Young Writers Research Articles

«ВСТРЕТИЛИСЬ. ШУТКА ЛИ – ШОЛОХОВ!» (ОБРАЗ М.А. ШОЛОХОВА В ПОЭЗИИ В.Ф. БОКОВА)

M.A. Sholokhov (1905–1984) and V.F. Bokov (1914–2009) met in Rostov-on-Don in August 1964. A two-hour conversation took place at the initiative of the author of «And Quiet Flows the Don», who learned about the «literary ship» – traveling along the Don and performing in the villages and on farms with the reading of poems by young writers, headed by V.F. Bokov. Bokov wrote several poems about Sholokhov, the main of which – «Meeting with Sholokhov» (1964) – was to be included in his book of poems «On the Don», but, due to the arbitrariness of the editor, the publication is not included. In September 1964 Bokov sent it by letter to Sholokhov and read it «everywhere from the rostrum». The poet actively worked on this text, preparing a substantially updated version of it for his Collected works (1983–1984). One of the brightest details of Sholokhov’s image found by the poet is his naming through the naming of the famous Tolstoy estate: Rejoice, laugh and Hello, / our Yasnaya Polyana!. Another poem of this subject – «You remember me / Sholokhov called…» – V.F. Bokov included in a letter to the Don poet A.A. Ter-Markaryan. According to the image of the poet, Sholokhov, as it were, appointed Bokov as the «father» of the young writers accepted by him under his protection: Be your father to them, Victor. In the poem «The Old Cossack» the Sholokhov’s theme at the end, but, thus, becomes decisive. With the poet’s sense of humor, he writes that if this old Cossack would meet Sholokhov – there would be a novel! In his works on Sholokhov’s theme, Bokov proved himself, as in his work as a whole, a major master of the artistic word.

Unto the Dying Lamb

In 1947 the Julius Rosenwald Fund Received an Application from a Young Writer Seeking to Document Harlem Life By “recording somehow the services of a store-front church in such a manner that it would emerge as neither savage, sensational, or sentimental” (Baldwin, Plan). The applicant—a twenty-three-year-old James Baldwin—explained that the work was already well under way. He and the photographer Theodore Pelatowski had begun to generate material for a photography book to be called “Unto the Dying Lamb.” “Dying Lamb” documents Baldwin's youthful gravitation toward the questions about religious belief and vicarious emotion that would animate his breakthrough work in Go Tell It on the Mountain and “Everybody's Protest Novel.” It also represents a rare instance of the author's experimenting with the photo-essay format. Until now, it has been assumed that no documents containing both Pelatowski's images and Baldwin's text have survived. However, an excerpt from a draft of the project, reproduced here, was published in the 27 April 1947 issue of PM, a short-lived newspaper that offered progressive photojournalism to the working-class New Yorker. The recovery of this early work allows us to reflect on Baldwin's interest in photography and his approach to collaboration, not to mention possible connections between these aspects of his practice.

Recent Contributions to the Irish Novel by Sara Baume, Anna Burns and Eleanor O’Reilly: On Language, Words and Wordlessness

The purpose of this contribution is to study three young writers who have offered, in the past three years, in a distinctively new voice, further instances of the Irish writers’ endless ability to experiment with the form of the novel. Sara Baume’s "A Line Made by Walking" (2017), Anna Burns’s "Milkman" (2018), and Eleanor O’Reilly’s "m for mammy" (2019) are three representative instances of the potential of the form of the novel in the hands of Irish women writers. Each of these novels deserve a study in its own due to their complexity and interest, but analysing them together offers us a unique opportunity to assess the thriving state of novel writing in Ireland, especially in the hands of Irish women writers.The three novels object of our study deal with identity crises, and they similarly represent their protagonists as struggling against society and its structures, be it the family, local communities, the world of art, nature or politics. Furthermore, the three authors have been able to devise alternative narrative styles, techniques and even endings that enabled them to render the complexities of the topics dealt with as well as to represent the unstable condition of their protagonists. In addition, Baume, Burns and O’Reilly have significantly chosen as protagonists female characters with artistic or intellectual aspirations who allow the authors to endow their respective narratives with metaliterary meditations on the possibilities as well as limits of language, words and wordlessness.

