Small Prose Research Articles

Peculiarities of Stepan Budnyi’s Artistic Works: Song and Musical Aspects

The poetic, prose and memoir works of Ukrainian writer Stepan Budnyi are considered in the article. He has left a noticeable mark in the history of Ukrainian literature of the 1950s. The focus of the research includes the analysis of the song concept, used frequently by the author and designated as a genre (in his own works). Many poetic works of S. Budnyi, characterized by melodiousness, emotionally elevated mood, simplicity of expression, vivid imagery, and the presence of striking figurative details, have a musical orientation. The frequency of the poet’s use of the song lexeme is counted in the article, indicating the folk-song character of S. Budnyi’s entire poetic heritage. This is reflected particularly in the titles of poetic works, evoking musical associations simultaneously. The poet has preferred those poetic works containing musical terminology in his translations from various languages. It is revealed that S. Budnyi’s relatively small prose heritage also includes musical motifs. Similar to poetry, the song in the writer’s prose works holds a distinct place and is a leading motif throughout his entire creative output. The author’s position and understanding of the essence of beauty are traced through the expressions of the lyrical heroes in prose sketches about music, song and dance. The author’s appeals to song and music are also considered in the writer’s epistolary. Texts by S. Budnyi, set to music by various Ukrainian composers such as Yaroslav Vyshyvanyi, Oleh Herman, Bohdan Klymchuk, Bohdan and Ivan Kravchuk brothers, Faina Moldavska, Volodymyr Obukhivskyi, Mykhailo Obleshchuk, Andrii Plishka, and others, are distinguished. Attention is drawn to the linguistic features of the writer’s artistic works, emphasizing especially that the author’s neologisms, used frequently, imbue the texts with a peculiar musicality. In general, Stepan Budnyi’s poetry has an original sound, impressing with a variety of artistic means, especially the vivid metaphorical expressions.

О ГЕНЕТИЧЕСКИХ СВЯЗЯХ ТВОРЧЕСТВА Ф.А. ИСКАНДЕРА

. The article deals with the analysis of opinions of F.A. Iskander on writers, which he made in his short prose of the post-Soviet period. The object of the study is small prose works published in thick literary magazines in the period from 1996 to 2006. Through an intertextual approach and content analysis, precedent names are identified: in addition to Pushkin, Tolstoy, the writer’s reviews of Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Rozanov, as well as Shakespeare, Goethe, Kipling and Darwin are analyzed. According to the results of the study, the following conclusions were made. Firstly, English literature as important to Iskander as Russian. Secondly, the dynamics in the writer’s humanistic views are noted, as evidenced by the changes in the assessment of Russian authors and the theory of evolution. Iskander believes in improving people, but with age he came to realize that it’s a very long process. Thirdly, with the help of a comparison of the most significant authors for Iskander, the key features for his work are revealed: the opposition of the West and the East, interest in evolutionary teachings, generalization, historicism, weakened didacticism. In terms of the genre, Iskander and his significant authors share an interest in complex prose genres, namely a novel in short stories and a collection of short stories.

МУЗИКАЛІЗАЦІЯ “НОКТЮРНУ B-MOLL” Ю. КОСАЧА ТА “СПРАГИ МУЗИКИ” В. ПЕТРОВА (ДОМОНТОВИЧА)

The article is devoted to the musicalization of the novel “Nocturne b-moll” by Y. Kosach and “Thirst for Music” by V. Petrov (Domontovych). It was noted that both the studied authors became the founders of the Artistic Ukrainian Movement (MUR). This is an organization of Ukrainian émigré writers, founded in Germany in 1945. Small prose, which prevailed in the mentioned period, was distinguished by a variety of themes and writer techniques. Common and distinctive modern trends are defined using the comparative aspect. For example, fragmentation, the splitting the world into visual sensations, including color, graphic and olfactory, fixation by the characters of individual details of the interior, clothing, and appearance of other characters, film coating method. Among the linguistic features, we find direct speech and improper direct speech in Kosach novel, and indirect speech in Domontovych novel. Attention is paid to determining the sources of musicality of the works of the specified authors. Ways of displaying music in works are highlighted. The considered novels of Kosach and Domontovych have an organic combination of musical and theoretical positions with the views of the writers on literature. The tendency towards musicalization is reflected in the title, borrowed elements of “musicality” are used in fragments interpreting listening or performing music (in Domontovych) and a certain subtext. For Kosach, music shapes reality, replaces words and actions, expresses emotions. It was concluded that the constant discussion of music is the same in both authors. The authors treat it as something sacred, completely incomprehensible to people.

