Spanish Themes Research Articles

Spanish Women in British Literary Annuals (1823-1830)

This paper explores the representations of Spain, and particularly Spanish women, in five British literary annuals of the late Romantic period (1823-1830): Forget Me Not, The Literary Souvenir, Friendship’s Offering, The Keepsake and The Amulet. Literary annuals were illustrated anthologies of poems, short stories and travelogues which started to be published in Britain in the 1820s and were sold annually as presents for Christmas and New Year. Mostly aimed at a female audience, these annuals were imbued with a spirit of cosmopolitanism, featuring texts about countries and regions from all over the world. Spanish themes were constantly present in the selected literary annuals, where with a few notable exceptions, most female Spanish characters are countermodels of femininity that deviate from the traditional feminine values fostered by these publications and defy the idealised depictions of (British) women appearing in their texts and engravings. These representations of Spanish women, which underline the ethnic and cultural differences between Spain and Britain, are in tune with the romantic image of the country promoted by British writers at the time.

Fragile Ties: Spanish Themes in Soviet Porcelain

This article is devoted to the study of the so-called “Spanish theme” in Soviet porcelain. The author analyses the reflection of the stereotypical perception of Spain in small porcelain sculptures of the Soviet period produced by a variety of manufactures. Among the components of the Spanish theme, the author highlights the images of flamenco (Spanish dance), bullfighting, the most recognizable heroes of Cervantes (Don Quixote and Sancho Panza), and the fiery Carmen who was created by Prosper Mérimée and has become the stereotypical image of a nineteenth- century Spanish woman in the popular imagination thanks to the musical and dance pieces of the same name. These traditional components of the perception of Spain in the twentieth century were supplemented by the interpretation of a turning point in Spanish history – the Civil War of 1936–1939 – in propaganda porcelain. This article proposes another perspective on the Spanish theme in Soviet porcelain and considers the formation of the images of Spaniards, men and women. Such images are reflected in all the plots presented in this paper. Most of the sculptural works by different generations of Soviet porcelain masters are devoted to dance. The author concludes that dance scenes, including the ones that refer to Carmen, are fundamental for the Spanish theme in Soviet porcelain.

Испанские романы Лиона Фейхтвангера

The article analyzes two novels of L. Feuchtwanger devoted to the Spanish theme – «Goya» and «The Jewess of Toledo». To be based on the classic plots of Spanish history – two tragic «une histoire d`amour» – Feuchtwanger seeks to establish the ideals of Humanism and the En-lightenment. Raising such issues as the artist and power, politics and love, progress and religion, the struggle between Good and Evil (Light and Darkness), the Black Legend and the role of the Jews in medieval Spain, Feuchtwanger is forced to come to the conclusion that human nature and intellect are imperfect. The author of the article shows that a deep historiosophy is hidden behind the artistic content, and Feucht-wanger conducts a constant and intense dialogue with his contemporar-ies.

ПРОБЛЕМЫ ГРАЖДАНСКОЙ ВОЙНЫ В ИСПАНИИ 1936-1939 ГГ. В КОНТЕКСТЕ ИТАЛО-СОВЕТСКИХ ОТНОШЕНИЙ

Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 became a factor that significantly determined the situation in Europe on the eve of the Second World War. In this regard, it is important to study the international aspects of this conflict in the context of Italian-Soviet relations. The author reveals how the interests of such focal countries as the USSR and Italy, which supported the opposing sides of the conflict in Spain, intersected at different levels and in different forms. The policy of Non-Intervention to Spain 1936-1939 has also aggravated bilateral, in particular, Italian-Soviet, relations. The Spanish theme was also actively used in mutual informational and psychological confrontation. The Italo-Soviet struggle over the Spanish problem ultimately influenced both the outcome of the Spanish War as well as the balance of power in Europe before the World War II.

