Stone Guest Research Articles

“THE DEAD DO NOT DISTURB US FOR LONG”: LOVLAS’S TEAR IN “THE STONE GUEST” BY A.S. PUSHKIN

In his work on the image of Don Juan, Pushkin comes into contact with the age-old tradition of artistic interpretation of the “eternal plot”. The sources that in one way or another influenced the poet’s idea are quite well studied, however, the origin of a number of images in Pushkin’s play, including the image of “poor Ineza”, remains not entirely clear. The article substantiates the hypothesis that one fragment of S. Richardson’s novel “Clarissa, or the Story of a Young Lady”, which has not yet attracted special attention of researchers, was directly related to the genesis of the image of the main character and was reflected in the first scene of the tragedy “The Stone Guest”.

Тирсо де Молина: маньеризм на пороге барокко

Continuing the study into the creative work of the Spanish playwright Tirso de Molina, in this article the author focuses on the problems of the writer’s works on the borderline between Mannerism and the Baroque that pose the most important questions of human existence, relations with the world and with God. In a broad historical, cultural, philosophical and religious context, the article analyses autos and ‘dramas about saints’, as well as the two masterpieces by Tirso de Molina — The Man Condemned for Lack of Faith and The Trickster of Seville, or the Stone Guest. In the drama The Man Condemned for Lack of Faith, the traditional image of a Christian righteous is debunked and the exaltation of a sinner is justified. In The Trickster of Seville, or the Stone Guest, criticism of morals is closely intertwined with mythopoetic imagery, and the tragic — with the grotesque, marking the tragicomic decline of the Renaissance and the transition from Mannerism to the problems of the Baroque. The optimistic anthropocentrism of the Renaissance is shifting towards the dynamics and tragedy of being and the heightened emotionality and polarity of the image system.

<i>The Stone Guest</i> [<i>Kamenniy gost</i>]: Shifting ideals in literature

The article examines the change of ideals in the metaplot of A. Pushkin’s drama The Stone Guest [Kamenniy gost] through the prism of A. Veselovsky’s concept of ‘counter-current.’ The author shows that the play’s three female characters epitomize an ideal of the respective period. Don Juan’s three muses – Inez, Laura, and Donna Anna – appear in the play as three principal ideals symbolizing the ‘spiritual currents of the epoch’ (in the words of I. Rodnyanskaya). As a result, Pushkin’s metaplot features Don Juan as an embodiment of a wavering ‘literary mind,’ whose constant pursuit of a new ideal in each given period eventually brings him to a deadlock. This is a depiction of literature emerging at the ‘counter-current’ and confronted with the question of ‘Quo vadis?’ The author also demonstrates that the dramatic cycle of Little Tragedies [Malenkie tragedii] centres on the problem of an ideal influencing the development of literature and history. Pushkin views both categories as inseparable as communicating vessels – an approach similar to that expressed by Veselovsky in his Historical Poetics [Istoricheskaya poetika].

Alexander Burry, Legacies of the Stone Guest: The Don Juan Legend in Russian Literature

Alexander Burry, Legacies of the Stone Guest: The Don Juan Legend in Russian Literature

THE TRANSFORMATION OF DON JUAN. ESSAYS ON THE DRAMATURGY OF ALEXANDER DARGOMYZHSKY’S OPERA THE STONE GUEST. DEDICATED TO THE 210TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE COMPOSER

The problem of semantic content and musical dramaturgy of an experimental and absolutely brilliant phenomenon of Russian musical theatre - the opera The Stone Guest by A.Dargomyzhsky, are addressed in the study. Namely, an attempt was made to study Dargomyzhsky’s recitative opera following the primary source, the little tragedy of the same name by A.Pushkin, in terms of the authors’ spiritual worldview. In this case, spirituality is understood not only as the richness of the inner world but also as the faith-centric creativity characteristic of representatives of Russian culture of the 19th century. The research perspective reveals a lot of new information in a seemingly familiar work.