КОЛІР ЯК ЗАСІБ УВИРАЗНЕННЯ КОНЦЕПТУ ПЕЙЗАЖ (на матеріалі малої прози І. Буніна)

У статті проаналізовано концептуальне увиразнення пейзажу в оповіданнях І. Буніна. Показано, що досліджуваний концепт розкривається у малій прозі письменника як цілісне системне утворення, репрезентоване кольоролексемами не лише з узуальною, а й з асоціативною семантикою. Розглянуто колоративи, які становлять периферійну зону концепту «пейзаж». Доведено, що саме вони збагачують, увиразнюють його в цілому, роблять його випуклим та рельєфним.

ГЕРОИ-МУЖЧИНЫ В ПОИСКАХ МУДРОСТИ (НА МАТЕРИАЛЕ ПРОЗЫ В. РАСПУТИНА)

The work is devoted to the problem of finding and acquiring male wisdom in the small prose of V. Rasputin. The artistic paradigm associated with the theme of male wisdom takes in the fate of patriarchal men, fools, mysterious elders as messengers associated with the mystery of otherness, and Athos monks praying for the Russian land. However, the author himself becomes the most focused seeker of wisdom, for whom the main question is the question of the fate of his native home, the land, its tragic history and the possibility of an outcome. The heroes’ journey in search of truth is carried out on both sides of existence, in prophetic dreams, visions, and this actualizes the images of mysterious elders – the author’s “doubles” in other limits. The image of a man-creator, builder in the artist’s prose is only outlined, paraphered. This explains the philosophy of escapism, which is professed by the silent and hermits of later texts. The active principle, connected with the protection of the ancestral land, the transformation of the forms of culture, remains for strong, strong-willed, all-knowing women.

Ландшафт культуры в рассказе Ужээрту «Судьба охотника»

The aim of the study is to identify, describe and interpret the landscape of the Evenki and Chinese cultures by the material of the story of the Evenki prose writer from China Uzheertu “Hunter’s Fate”. Within the framework of the article, the interdisciplinary concept “cultural landscape” in a literary text has been clarified, which refers to the world order as a projection of the author’s mental culture with a special system of value relations to the nature, man and society. Scientific novelty is determined by an interdisciplinary study of the “cultural landscape” by the material of fiction, in particular the national story, the introduction of the “small prose” of the Chinese Evenki literature as an object of study to the Russian literary criticism. As a result, the semantics, functions of the epigraph and title of the story have been revealed, an interpretation of the protagonist’s image and the main conflict of the work has been proposed, it has been concluded that the landscape of culture in Uzheertu’s story is determined by the worldview categories and ethno-reality of the Evenki and Chinese cultures.

The Uniqueness of Gabrielė Petkevičaitė-Bitė’s World of Short Prose: A Search for a Meaningful Existence