ТАНЕЦ В ОПЕРАХ М.М. ИППОЛИТОВА-ИВАНОВА: ТЕКСТ И ЕГО ИНТЕРПРЕТАЦИЯ

The phenomenon of the "lifeworld" (E. Husserl) in its national branches and cultural realities is revealed in the operas of M. M. Ippolitov-Ivanov largely due to the extended mass scenes. A special place here is occupied by dance episodes and scenes in which characteristic elements of different folk traditions, both those previously experienced in Russian music (oriental, Spanish themes) and those introduced by Ippolitov-Ivanov in accordance with the conditions of plot realities (Norwegian theme), are presented in a sharp and expressive way. It has always been important for the composer to emphasize in operas the authentic, the present, which has a timeless value, focusing on the forms of musical folklore. Folk dances, which are represented in many mass scenes of the composer's operas, provided him such an opportunity, as did extended ballet scenes (for example, in the opera "The Last Barricade"). With an obvious aspiration to the ballet genre, the score of "Nestan Darejan" based on Shota Rustaveli's poem "The Knight in the Tiger Skin" was created: the composer called this composition a ballet, then an opera-ballet. The archive of Ippolitov-Ivanov holds the libretto of the ballet "The Scythians", which could probably have interested the composer because of his special attitude to the ballet genre. There are dance scenes in all of the composer's operas, including "Ruth", based on a Biblical plot. There are also dance scenes in the libretti of operas he conceived, but did not realize ("Chrysanthemum", "Miriam", "The Dressmaker"). Dance scenes emphasize the national flavor, create the realities of everyday scenes ("Azra", "Treason"), enhance the contrast between the external and deeply psychological internal action ("Ole from Nordland"), characterize the characters and determine the main figurative and semantic "tonality" of the work ("Asya"). Thanks to the dance, "windows" are opened into another world of culture and folklore traditions, an interest in which the composer has preserved throughout his life.

Fragile Ties: Spanish Themes in Soviet Porcelain

The article is devoted to the study of the so-called Spanish theme in Soviet porcelain. The author analyzes the reflection of the stereotypical perception of Spain in small porcelain sculptures of the Soviet period produced by a variety of manufactures. Among the components of the Spanish theme the author highlights the images of flamenco (Spanish dance), bullfighting, most recognizable heroes of Cervantes such as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and fiery Carmen who was created by Prosper Mérimée and has become the stereotypical Spanish woman of the 19th century in the popular imagination thanks to the similarly named music and dance pieces. These traditional components of the perception of Spain in the 20th century were supplemented by the interpretation in propaganda porcelain of the turning point in the Spanish history — the civil war of 1936-1939. The article proposes another perspective on the Spanish theme in Soviet porcelain and considers the formation of the images of Spaniards, men and women. Such images are reflected in all the plots presented herein. Most of the sculptural works by different generations of Soviet porcelain masters are devoted to dance. The author concludes that dance scenes, including the ones that refer to Carmen are fundamental for the Spanish theme in Soviet porcelain.

What 1sg forms tell us about Spanish theme vowels

This article argues in favour of a view of the Spanish Theme Vowel (ThV) as the direct spell out of an identifiable syntactic head, specifically Ramchand's (2018) Event head, responsible for tagging lexical verbs with world and time parameters. I will argue that several apparent cases of verbal irregularity related to the conjugation of 1sg forms can be related to each other, and can receive a principled explanation once one adopts this view of Spanish ThVs. An approach where ThVs are post-syntactic morphemes that idiosyncratically tag the functional structure of verbs, or where they are syntactically inert morphemes, can only treat these facts as accidental and cannot provide an account of their mutual interconnection.

Literary sources of the image of Spain in the works by Marina Tsvetaeva

This paper analyzes literary sources of Spanish themes in the poetry of M.Tsvetaeva. The Spanish theme in Russian culture and Russian-Spanish relations have been fruitfully studied for a long time, but insights of this scholarship are rarely applied to Tsvetaeva’s works (generally when speaking about the images of Carmen and Don Juan, or about the Federico Garcia Lorca translations). Despite the fact that there are many works about the reception of different countries by Tsvetaeva, there are no studies analyzing Spain throughout the poet’s work. But Spanish motives appear in one of the first poems of Tsvetaeva, “The Street woke up”, and the last year of poet’s life is related to the translations of Garcia Lorca. For the first time, this paper takes a panoramic view of the author’s Spanish texts and reveals their literary basis. Among the sources identified we find the texts of Spanish literature and folklore that Tsvetaeva read in translation: folkloric songs, plays by P.Calderon, M.Cervantes, F.Garcia Lorca, etc. But the corpus of non-Spanish sources is much more extensive: here we have the works of Russian poets (A.Pushkin, A.Tolstoy, S.Parnok, P.Antokolsky and others) and foreign authors (P.Merimee, V. Sardou, J. Sand, G.Aguilar, O.Wilde and others). We conclude that Tsvetaeva’s image of Spain is a variant of the European Spanish myth. It has a heterogeneous character and is formed by sources of polyethnic origin.

