticism. Based on the analysis of numerous documentary evidences contained in periodicals (“The Modern West,” “The Press and the Revolution,” “On a literary post,” etc.), theoretical and literary-critical works of authoritative literary critics (N.Y. Berkovsky, V.V. Weidle, B.A. Griftsov, A.K. Voronsky, etc.), in the statements of famous writers (O.E. Mandelstam, V.V. Mayakovsky, Y.K. Olesha, I. Ilf and E. Petrov), research reveals how the attitude to the works by Proust in the specified period of Soviet literature development, which is characterized by the coexistence and confrontation of various schools and trends (“Forge,” “Pass,” RAPP, LEF, etc.), helps to clarify their aesthetic orientation.

Methods and techniques of interpretation of mythical and magic characters’ names in Russian folk tales in Persian

The rapidly developing cultural relations between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Russia predetermine the importance of studying the realities of Russian culture in teaching Russian as a foreign language. Despite the constantly growing interest of the Iranian reader in Russian fiction, we have not found translations of Russian folk tales. A distinctive feature of fairy tales is the presence of specific monsters and mythical creatures in them. The relevance of this study is emphasized by the fact that the opinions of researchers on the issue of translating these realities are divided: some researchers note that realities are untranslatable, others argue that there are no words that would be impossible to convey in another language. This research work presents methods and techniques for an adequate and equivalent translation of the proper names of mythical creatures that are the heroes of Russian folk tales of a magical nature. The translation experiment was conducted in student classes of the RFL departments of higher educational institutions of Iran. The main methods on which the study is based are the comparative method, the method of linguistic description, and the method of experiment. The students were asked to translate typical sentences, selected by continuous sampling, in which there was a mention of the magical characters of Russian folk tales. The purpose of the experiment is to identify what methods and techniques of translation strategies were used in the process of translating realities that do not have equivalents in the Persian language. Thus, the empirical basis of this study is the interpretation of fragments of Russian folk tales of a magical nature in Persian by students learning Russian as a foreign language. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that it is the first attempt to analyze the method of equivalent or adequate conveyance of national and cultural color of the Russian fairy tales characters into Persian. Based on the experiment, we can conclude that when translating the names of mythical heroes and monsters of Russian folk tales, students resorted to two main translation strategies − foreignization and domestication. Russian students chose the method of phonetic transliteration and transcription as the main method of foreignization, as well as calques that contribute to the preservation of Russian cultural and ethnic specificity and overcoming the difficulties of conveying semantic content and the national color of the mythical heroes of Russian folk tales. The main technique of the domestication strategy used by students is the borrowing of the designation of a fairy-tale character from the culture of other peoples with whom they were previously familiar. The results of our research can find practical application in literary translation in Iran. Theoretically, the material can contribute to the development of the theory of translation of literary texts of the folklore genre, as well as arouse interest in further research among undergraduates and graduate students studying in higher educational institutions of Iran.

The activity of Count Karl Ludwig von Ficquelmont in the Russian Empire, with a focus on his St. Petersburg salon

The aim of the paper is to analyse the activities of the Imperial Envoy Count Karl Ludwig von Ficquelmont in the Russian Empire during the first half of the nineteenth century, with a special emphasis on his salon in St. Petersburg. This salon, which Ficquelmont ran in the years 1829–1840 with his Russian wife Darya Fyodorovna (Dolly), was located in the building of the Austrian Embassy in St. Petersburg and was the centre of not only cultural but also diplomatic life in the Russian capital. Interestingly, the cultural and artistic level was combined with the diplomatic and political level, which testifies to Ficquelmont as a host with a truly broad intellectual scope. The paper examines how these levels interacted, while pointing out that Ficquelmont made extensive use of his privileges as an influential diplomat and one who was loved at the court to help guests in his salon circumvent some Russian obstructions, including the severe censorship of that time. Ficquelmont’s most famous guest was the poet Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, who gained inspiration from the Austrian Embassy building for one of his famous works. In addition, Ficquelmont has connections with the Czech lands, as he and his wife are buried in Teplice, where his daughter married. Overall, the aim is to introduce Count Ficquelmont as an educated and cultured diplomat who naturally ran one of the most influential Russian salons of the first half of the nineteenth century. Within the source base, diplomatic reports (Ficquelmont sought greater rapprochement of the Austrian Empire with the Russian Empire) as well as various ego-documents, including the extensive diary of Darya Fyodorovna von Ficquelmont, and, marginally, contemporary Russian fiction are used equally. It was the salons that provided a large number of stimuli for the formation of Russian culture, and it was here that important socio-cultural topics of the time were discussed. It can thus be stated that the salons stood at the very birth and beginnings of Russian public opinion.