Gabrielė Petkevičaitė-Bitė’s work is colourful and diverse in terms of content and genre. She strove to reveal the most prominent conflicts of the public life of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, the problems of the individual’s spiritual development and the discovery of one’s own identity, the reflections of the life of the intelligentsia and the rural people, the search for a meaningful life by different representatives of the ethnic community and to bring up the question of the individual’s self-esteem. To this end, the writer created distinctive examples of the genre of small prose, such as short stories, essays, sketches, reflections, and reminiscences, which enriched the world of Lithuanian prose. Petkevičaitė-Bitė’s creative space was strongly affected by the epoch of national revival. The author wrote a number of vivid traditional realistic short stories, which reflected the actual reality and in many cases were strongly autobiographical. In her prose, the writer often depicts a young person is striving for new ideals of the national community: a different model of life characteristic of the secular intelligentsia, responsible activity for the sake of the nation, and ideas of nation building. The hero of her short prose is a person capable of creating a sincere and spiritual relationship between the members of society that is based on mutual assistance and understanding. For Petkevičaitė-Bitė, a young person is perhaps most closely associated with a romantic hero’s burning love for the world, the pursuit of ideals, impetuous feelings, passionate and courageous quests, ethical maximalism, uncompromising nature, refusal to put up with the ills of life, and individual truth, i.e., the qualities that are most typical of young people. It is not careerism or the search for a more diverse existence, but the pursuit of a more enriching form of life, a meaningful foundation for it, and a quest for spiritual discovery that motivates these young seekers, dreamers, and altruists to open themselves wholeheartedly to life. This existential stance of the characters arises from the actual efforts of the intelligentsia to change the established moral, social, and cultural order of the nineteenth century and to oppose the constraining stereotypes of previous years. Petkevičaitė-Bitė’s works mostly reflect the process of the national revival movement and the colourful portraits of strong personalities whom she had met and remembered: book smugglers, rebels, and spiritually rich villagers, who made every effort to enlighten their children and pave the way for their education. She perceives and treats an individual’s meaningful activity, which is focused on helping others, as the pivotal factor of the nation’s spiritual rebirth that guaranteed its survival and the sustainability of its life. In her prose, the writer seeks to reveal both the dark and the light side of human nature, to show its beauty, power, and strength. Unconditional sacrifice for the sake of the other – book smuggling, secret teaching of children from forbidden books, care of orphans and the needy – were the fundamental existential imperatives and the foundation of the life and activities of Gabrielė Petkevičaitė-Bitė, who was an aristocrat of the spirit herself.

Sleeping water mystery in David Turdospireli's novel "Bagwash of Hearts"

David Thurdospireli belongs to the number of Georgians who made their modest contribution to the development of the Twentieth Century Georgian Small Prose.  David Turdospireli's novel works are a bearer of all the features characteristic of a small prose, which is expressed by the glow of mood, insensitive epic embroidery, intense expression, rhythm, in some cases lyricism and refreshment, the structure of the dialogue or the use of fabulous and fabulous fantastic and fictional elements. David Turdospireli's literary heritage is distinguished by an abundance of children's works, but attracts the attention of the reader as an interesting pattern of the writer's simultaneous era events and small prose reflecting general problems. In this regard, the archive of a writer kept in the Museum of Literature retains many interesting materials, most of which are still unpublished and therefore remain beyond scientific circulation.  This time, we want to focus on the 1916 novel "Bagwash of Hearts. " Water mystery, which falls asleep once in a century, gives a hope to novel’s main character to help him make his youthful dreams come true.

Poetics of artistic speech in small prose works

Poetics of artistic speech in small prose works

The influence of Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy" on the small prose of A.I. Kuprin (on the example of the story "Meat")

The influence of Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy" on the small prose of A.I. Kuprin (on the example of the story "Meat")

Literary text as a place of archiving the past in M. Shishkin’s short story collection “The Half-Belt Overcoat”

We analyze the principles of working with memory and elements of the past in the stories of M. Shishkin from the collection "Coat with a strap", which using intertextual, contextual, structuralist methods, the method of holistic analysis of a literary text, are considered. The notions of narrative, montage, memory, punctum, stadium are used for the analysis, the specificity of photography as a cultural fact is considered. It is proved that within the framework of small prose, the prose writer arranges a narrative, which in one way or another integrates the elements of the past and the motives of memory. Appealing to the things as facts of everyday life, the narrator constructs a specific scheme “thing – image – space” within the text. This creates a specific catalogue of things, archiving experiences and memories. This catalogue helps to go from loss of some facts of the past (photographs) through the act of memory to fixation of this past in the text, thus contributing to “resurrection” and salvation of the past through the Word. In addition, the role of the corpus of photographs in the collection is examined. It is revealed that the photographs not only serve as a reference point for the act of remembering and restoring the past, confirming what is described, but also include the reader in the fact of text unfolding. The materials of the study and its conclusions can be used not only for the analysis of other works by M. Shishkin, but also in the analysis of modern domestic and world literature in the context of memory studies.