Andrić y Goya

The Yugoslav writer Ivo Andrić spent over two years in Madrid (1928–1930), where he served as viceconsul of the Yugoslav Diplomatic Legation in Spain. His experience of Spain is expressed in some of his works. Spanish themes and motifs appearing in them feature three aspects, one of them associated with the Spanish painter Francisco Goya. Andrić had the opportunity to get well acquainted with the works of Francisco Goya thanks to an extraordinary exhibition of the painter’s works at the Prado Museum on occasion of the centennial of his death (1928). Goya appears in two of Andrić’s works: “Goya” (a biographical essay, 1929) and “Conversation with Goya” (a fictional story, 1935). The study of these two works involves consideration of various issues: generic differences between essay and story (documentary versus fictional), interpretation of Goya’s works (especially The Caprices, The Disasters of War, and drawings) and his poetics, divergence and convergence with essays on Goya written by other contemporary Yugoslav authors (M. Krleža and O. Bihalji Merin). The analysis is especially focused on “Conversation with Goya”, an exceptional story about the creation of Goya as a literary character,  his transformation from historical figure to paradigm of the Artist (shift from biography to philosophy of art), the construction of a (verbal) portrait, the use of epiphany as a metaphor and a narrative resource, the use of interior monologue, the construction of two narrative dimensions (mimetic versus fictional), the analogy with the Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man by J. Joyce, the interaction between “reality” and fiction, and last but not least – the discrete auto-ironic perspective Andrić has woven into this extraordinary narrative. 

МИФООБРАЗ ГЕНИАЛЬНОГО ХУДОЖНИКА В ХУДОЖЕСТВЕННОМ ОПЫТЕ К. БАЛЬМОНТА: РЕЦЕПЦИЯ ИСПАНСКОГО АРТИСТИЗМА

The Russian culture of the turn of the XX century is characterized by actualization of the prob-lems of intercultural dialogue. Thus, the analysis of the Silver age is impossible without considering the fact of such a dialogue as a cultural phenomenon. The problem of hispanism reception is considered in the aspect of creative genius in K. Bal-mont’s works. In the context of Balmont's symbolism, it is important to take into account his specific conceptualization of the artist's status and interpretation of creativity as dreaming. The task of the re-search is to study the implementation of this mental usus within the Spanish theme, the discourse of the painter as a genius-overman by Balmont, and the existentials of the poet's spiritual experience correlated with it. Spain by Balmont is primarily a country of great artists. He creates portraits-myths of the great Spaniards, almost overmen for him. In the article “Poetry of horror” Balmont calls Goya's “a poet-symbolist in painting”, and relates his genius with other representatives of world culture: Poe, Bosch, Teniers etc. Spanish artist is de-clared a predictor of a new art. Goya in Balmont’s interpretation is an actual genius-creator, artist of borderline, mystical experience. Goya’s grotesques are interpreted as a breakout to otherness. Artist's chimeras scare with credibility and live. Goya created an infernal world with the character of universality. Balmont calls “Capricious” a theodicy, as this hymn to the aesthetics of ugliness justifies the existence of evil. The poet highlights in Goya’s aesthetics something close to the era of the early ХХ century. Cultural fashion finds its source and consonance in Spaniard’s drawing (mysticism of terrible, “attraction” to demonism, themes of disease, suffering and dreams). Also, the great painter in the poet’s interpretation is a dreamer reflecting his prophetic dreams on canvas. If Goya’s dreams are marked by a dark, night element in the poet’s artistic metaphysics, the oneirism of Velasquez is marked as sunny. The artist’s mythological image is embodied in the rhyme “Velasquez”. Solar genius of Velasquez organically becomes one of the main figures in the artistic metaphysics of Balmont's poetic collection “Let's be like the Sun”. The last limit of the volitional effort called for in the title of the collection is specified with Velasquez’s image. By binary logic a dark genius should confront Velasquez-Sun. In the book this role is assigned to the painter José de Ribera, Goya’s analog in the context of Balmont’s works. A mythological image was created with reference to the stockpile of ancient myths, the antithesis of Prometheus and Epimetheus. Entering into a dialogue with the culture of Spain and creating myths of Spanish artists, Balmont was looking for a reflection of himself in the Spaniards. Regarding their heroes as the dreamers, he oneirically dreamed about the essence of the Spanish genius basing on his travel impressions but trusting much more his mythic-creative speculation and accentuating the central existentials of his experience.

К кому же все-таки обращено стихотворение А. А. Блока «Испанке»?