Tożsamość vs uniformizacja (współczesna literatura rosyjska – studium dwóch przypadków)

IDENTITY VS UNIFORMIZATION (CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN LITERATURE – STUDY OF TWO CASES)
 The aim of the following article is to consider expressions such as “identity” and “uniformization” which are often used in Russian philosophy as well as in contemporary Russian fiction. Two well-known novels translated into Polish language: “Medea and her Children” by Ludmyla Ulitzkha and “Duchless. A Story about Unreal Man” by Sergiey Minayev were chosen as examples. The first of them takesplace in the 1970’s, whereas the second one is set in the present day. In both cases identity is considered in the context of human relationships and the attitude to other people and at the same time to culture and tradition. Identity is usually based on certain determinants. These are: faith in God, the respect for different confessions, proximity to the nature, care for preservation of heritage including memory about the past and native language. Medea follows this hierarchy of values in her life. The identity of an anonymous hero of Minayev’s book was destroyed by globalizing processes, uniformization, boredom and by addiction to the Internet.

The Crocodile in the Russian Language, Consciousness, and Culture

The development of figurative secondary meanings in a word is due to the correlation of denotative and reference components, i. e. sigmatics and semantics. The starting point of the study is the hypothesis that the farther the object is from the everyday life of a society (i. e. the more exotic it is, the less significant in practice, the less common for the native speaker), the weaker, the “emptier” is the denotative part of the name. However, this non-semantics is apparent, because denotative emptiness is immediately compensated by the development of figurative meanings, most of which are connotative. This article examines the Russian word крокодил, meaning an exotic water animal. The author studies the characteristics of this lexeme based on explanatory and frequency dictionaries of the Russian language, associative dictionary, the Russian National Corpus, and several examples from Russian fiction: works of Vl. Solovyov, A. Chekhov, M. Gorky, T. Tolstoy, V. Kantor, etc. For Russian consciousness, the crocodile is a marginal creature, and its name is located on the periphery of the vocabulary. The national corpus of the Russian language contains 500 documents with the word крокодил and a total of 1222 entries. The analysis demonstrates that about two thirds of these documents contain the word крокодил in figurative meanings. This confirms the assumption that the word denoting a thing that does not participate in the daily life of a society has a tendency to secondary semantic content. It is interpreted metaphorically, in accordance with the cognitive and communicative needs of society.

Трансформация классической лагерной прозы в новейшей отечественной литературе

Introduction. In the classic sense, forced labor camp prose includes fiction and documentary texts created by immediate participants of the events described (Stalin’s purges of the 1920s–1950s), and thus being usually autobiographical by nature. The bulk of such prose works were created in the 1950s–1970s by such writers as A. Solzhenitsyn, V. Shalamov, E. Ginsburg, Yu. Dombrovsky, A. Zhigulin, etc. Goals. The paper attempts an analysis of features inherent to manifestations of the forced labor camp theme in contemporary Russian fiction, and relates such texts to existing visions of such prose. Results. As is evident, there can be no camp prose — in the mentioned sense — in 21st-century Russian literature but the sociocultural trauma experienced by individuals (and communities) proves so deep and fundamental for their consciousness and subconsciousness that it persists in Russian literary discourse to date. Family memories, archival documents, search for identity, keen interest in national and regional history, official and social mythology give birth to various author’s strategies of addressing this sensitive issue and working with it. These yield narratives that greatly vary in authors’ ideological and aesthetic viewpoints and give rise to enormous — and sometimes violent — controversy in contemporary cultural environment.