The Myth of Don Juan: A. S. Pushkin and A. G. Schnittke

The article discusses the characteristics of the interpretation of the myth of Don Juan in A. S. Pushkin’s play “The Stone Guest”, as well as the embodiment of Pushkin's play in M. A. Schweitzer’s 1978 film from the series “Little Tragedies”. The analysis of Pushkin’s text in the context of the development of the myth reveals its anti-romanticism, which sharply distinguishes it from its artistic and historical environment, in particular the poet's negative attitude towards the right to freedom of feeling proclaimed by the Romantics. These ideas are further developed in the film version of The Stone Guest, in which the musical sequence created by A.G. Schnittke plays an important role.

THE TRANSFIGURATION OF DON JUAN. ESSAYS ON THE DRAMATURGY OF ALEXANDER DARGOMYZHSKY’S OPERA THE STONE GUEST. DEDICATED TO THE 210TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE COMPOSER. ESSAY ONE

The essays on A.Dargomyzhsky’s opera The Stone Guest are not quite usually named - “The Transfiguration of Don Juan”, to understand the image of the protagonist. The problem of semantic content and musical dramaturgy of this experimental and absolutely brilliant phenomenon of Russian musical theatre are addressed in the study. Namely, an attempt was made to study Dargomyzhsky’s recitative opera following the primary source, the little tragedy of the same name by A.Pushkin, in terms of the authors’ spiritual worldview. In this case, spirituality is understood not only as the richness of the inner world but also as the faith-centric creativity characteristic of representatives of Russian culture of the 19th century. The research perspective reveals a lot of new information in a seemingly familiar work.

Stone as Witness

The depiction of stones that speak has long been used as a literary and philosophical device to reflect upon the limitations of human language (i.e., language as a petrification of thought and action). Jacques Rancière has described stone’s capacity to bear witness as a form of “mute speech,” noting how “any stone can also be language,” as a part of the “testimony that mute things bear to mankind’s activity.” In exploring the character of this form of testimony, and asking how we hear it, this article examines the function of the Stone Guest in the legend of Don Juan, across Molière’s and Pushkin’s theatrical versions, a short film version by Marina Fomenko, and Mozart and Da Ponte’s operatic version, so revered by Kierkegaard and others. The character of the Stone Guest is often seen as casting judgement against the aesthetic mode of life, yet the power of the character lies not in his ghostly humanity or sense of retribution, but in his stoniness – his capacity to bear witness, just as a stone monument bears witness or commemorates a past trauma. In a number of versions of the Don Juan story, the Stone Guest is announced by approaching footsteps or knocking. This acousmatic device mirrors the uncanny separation of sound and source in opera – the way in which music mediates between the conflicting imperatives of language and the corporeal or material aspects of the singing voice, lending opera its vaunted mechanical qualities. Using stones that speak as a heuristic, the article draws together ideas about the limitations of language and the mechanical qualities of opera in order to excavate the auditory affordances of the stone’s form of testimony, in all its inorganic liveliness.

Reception of History in the Poem of D. Tumanny (N. N. Panov) The House in Sverdlovsk (1926)

This article examines the poem The House in Sverdlovsk (1926) by the futurist presentist and constructivist Dir Tumanny (pseudonym of Nikolai Nikolayevich Panov) as a fact of reception of the death of the Russian Emperor Nicholas Romanov and his family in the summer of 1918 in Ekaterinburg. Also, the author of the article considers the poem as a complex artistic statement reflecting and scaling the sense of history inherent both in the hero of the poem and the lyrical epic narrator and the author himself. In the space of the “Romanov text”, D. Tumanny’s poem is a unique precedent starting from the death of the tsar and his family but focusing not so much on it as a historical fact only but on the present modeled according to the Komfut ideals as a combination of the technocratic utopia of futurism and the social utopia of socialism and endowed with historical significance. However, the true content of The House in Sverdlovsk is the author’s dialogue with the powerful artistic tradition. Characteristic of the lyrical epic poem of Pushkin’s time and a completely outdated Byronic hero makes a pilgrimage to the Ipatiev House and is immediately replaced by pictures of Sverdlovsk being built (which becomes another hero of the poem). The features of a novella are combined with the optics of a travelogue essay, and Pushkin’s abundant intertext (the epigraph, allusions, and specific stylistic devices including the usage of the octave and referring to The House in Kolomna, Eugene Onegin, The Stone Guest, and The Fountain of Bakhchisarai) is only the upper layer of a deeper poetic adherence to Pushkin’s tradition. It is the playful focus of the author of the poem who presented the pilgrimage as an anecdote that reduces the reception of a historical event and in some way deprives it of historical status and even more so than the ideological guidelines of Soviet historiography which D. Tumanny undoubtedly adopted.