The article discusses the addressee of A. A. Blok’ poem, arguing against the suggestion that it is addressed to Kazarose (B. G. Shensheva), a «small genre» actress. The analysis of the documentary and biographical data, and of the historical and cultural context (in particular, of the «Spanish theme» in the repertoire of the Terioki Entreprise), suggests an alternative version: the implicit addressee of the poem is L. D. Blok. The text itself is considered as a «heraldic construction» («mise en abyme» technique), with a reference to Vs. Meyerhold’s pantomime "The Lovers" as the decoder of the communicative situation.

«SPANISH» WORLD CONCEPT IN POETRY OF K. BALMONT

The purpose of this paper is to determine the Spanish concept of the world in the artistic perception of K. Balmont by the method of analysis of poetic works with Spanish themes in the creative heritage of the poet. The variety of the «Spanish» themes, motifs, and characters in K. Balmont’s poetic heritage proves that Spain was seen by the poet not only as historical or geographical scenery, against which the poet represented his own work; К. Balmont recreated the past of Spain, delved into the essence of the Spanish character, appealed to the masters of art and literature, which led to the endless transformation of the К. Balmont’s lyrical hero. «Spanish» themes, motifs, characters have served as a source for his critical articles and essays with Spanish themes, complementing the «Spanish» concept of the world in his literary heritage.

Spanish Language Grammatical Context—Acknowledging Specific Language Characteristics

The current research article exposes a linguistic-outline-analysis about the use of Nouns-Object/Thing/Place, Definite and Indefinite Articles and Descriptive Adjectives in the writing and speaking context of Spanish language communication. The teaching and learning of these Spanish grammar themes continue to be subject of interest among scholars due to the level of complexities that these syntaxes present in terms of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) (Bialystok, 1981). The article collected appropriate literature-materials from different sources and added new-contextual-insights into its frame to adhesive an analytical-database with emphasis on Spanish Language Grammatical Contexts that tap into the subject-matter-discussed. Being consecutive to this, the study aimed to provide valuable material as a reference to teach and study these Spanish grammar subjects in Spanish foreign language classes.

Theme in English and Spanish

This article offers a comparative view of a Systemic Functional (SF) account of Theme in English and Spanish declarative clauses. It considers the lexicogrammatical realization of Theme in both languages and shows how Themes across the clauses construe the method of development of a phase of discourse in the respective languages, unmarked Themes scaffolding textual continuity and marked Themes scaffolding transitions between discourse phases. The paper reviews the concept of Theme in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and analyzes texts in both languages, taking into account a trinocular perspective (Matthiessen & Halliday 2009): from above, considering textual discourse functions related to the lexicogrammatical function of Theme; from roundabout, considering other textual functions in the clause as New; and from below, paying attention to the role that different ranks may play in the realization of the function under focus. In addition, the paper argues for a re-interpretation of previous SFL accounts of Spanish Theme, on the assumptions of SFL language typology. Based on the analysis of fragments of Research Articles, the paper shows how English and Spanish texts perform similar strategies to maintain the method of development of a text, through the interaction between lexical strings and reference chains with the function of Theme (Fries 1981; Martin 1992). It is shown, however, that the lexicogrammatical realization of unmarked Theme differs between these languages.

The Uneven Landscape of California's Historical Landmarks

Historical markers help preserve and display history and communicate what a group deems important about a place's past. This paper analyzes the changing themes and landscape relevance of California's official historical landmarks. California's thousand‐plus markers are classified and mapped by themes, analyzed for changing topical emphasis over time, and evaluated for landscape presence. The thematic distribution and relative density of these landmarks is uneven. Gold Rush and Spanish themes have become less prevalent over time as culturally related landmarks have grown in importance. This paper illustrates how historical landmark programs help sustain and define the public's collective memory through designating dispersed geographical locations as particularly important points of reference to the past.

The Spanish lexicon stores stems with theme vowels, not roots with inflectional class features