Specific Character of Linguistic Personality Education in the Noble Society of the Second Half of the 18th – the Beginning of the 19th centuries

Introduction. Noble society traditions are not simply a base for Russian multilingual culture; they remain the historical basis of the reproduction of human intellectual capital as a basis of the world organization. In this connection the mechanisms of linguistic personality educational processes within the framework of the noble society are of considerable interest for modern researchers and, in our opinion, they require certain elucidation and some comments. The purpose of the article is to analyse communicative process in the noble environment of the 18th – the 19th centuries as a specific model of personality upbringing. Materials and Methods. The material of the research is Russian fiction, autobiographical literature and memoirs of the 18th and the 19th centuries. The methods used in the article are: method of system analysis of sources, content-analysis method, sociocultural, axiological, phenomenological, hermeneutical and comparative-historical approaches to the study of cultural phenomena. Results. The hypothesis that specific character of linguistic personality upbringing of the second half of the 18th – the beginning of the 19th centuries was closely connected with the tutorship institute as well as with the large scale of home education is empirically confirmed and corroborated. Didactic approach to the noble heirs, aimed at multilingual personality formation quite often came to the readiness of of-springs to freely master both oral and written forms of speech in a foreign language (mainly the French language). Moreover, the aspiration of the pupils to fix and pass their speech and thinking experience in a foreign language as well as the examples of its use in the practice of speech culture and behaviour become the standard of educational processes. Discussion and Conclusions. The results of the research can be used for the development of the syllabuses connected with the history of bilingual teachings, the history of pedagogy and the theory of education, which, from the practical point of view, will be of use for the perfection of the syllabus for institutions of higher education and the improvement of the quality of literary works analysis. The value of the research is in the context analysis.

The transformational paradigm of a phraseological unit in Russian speech within the space of predictability and unpredictability

The paper aims at presenting the research potential of the transformational paradigm of the phraseological unit as a set of all detected speech realisations of its updated invariant, formed not by the principle of “predicting” the possible transformations, but of “collecting” their actual variants in speech. The starting points in this case are both the intralingual multi-sided (according to R. Sternemann) model of comparing the actual speech updates of the phraseological unit with its invariant as tertium comparationis and the broad understanding of the object of phraseology. The basic methods are methods of total sampling and textual identification of the phraseological transform, component-variant analysis, methods of phraseological modelling, applicative method, methods of historical-etymological and linguocultural analysis. The material of the research contains transformation paradigms of different types of phraseological units collected and systematized by the author (wolf in sheep’s clothing, return of the prodigal son, step on the same rake, man in a skirt, Pandora’s box, he who has a tongue can find his way), which were formed on the material of Russian fiction and non-fiction texts, Russian and Russian-language printed and electronic media, including texts of Internet forums and blogs of the early 21st century as a space of network (often anonymous) media communication. The systematization of phraseotransforms in Russian speech and structuring the transformational paradigm, taking into account the internal and external levels in the form of a “matrix,” opens up opportunities for searching for the systemic and the asystemic, the predictable and the unpredictable, for generalising the linguistic and non-linguistic factors stimulating the phraseoransformation and phraseoformation of the phraseological invariant as well as for determining the ratio of creative capacities of the language system and the creativity of the authors of phraseological transforms. The proposed model of analysis can be used in the context of intralingual and inter-lingual comparisons.

ВПЛИВ ІДІОСТИЛЮ А. ФЕТА НА РОЗВИТОК РОСІЙСЬКОЇ ЛІТЕРАТУРНОЇ МОВИ

The relevance of scientific research is due to the fact that Old Slavonic, Church Slavonic and borrowings from other languages enrich our speech, helping it to give a special meaning, expressiveness and emotional color. By explaining the lexical meaning of specific tokens, it becomes possible to better understand Russian fiction. Separate layers of Russian vocabulary help to study the close historical and cultural ties of the Slavic peoples. The object of our study is the poetic language of A. Fet as a special means of existence of natural language, where the poet creates individual linguistic images. Our analysis revealed the peculiarities of the functioning of Church Slavonic, Old Slavonic, individual tokens of Indo-European, Interslavic and East Slavic vocabulary, as well as borrowings from other languages.