«Общество спектакля» в произведении Мюриэл Спарк «На публику»

The paper aims to identify the artistic originality of Muriel Spark’s story “The Public Image”. The scientific originality of the research is connected to the fact that the attention of literary critics at all times was turned to the novels of the English writer, while her small prose was ignored. It is necessary to investigate the principle of theatricality in Muriel Spark’s story “The Public Image”. The results have shown that in the work, there is a unity of epic and dramatic beginnings with the high prevalence of the latter: significant attention is paid to the gestures, the position of the characters in space, the plastics of the image, but dramatization has farcical nature, the objective physical world is pictured plastically and visibly, which creates the theatricality effect, the illusion of stage.

For Structural-Semantic Perception of Georgian Short Prose Titles

We consider the analysis of the linguistic aspects of titles as one of the important components of the study of Georgian short prose, as it is an integral part of the text and a kind of mediator with the reader. That is why the difficult task facing writers i.e. the meaning of a title which represents a phrase consisting of one or more words - is special. A poorly thought-out title can diminish the meaning of the text, or, if it effectively exceeds the content of the text, disappoint the reader. The title is also seen not only as an indicator of the author's style, but also as an expression of the artistic-cultural thinking in which it was created. In this paper, we discuss the main features of the structure and semantics of the titles of small prose samples.Most of the titles in Georgian short prose samples representone full word; there are relatively few samles of two, three, four and more-member cases. Expressionism and gradation are mainly served by lexical repetition, synonymy and antonymy. In the paper we draw the main conclusions based on the qualitative, quantitative, analysis and synthesis methods of research.

Phono-stylistic features of small prose by E. Canetti

Linguistics as the science of language, its social nature and functions, the laws of its functioning, historical development includes many sections that consider various aspects of language - first of all, sounds (phonetics, phonology), words (morphology), sentences (syntax) and values (semantics). One of these sections is phono-stylistics, the task of which is to study the sound aspects of speech, the sound organization of the text, and sound effects in a work of art. The phonetic means of stylistics are the frequency of phonemes, sound repetitions, sound reproduction, and rhyme use. The study of a work of art from the point of view of phonetics plays a special role insofar as the analysis of the use of phonetic means (melody, rhythm, tempo, tone, accent, rate of speech, the use of certain sounds) in a text, sound support, stylistic meaning of the subtext helps to reveal the ideological intention of the author and to comprehend the aesthetic and emotional depth of a work. The purpose of this article is to consider the phono-stylistic, or rather rhythmic-intonational, features of Elias Canetti's short prose; for convenience, we will use the term “miniature”, “story” in this article, recognizing certain conventions within this genre modification.

POST-SOVIET SMALL PROSE BY KAMAL ABUKOV

The article considers the small prose of Kamal Abukov of the post-Soviet period, notes their artistic features: orientation to typing images, appeal to forms of comism, masterful application of tropes, in particular compari-son. There are noted such signs of the evolution of the writer's work as the strengthening of the social compo-nent, the frequent appeal to negative images, which determines the critical, ironic pathos of the works.

Small Prose Constants by F. Sologub

The question of constants in the short prose of F. Sologub is considered. Special attention is paid to the iconic cycle of stories in the work of the author. The results of the analysis of motives, chronotope, recurring elements of the plot and the system of characters in the cycles “The Sting of Death” and “Unkind Lady” are presented. It is shown with the help of comparative and intertextual methods that in the stories of the cycles the constant binary opposition of a meaningless, cruel life and a consoling death is embodied, the hero’s dreams of death determine the meaninglessness of being. It has been proved that time and partly space in the stories of the cycles are binary organized, but this is not the duality of this and other worlds: the hero does not go beyond the boundaries of this world, but the time and space of this world change under the influence of the altered consciousness of the hero. The author dwells on the analysis of motivational complexes that also represent oppositions, which allows us to conclude that there are constant signs of Sologub’s artistic world. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that modern comprehension of classical works using a new technique made it possible to see the internal complex interconnection of texts, to find explicit and implicit signs of interaction between cycles.