Pan Voyevoda by N. A. Rimskii-Korsakov. To the Creative History of Opera

In the N. A. Rimskii-Korsakov’s legacy there are operas that seem to be in the shadow of his great creations; among them is the opera Pan Voyevoda (1903) to a libretto by I. F. Tyumenev (without using any historical or literary source). The opera was the result of the composer’s long-cherished plan to create an opera on a Polish plot, so that in it “there would be no place for politics or national enmity”. Romantic events that took place in the 16th–17th centuries are presented in many respects in the traditional musical solution, which does not exclude the presence of bright dramatic situations, dramatic alignment, magnificent melodies, famous national dances. The surviving documents: letters, memoirs of both authors, as well as autographs of the libretto, clavier (partially) and scores from the archives of St Petersburg allow us to recreate the process of working on the work. The main time of work on the musical text was in the summer of 1902, when the composer left for Heidelberg to live with his son. The execution of several other creative works in parallel, including the re-interpretation of the Stone Guest by A. S. Dargomyzhsky, did not interfere with the active process of working on Pan Voyevoda. The first three acts of the four (the last act is very short) were written in less than three months, and during the winter and spring of 1903 N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov performed the orchestration. Musical autographs show how the work was carried out: the text of the libretto was clarified, sometimes expanded or shortened, the composition of the characters was determined, intonation and harmonic variants were introduced, the orchestration changed, and so on. The composer strenuously searched for optimal means of expression, creating a national color and a special “timeless aura” of Polish antiquity. It is no coincidence that the composer marked on the title page a dedication to the Memory of Frédéric Chopin.

Building Solidarity in the Field of Asylum: From an Abstract Principle to an Effective Policy?

Solidarity is widely present in European Union legislation. Several primary law provisions reflect its articulation, simultaneously assuming it as a value, an objective and a principle. Article 80 TFEU provides that the principle of solidarity and fair sharing of responsibility between Member States is the “guiding principle” of all common Union policies on border management, asylum, and immigration. Despite all this, solidarity has so far lacked a clear definition and meaning, appearing rather as an “amorphous concept”. Indeed, political narrative recognises solidarity as “the glue that holds our Union together”. However, in practice and as far as asylum is concerned, the conception according to which “solidarity must be given voluntarily, it must come from the heart, it cannot be forced” seems to prevail. By critically reviewing the relevant literature and the CJEU’s jurisprudence, this paper pursues a twofold purpose: examining the doctrinal debates on the nature, scope and (abstract or binding) character of the solidarity principle; and gauging the role that the CJEU may be playing towards an effective solidarity, uncovering the constitutional bases that prevent from continuing to treat solidarity, in its multiple manifestations and policy areas, in particular that of asylum, as little less than the stone guest.
 Received: 31 July 2022Accepted: 10 October 2022