WE versus Us: Dystopias in Russia, China, and Maybe the USA

Evgeny Zamyatin’s novel WE, blocked from publication by Soviet censors in 1921, has been published in several translations since the 1920s – most recently in 2021. An inspiration for Orwell’s 1984, WE anticipated many features of the totalitarian dictatorships that emerged under Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler and have reemerged in Communist China and Putin’s Russia, and may be taking root in the United States and other Western countries where modern technologies bolster government capacities to watch and control one another and their subjects. This essay highlights parts of WE as rendered in a fresh translation and suggests how it illuminates some trends in today’s world. It also offers snapshots of dystopias in recent Russian and Chinese science fiction – many of which warn of a totalitarian future. The Russian snapshots are supplemented with an analysis of what the magazine GQ Rossiia in February 2022 termed the eight controversial books everyone must read – beginning with Zamyatin’s WE and ending with several dystopian novels by American writers such as The Giver by Lois Lowry. Most of the eight are dystopian. None is primed to encourage young Russians to adopt a fight-for-the fatherland outlook determined to wipe out Ukrainian traitors. The upshot: Zamyatin and Orwell predicted our realities more accurately than, say, Walt Whitman or even Jack London.

Shoals

Shoals Pia Tafdrup (bio) Translated by David McDuff (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Don’t just aim the telescopeat the night sky’s swarmingto discover one more planet. Turn it also toward the earth,toward the bottom of the sea,see the fish in between the rocks, a flicker of silver arrows,a glow of fire in the depths,the blunt force of fibers, the water burnswhen the fish shoot their way forwardand stop submerged in the seaweed gardens, look also toward the bottom of the sea,shoals of fish irradiate the darkness there,find rest in the waves. Translation from the Danish [End Page 27] Pia Tafdrup Danish poet Pia Tafdrup (www.tafdrup.com) has published twenty collections of poetry, including Queen’s Gate (2001), Tarkovsky’s Horses and Other Poems (2010), Salamander Sun and Other Poems (2015), and The Taste of Steel • The Smell of Snow (2021). She is the recipient of the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize (1999) and the Nordic Prize from the Swedish Academy (2006). Berøringen af hud (The touch of skin), the last book in her series about the senses, just appeared in Denmark. Photo by Isak Hoffmeyer David McDuff David McDuff (b. 1945) is a Scottish translator, editor, and literary critic. His translations include works of nineteenth-century Russian fiction in Penguin Classics and Nordic poetry from Bloodaxe. In 2021 he was honored with the Swedish Academy’s Interpretation Prize (Tolkningspris). Copyright © 2022 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Gastronomic Italianisms in Modern Russian Language (Synchronic and Diachronic Aspects)

The article examines the gastronomic vocabulary of Italian origin in the modern Russian language, clears out the linguistic, social and psychological factors that determined its introduction in different historical periods. Three lexical-semantic groups are distinguished basing on definition dictionaries and cookery-books: the names of food-stuffs, drinks and dishes, the etymology of the lexical units included in them is considered, the history of their origin is given, and a cultural commentary is provided in order to clarify the meaning of these words. Gastronomic Italianisms derived from proper names are of great interest. Special attention is paid to the words pasta and pizza. As the study shows, gastronomic Italianisms are actively used in the language of Russian fiction and modern advertising. The study of the functions performed by these words in texts of different stylistic slant allows us to better understand the mechanism of adaptation of such words in the modern Russian language.