The Answer Lies in the Resilience: Cross Cultural Conflict in The Bamboo Stalk

The Bamboo Stalk is a daring work which looks objectively at the phenomenon of foreign workers in Arab countries and deals with the problem of identity through the life of a young man of mixed race who returns to Kuwait, his father’s homeland, the ‘heaven’ which his mother had described to him since he was a child. The novel is written by Saud Alsanousi and he is a Kuwaiti novelist and journalist, born in 1981. He published his first novel The Prisoner of Mirrors in 2010, which won a prize awarded for novels and short stories by young writers. His second novel The Bamboo Stalk won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction 2013. Receiving this prestigious prize, he became the youngest author to win the prize. Alsanousi raises complicated themes related to religion, discrimination and identity. His sharp criticism of Kuwaiti society particularly in his last two novels is an attempt to inspire a positive change in the way Kuwaitis view both others and themselves. Although many have discussed the complicated themes of culture and identity in The Bamboo Stalk , a few critics have examined its protagonist’s coming of age journey realizing his identity through reconciling two cultures and hence his bicultural identity. Key words: Identity, culture, discrimination, conflict, reconciliation, Kuwait

Atopic moments in the square: a report on despair and hope after the Candlelight Revolution in South Korea

ABSTRACTOver the past ten years, South Korea has seen an alarming rise in hatred and anti-progressivism among its youth. Considering South Korea’s remarkable string of successes with democratization, including the miracle of the Candlelight Revolution in 2016–2017, it is almost inconceivable to see its modern youth adopt ‘Hell Choson’ as a rallying cry and take pleasure in bullying the weak and marginalized. Therein lies an uncanny discrepancy: astounding achievement in the democratization movement juxtaposed with widespread disillusionment. This inconsistency also manifests itself as an inexorable generational conflict between the establishment and the youth, who have grown up in the shadow of a historically powerful establishment called the ‘386 Generation’. The dilemma the young generation face is this: they refuse to be interpellated by the ‘386 Regime’, but they also struggle to forge their own agency. In order to shed light on this issue, three literary works written by young writers will be reviewed: Chang Kang-Myoung’s [장강명, 2015. 한국이 싫어서 [Because I Hate Korea], Seoul: 민음사 [Mineumsa]], Yoon Go-Eun’s [윤고은, 2019. 부루마블에 평양이 있다면 [If There is Pyongyang in the Blue Marble], Paju: 문학동네 [Munhakdongne]], and Hwang Jung-Eun’s [황정은, 2019. 디디의 우산 [DD’s Umbrella], Paju: 창비 [Changbi Publisher]]. All three texts express the disillusionment and hopelessness of South Korea’s youth. However, there is a notable difference between DD’s Umbrella and the other two texts regarding disillusionment. While the latter texts mirror the youth’s detachment from dreary reality and seek solace through escape, the former digs into the bottom of the disillusionment by continuously revisiting the moments of revolutions. Mulling over the meaning of ‘the banality of evil’ and its relationship with revolutions, Hwang acutely examines the mechanism through which revolutionary vitality tends to be absorbed in a rigid system and replaced by the world of common sense.

О прагматике жанра и источниковедческом ресурсе «литературных» воспоминаний о позднем Гоголе

This essay examines an episode of Nikolay Gogol’s biography described in four memoir texts — by I.I. Panayev, A.YA. Panaeva, P.V. Annenkov, and N.A. Nekrasov. All the four texts tell the story of Gogol meeting “young writers” in St. Petersburg in the late 1840s. As it often happens in memoirs, the authors describe the same event differently. The author of this article thoroughly examines the sources of this particular episode and comes to the following conclusion. The memoirs of Gogol`s meeting with the “young writers” in the late 1840s tells us a lot about how Gogol’s personality was perceived by his younger and less famous contemporaries. It also sheds light on the typology and evolution of memoir genres in the second half of the 19th century. Yet the reliability of biographical data about Gogol is insufficient. The total amount of information indicates the probability that the meeting took place but gives a reason to doubt almost all the details of this event. The participants named by the authors of the memoirs (Goncharov, Grigorovich, Druzhinin, etc.) kept silent about this important meeting while the data available to modern Gogol scholars points at the hypothetical character of the mentioned episode.