Abstract The choice of theme vowels in Spanish nouns and adjectives can be predicted neither from the phonological shape of roots nor from syntactic features like gender. However, this state of affairs does not require the postulation of inflectional class features. The alternative is for the Spanish lexicon to store stems with their theme vowels, instead of roots annotated with declension diacritics; default generalizations over the lexical entries of stems can be expressed by means of lexical redundancy rules. The hypothesis of stem storage is compatible with the failure of Spanish theme vowels to surface in certain environments: this is demonstrably caused by an entirely general and regular phonological process deleting unaccented stem-final vowels before suffixes beginning with another vowel. Stem storage receives further support from psycholinguistic data from recognition latencies. Additional new evidence comes from cyclic locality conditions on allomorph selection, as shown by an analysis of the well-known stress-driven alternation displayed by items like [kont-á-ɾ] ‘count.inf’ ∼ [kwént-a] ‘count. 3sg’. In derivatives like 〚N 〚V kont-a〛 ðóɾ-∅〛 ‘counter’, assuming that diphthongal allomorphy is a property of the root incorrectly predicts that the choice of allomorph will be determined in the first cycle: i.e. *[kwentaðóɾ]. The locality problem vanishes if /koNt-a/ and /kweNt-a/ are both listed in the lexicon as stem allomorphs. These data show that Stratal Optimality Theory allied to a stem-driven theory of morphology performs better than alternative approaches to allomorphic locality. Root-driven Distributed Morphology is too local: the domains for allomorph selection that it generates are too narrow. Conversely, noncyclic versions of Optimality Theory fail to predict allomorphic locality (even if they can describe its effects) because they endow allomorph selection with unrestricted access to the global environment.

‘Spanish’ Theatre in Occupied France, 1940–1944

This article examines the impact of Spanish exiles on French culture from the outbreak of the Second World War, focusing especially on the influence of Spanish writers, themes, and landscapes in the theatre performed in France during the German Occupation, from 1940 to 1944. It will be argued that Spanish exoticism and themes from seventeenth-century Spanish plays such as grandeur, love, honour, and duty were ideal material for boosting audiences who were suffering from the deprivations of war. Additionally, such plays were far enough removed from the contemporary situation not to raise eyebrows with the German censorship bodies. Some famous examples of artists with close ties to Spain, such as Casarès and Camus, are discussed for their contributions to this trend, as are a few playwrights, such as Montherlant and Claudel, who privileged Spanish themes in their works premiered during this period. It will be seen that French theatre was hugely affected by its Iberian neighbours — as its intellectuals had been by the Spanish Civil War, and that the fashion for ‘Spanish’ theatre in Paris was to increase dramatically in the post-war years.

Ejemplos de la recepción creativa de la literatura española en la literatura eslovena

Ejemplos de la recepción creativa de la literatura española en la literatura eslovena

Georges Bizet’s Carmen and Fin-de-Siècle Spanish national opera

At the end of the 19th century, Georges Bizet’s Carmen was the most performed opera with a Spanish theme in the Iberian peninsula. It had made its breakthrough into the Spanish repertoire in the late 1880s, just as debates over the state and future of Spanish opera had intensified and were tied to emerging questions of national identity. In a period when full-length Spanish works (zarzuela grande and opera) were struggling to maintain a foothold in the repertoire, Carmen received numerous operatic productions and several adaptations into the Spanish lyric genre of the zarzuela, accelerating the process of acculturation of Bizet’s opera.The main ideologues of Spanish national opera, Felipe Pedrell, Antonio Peña y Goní and Tomás Bretón all engaged critically with Bizet’s “infamous espagnolade,” and it formed the backdrop to a wave of Spanish nationalist operas, from Bretón’s La Dolores (1895) to Manuel de Falla’s La vida breve (1905). This paper will explore the multi-faceted impact of Bizet’s Carmen in shaping the discourses of Spanish national opera, and its stylistic impact upon the new repertory of Spanish operas that were created at the turn of the 20th century.

Spanish stages: British Romantic tragedy and the theatrical politics of Spain, 1808–1823

British Romantic‐period theater features a sizeable number of plays and other spectacular entertainments centered on Spanish themes and located in Spanish settings. No mere continuations of the Spanish plays in the Restoration and eighteenth‐century repertoire, these works actually respond to a renewed interest in Spanish culture and contemporary political and military events. And if Spain is an important presence on the early nineteenth‐century stage, at the same time commentaries on current developments, from the outbreak of the Peninsular War in 1808 to the end of the constitutional monarchy in 1823, repeatedly imagine this country in overtly spectacular ways as a theater of war and the stage of crucial historical events. Starting from this intersection of theater and politics, this essay considers the presence and significance of this country in Romantic‐period drama and theater, particularly the usually overlooked historical tragedies written for the “legitimate” or patent theaters in London. Focusing on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Remorse, Richard Lalor Sheil’s The Apostate and Bellamira, and Lord John Russell’s Don Carlos, the essay examines how these works employ the Spanish geo‐cultural construct in order to develop reflections on racial contrasts and conflicts, cross‐cultural exchanges, despotism and autocracy, obscurantism and fanaticism, the fall of empires, and the emergence of new polities. In the process, it also throws light on some of the dramatic mechanisms and strategies by which these plays address such concerns and address them to their public of readers and spectators.