АВТОРСКОЕ СЛОВО В МАЛОЙ ПРОЗЕ ТАТЬЯНЫ ТОЛСТОЙ

The article is devoted to author's speech issue in T. Tolstaya's small prose herein represented with “With folks” (“S narodom”) and “There may be light” (“Mozhet byt' svet”), based on Tolstaya's blogs in social networks. The author of the article discovers traditions of M. Zoshchenko prose, particularly, elements of such a paradoxical narrative form as writer’s tale. The article demonstrates the use of common place syntaxes, diffusion of academic and casual lexis, violation of word usage taboo, the narrator minimized the distance, separating it from a reader, creates an atmosphere of intimate conversation, carnival freedom, where status of writers changes: now they are not the “lord of thoughts” and mentor, but a reader's plenipotentiary interlocutor.

Prusko-francouzská válka v kramářských tiscích

The study deals with the Franco-Prussian War in chapbooks. This conflict provided the last major stimulus for this medium, which gradually disappeared in the second half of the 19th century. Chapbooks on the subject of the Franco-Prussian war comprised mostly broadside ballads, but prayers and small prose prints were created as well. The importance of satirical songs significantly increased at that time. The article studies the interpretation of the war conflict in chapbooks, especially the glorification of French commanders and the authors’ hatred for Prussian soldiers, which stemmed from the defeat of the Austrian army in 1866. Attention is also paid to reflections on the main figures in the conflict (Napoleon III, Otto von Bismarck). The paper shows the genre diversity of chapbooks in the second half of the 19th century, at a time when they were gradually disappearing.

Лингводидактический потенциал современной англоязычной малой прозы (для уровней B1-C1)

The article considers specificity of using authentic literary texts in foreign language teaching. The research objective includes analysing the linguo-didactic potential of the modern English-language small prose as educational material used for teaching foreign language reading to B1-C1 students and within the framework of an integrated English lesson. Scientific originality of the paper lies in the fact that stories of the modern English-speaking authors Sh. Alexie, M. Atwood, K. Liu, J. Nyíri, A. Smith et al. are for the first time analysed in the linguo-didactic aspect; their didactic value is justified taking into account lexical, stylistic and linguo-culturological filling. The research findings are as follows: the author proves efficiency of using modern English-language short stories to form students’ linguistic, communicative and sociocultural competencies.

To the Issue of Differentiation between Metaphorical and Mental Images Verbalized in Emotive Prose
 (Based on the Texts of Small Emotive Prose by Ye.I. Zamyatin)

Nowadays achievements in metaphor studying make it possible to state that the nature of metaphor comprises mental and figurative features. Trying to fix the ideal, metaphor like any mental image may be expressed by means of natural language instruments. The mediate demonstration of the ideal nature
 makes metaphor verbalization and the one of the mental image nondescript that is aggravated by their core similarity and absence of special figures of mental images expressionand taking into consideration their all principal possibilities
 to be verbalized. The author of the article has faced the taxonomic problem of characterization of Ye.I. Zamyatin’scertain emotive prose texts according to the
 type of their imagery. The literal material of Zamyatin’semotive prose discourse analyzed in
 the article shows practical difficulty of interpreting mental images in accordance with their nature. The study has made a parametric succession of constituents
 included in metaphorical and mental images notions due to the methods of contextual analysis of the natural language text, as well as self-observation as an empiric analysis of the language material, and theoretical synthesis of
 speech experience with further schematization. The succession is applied to the analysis of Zamyatin’s texts. The research data may be used for the interpretation and analysis of any
 emotive prose text since mental images are often intentionally verbalized as an expressive means and metaphorical ones.