К проблеме циклизации «Маленьких трагедий» А. С. Пушкина

The article proposes a new version of the cycle-forming organization of “Little Tragedies” by A. S. Pushkin, after a brief excursion through the already existing cycle-forming concepts of a group of scenes and plays united in Russian culture under the non-author’s general name “Little Tragedies”. The intra-textual situation of unexpected, spontaneous inspiration of the central characters of the plays included in the cycle is put forward as a binding compositional element. It is this recurring element that accompanies either the beginning of a plot action or, on the contrary, its climax. Walsingham (A Feast in Time of Plague) and Mozart (Mozart and Salieri) are liable to sudden inspiration (for Walsingham, this comes as a surprise, but Mozart is so surprised by the result that he hurries to demonstrate the composition to his “friend” Salieri, unwittingly provoking the envier to a crime). The “improviser” of the love song is Don Guan (The Stone Guest), who spoke to Donna Anna and set out on the path of his inevitable death. The moment of spontaneous inspiration becomes for all three characters a harbinger of the end, however, for Walsingham it is so far hypothetical. The Baron (The Miserly Knight), who is strikingly different from the other three protagonists, also experiences such a moment, spontaneously deciding to arrange a “feast” for himself alone with his wealth. At this moment, he returns to the thought of his heir, which will push him to slander and death. In the conclusion of the article, a parallel is carefully drawn between the mood of the biographical author, who enthusiastically indulged in the work, and the state of the heroes of his plays, who unwittingly “inherited” from their creator the same moment of being intoxicated with sudden inspiration.

The Stone Guest. The Soviet Rediscovery of Formal Linguistics Towards the Early Chomsky

After Stalin’s death, Soviet linguistics seemingly steered in a new direction, enthusiastically adopting mathematical methods within the upsurge of interest in machine translation. This fostered the acceptance of formal models disjointed from the rigid dictates of dialectical materialism and paved the way for the rediscovery of the scientific legacy of (post-)structuralist Euroamerican schools. In the eyes of the protagonists of this epistemological change, linguistics seemed to be freed from the traditional methodological constraints imposed by philology and literature. This short-lived yet intense period, however, is characterized by the polyphonic coexistence of several ideas and personalities, whose research activity can be properly understood and evaluated only from a broader historical perspective, encompassing both earlier and later stages, thus substantially curtailing the explanatory power of historical and thematic periodization. The study aims at examining the salient characteristics of the scientific environment surrounding the early critical reception of Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures in the Soviet Union. By tackling specific terminological and epistemological issues, it is argued that the evolution of Soviet linguistics was not defined by abrupt saltational processes, but rather by a constant pendular oscillation which – depending on cultural, political, and historical circumstances – would grant temporary priority to some scientific approaches and orientations at the expense of others.

«ТРИПТИХ» ПЕТРА ФОМЕНКО: ОСНОВНЫЕ ПРИНЦИПЫ И ПРИМЕРЫ ДРАМАТИЗАЦИИ

The article focuses on Pyotr Fomenko's (1932–2012) last theatre production — "Triptych", staged at the "Pyotr Fomenko Workshop" in 2009. The director combined three texts by Alexander Pushkin: "Count Nulin", "The Stone Guest" and "Scene from Faust". The performance reflected the director's main principles of working with a literary text, such as the introduction of a conditional narrator, the use of rough drafts and texts by other authors, and musical and lyrical fragments. Fractional structure of the performance gave it a poetic order and allowed to consider it within the traditions of poetic theater. While the internal connection of each of the literary texts is causal, the director complicated the structural connections and combined the texts by association, freely comparing one story with another.

Don Juan y las formas de representación simbólica de la muerte en el siglo XVII

Since its origins in the Theater of the Golden Age, Don Juan has been seen as “a symbol of carnal pleasure”. The seventeenth-century Don Juan seems to be a symbol of the baroque festival, where sex and death appear interwined. This paper analyzes the relationship between sexuality and Death as pillars in don Juan’s story. Both embody two faces of the same coin: The Trickster of Seville embodies the image of sexual instinct and The Stone Guest “the Death”.

TROMPLEJSKA BIĆA I TERATOLOŠKI KONCEPT UMETNOSTI

This paper is about ontological bivalent heroes, named „Trompe l’oeil” beings. In the sense of an optical illusion, the term „Trompe l’oeil” is taken from the fine arts. Starting from revived statues and revived portraits in the literature, we highlighted their „trompe l’oeil” traits: alert- ness, ambivalence, and liminality. We have made a catalogue of works in which revived beings appear: Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman and Stone Guest, The Unknown Masterpiece by Honoré de Balzac, La Venus d’Ille by Prosper Merimee, The Oval Portrait by Poe, The Portrait by Gogol, The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde, The Marble Killer by Vojislav Ilić. In these works, we focused on the teratological concept of art and the understanding of the artist as a monster that gives birth to a monster.