The Provinces in Russian Fiction

The Provinces in Russian Fiction John Randolph Anne Lounsbery, Life Is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Provinces, 1800–1917. 360 pp. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. ISBN-13 978-1501747922. $33.95. At the beginning of the 18th century, Peter I and his advisers sought to transform the governance of the Russian Empire. They turned to examples drawn from other states and imported terminology for the new administration they planned. Some of this new vocabulary never made it far beyond the project stage (for example, the Swedish inspiration of calling a local military commander the landsgevding). The loanword guberniia, meanwhile, was a great success, used to describe the Russian Empire's largest units of administration (its territorial "governments") right through 1917. A middling fate awaited the kindred calque provintsiia. Employed in the Petrine era to create smaller, more manageable divisions (or provinces) within the gubernii, provintsiia was ultimately discarded by Catherine II. Catherine right-sized her territorial governments not by subdividing them but by shrinking them and increasing their number, thereby superannuating the original Russian "province."1 That might have been it for provintsiia, which could have shared the fate of many other imperial projects: to be given to the archive to be forgotten forever. Instead, as Anne Lounsbery shows in this wondrous and incisive study, a much grander destiny awaited "the provinces" in modern Russian culture. Life Is Elsewhere explores "the process by which nineteenth-century Russian writers imagined the provinces into being" (243), taking an abandoned administrative term of art and making it into one of the central tropes [End Page 167] of "Russian narrative art" (165). Though the cultural space occupied by the provintsiia inside Russian literature would come to be enormous—at times standing for all of Russia itself, and beyond that the still bigger global task of "figuring alienation in geographical terms" (243)—Lounsbery is admirably clear about the limits of her own project. She is quite aware that the province, though capacious, does not include everything. It does not represent (and, indeed, often serves to obscure) the diversity of the Russian Empire, as we might attempt today to reconstruct it through other sources. It draws around some territories and social groups, rather than including them. For good or ill, Lounsbery contends, peasants "are never provincials" in narrative fiction (playing instead the role of "the folk"). While fiction frequently visits the provincial "Town of N," made most famous by Nikolai Gogol´, it contains no memorable invocations of a "Village of N" (all villages have names, it seems, even the humblest ones). Imagined borderlands such as "the Caucasus" receive distinct exoticizing treatments, even as the empire's really existing gubernii are folded up into a common province trope (14–15, 21–22). Within literature, Lounsbery argues, the making of the province was also confined by generic boundaries. Poetry and drama, she contends, needed it less. Focused on internal worlds and intimate stages, these genres were happy to avoid or even mask their relationship to larger networks and hierarchies (of politics, of economy, of culture). Narrative prose—which depended more obviously on these structures for its print production and circulation—did "not have the option of pretending these systems do not exist" (20). Instead, taking up the province as a central device, Russian fiction writers set about conjuring a vast middling world defined by its spatial and temporal relationship to some other center. As a result, as Lounsbery shows, the province with its capital in the proverbial "Town of N" became a sort of irreducible, universal variable (the constant pi) within Russian narrative prose, a magic number that authors could always use to solve all manner of chronotopographical equations. "Provintsiia takes on significance," Lounsbery writes, "because it meets a larger need": it "allows Russians to think about the consequences of centrality and peripherality more generally, and thus (eventually) about modernity and nonmodernity—all crucial issues at a time when educated elites are increasingly worried about their relationship to European ways of measuring both time and space" (56). How, then, did this trope come into being, and how did it develop across the 19th century? Lounsbery's book is organized chronologically. It starts "before the provinces...

Peasant Speech in Ivan Turgenev’s “A Sportsman’s Sketches” and Russian Fiction Before the Emancipation

The article focuses on the representation of peasant speech in short stories from peasant life published before the abolition of serfdom in 1861. The author shows that throughout the entire period, writers gradually increased the ratio of dialect («regional») words in the speech of peasant characters. The culmination of this trend came in the mid-1850s and correlated, on the one hand, with the rapid development of ethnographic and dialectological knowledge in the Russian Empire, and, on the other hand, with the formation of a trend towards the aesthetic representation of peasants as “others” in juxtaposition to the educated elite. In prose, to make the subjectivity of peasants more embodied, it was necessary to depict their speech as generally understandable to readers, and at the same time — as phonetically and lexically different from it. The degree of such deviation was supposed to be not very significant, and literary critics constantly debated the fine line between ‘typically reliable’ and ‘inadequate’. The article presents various ways of depicting peasant voices and speech in the prose of both canonical (I. S. Turgenev) and peripheral authors (I. I. Zapolsky, A. V. Nikitenko, A. F. Martynov, E. P. Novikov).