The Stone Guest: How Does pH Affect Binding Properties of PD-1/PD-L1 Inhibitors?

The interaction between programmed cell death-1 (PD-1) and its ligand PD-L1 activates a coinhibitory signal that blocks T-cell activation, promoting the immune escape process in the tumor microenvironment. Development of monoclonal antibodies targeting and inhibiting PD-1/PD-L1 interaction as anticancer immunotherapies has proved successful in multiple clinical settings and for various types of cancer. Notwithstanding, limitations exist with the use of these biologics, including drug resistance and narrow therapeutic response rate in a majority of patients, that demand for the design of more efficacious small molecule-based immunotherapies. Alteration of pH in the tumor microenvironment is a key factor that is involved in promoting drug resistance, tumor survival and progression. In this study, we have investigated the effect of pH shifts on binding properties of distinct classes of PD-L1 inhibitors, including macrocyclic peptide and small molecules. Results expand structure-activity relationships of PD-L1 inhibitors, providing insights into structural features and physicochemical properties that are useful for the design of ligands that may escape a drug resistance mechanism associated to variable pH conditions of tumor microenvironment.

RNA as the stone guest of protein aggregation.

The study of prions as infectious aggregates dates several decades. From its original formulation, the definition of a prion has progressively changed to the point that many aggregation-prone proteins are now considered bona fide prions. RNA molecules, not included in the original ‘protein-only hypothesis’, are also being recognized as important factors contributing to the ‘prion behaviour’, that implies the transmissibility of an aberrant fold. In particular, an association has recently emerged between aggregation and the assembly of prion-like proteins in RNA-rich complexes, associated with both physiological and pathological events. Here, we discuss the historical rising of the concept of prion-like domains, their relation to RNA and their role in protein aggregation. As a paradigmatic example, we present the case study of TDP-43, an RNA-binding prion-like protein associated with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Through this example, we demonstrate how the current definition of prions has incorporated quite different concepts making the meaning of the term richer and more stimulating. An important message that emerges from our analysis is the dual role of RNA in protein aggregation, making RNA, that has been considered for many years a ‘silent presence’ or the ‘stone guest’ of protein aggregation, an important component of the process.

Some peculiarities of opera libretto as a potential literary genre

This article analyzes the changes pertaining to such level of literary works as a system of characters, category of space and time, phonetic system and composition; as well as changes in epic and dramatic oeuvres in the process of transformation of the text of literary work into an opera libretto. Analysis is conducted on peculiarities of the aforementioned levels of literary text and libretto. As an example of epic work, the author selected the A. S. Pushkin’s verse novel “Eugene Onegin” and the eponymous opera composed by P. I. Tchaikovsky; as an example of dramatic work, the author picked the two poetic dramas from Pushkin’s cycle “The Stone Guest” and “The Miserly Knight” and the eponymous operas by A. Dargomyzhsky and S. V. Rachmaninoff respectively. The following methods were applied in the course of this study: comparative based on juxtaposition of musical-scenic interpretation and precedent literary text; typological for determination of patterns, classification and generalization of the results. The author comes to the conclusion that the transformation of epic and dramatic literary texts into the opera libretto has similarities and differences on all levels of the text. The possible reasons of such phenomenon are discussed. The author answers a question whether or not libretto can be attributed to as a genre of fiction writing.

The Stone Ghost: The Undead in El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra

Tirso de Molina’s philandering Don Juan finds his downfall in the Stone Guest. This reanimated tomb effigy of Don Gonzalo pulls Don Juan to hell in the final act of El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra. Don Juan’s life of transgressions has upset both societal and divine order, so his punishment must be enacted in both spheres. In this paper, I consider the Stone Guest, who returns to the world of the living to mete out Don Juan’s punishment, to be a ghostly figure. As an undead apparition, the Stone Guest occupies a space between life and death, which positions him as the only character capable of enacting complete justice. I further examine the ways in which Don Gonzalo’s execution of justice, both human and divine, contributes to the 16th century’s de auxiliis debates regarding the influence of free will and divine control in man’s life.