Peningkatan Minat Baca Masyarakat Melalui Wisata Leterasi

The purpose of this community service is to increase children's interest in reading. Nowadays, children have been busy with their gadgets and tend to have low literacy. The basic problem is the dominance of gadgets in the daily lives of children in Pondok Rejo Asri Housing in addition to the low literacy culture. The solutions offered are socialization, training, practice, mentoring and the establishment of a reading park so that children have higher linguistic intelligence and have a passion for better reading and writing. Reading, which has been assumed to be boring, will change its paradigm with something unique and interesting. Literacy activities to foster children's reading interest in this service are carried out in several stages, namely: outbound, socialization, talk shows with young writers, magic clowns and outbound literacy. The last is to establish a children's reading park: Peluk Buku”.

"Вони роблять сучасність змістом мистецтва" ("Серапіонові брати" в критиці Маріетти Шагінян)

In this article Olha Viernik explores two articles of Marietta Shahinian. Marietta Shahinian was a Soviet writer, critic and translator. She has written articles about a group of writers named „Serapion's brothers”. Marietta Shahinian knew the writers of this group. She often attended the meetings of the literary group. She participated in these meetings. She listened to new works read by young writers. Marietta Shahinian tried to be objective in her articles. She wrote her first article in 1921. A critic wrote that the writers create realistic works. Marietta Shahinian wrote that „Serapion's brothers” and the formal school have nothing in common. Modern scholars do not think so. Olha Viernik writes that Lev Lunts had a great influence on formalists. Marietta Shahinian praised the novel of Mykolai Nikitin named „Kol”. She believed that this story was the best in Russian literature. This story was published only time in 1922. Then the novel was forbidden in Soviet Russia due to censorship. A year after it Mykolai Nikitin became not only a Soviet author but a Soviet patriot. He praised the Soviet government and Bolsheviks. Mykolai Nikitin never wrote about the personal tragedies of different people in a period of the revolution and civil war again. In 1923 Marietta Shahinian wrote her second article. She appreciated every writer of the group. „Serapion's brothers” have changed. Marietta Shahinian wrote about important events and style changes in the works of group. Mykhail Zoshchenko describes original satirical characters in his works. Veniamin Kavierin continued the work of Hoffmann. Lev Luntz continued the work of Schiller. Yelyzaveta Polonska wrote intelligent lyrics. Mykolai Tykhonov created original ballads. Olha Viernik finds that the articles of Marietta Shahinian are of great importance in the history of the literary group „Serapion's brothers”.

АНТИРЕЛИГИОЗНАЯ ПЕЧАТНАЯ ПРОПАГАНДА В БУРРЕСПУБЛИКЕ (НА ПРИМЕРЕ ЖУРНАЛА «ЭРДЭМ БА ШАЖАН»)

The article analyzes anti-religious propaganda in the early 1920s in the Buryat-Mongol Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic on the example of the magazine Erdem ba Shazhan [Science and Religion]. An important component of the state policy in the antireligious struggle in the republic was the Regional Union of Atheists, created in Verkhneudinsk on December 2, 1926. The publication of Erdem ba Shazhan in the Mongolian script was aimed at covering the gap of specialized literature on anti-religious propaganda. While analyzing issues of the magazine stored in the Center of Oriental Manuscripts and Xylographs of the Institute for Mongolian, Buddhist and Tibetan Studies of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, research methods of historical science were used. The source study method has revealed the significance of the magazine as a source for studying atheistic propaganda and introducing a new socialist ideology in Buryat society. Erdem ba Shazhan was a methodological guide for a wide network of circles of the League of Militant Atheists. The magazine described the anti-religious events held in the republic, discredited false religious postulates, and propagandized the new Soviet style of life. For instance, the magazine published scientific disputes with lamas about the essence of religion. The analysis of the contents of Erdem ba Shazhan shows that educational issues were aimed at the broad promotion of the new life and eradication of religious remnants occupied more than a half of its volume. The magazine had no thematic sections, but it is possible to identify several main headings: propaganda and educational materials, popular scientific articles, short news, literary life. The “short news” part presented items on the activities of not only the Union of Atheists, but also of the first scientific organization—Buruchkom. The history of overcoming religiousness and inculcating the new ideology found reflection in the works of fiction the magazine published. Young writers, scientists, and educators (Kh. Namsaraev, Ts. Don, D. Madason) collaborated with Erdem ba Shazhan. The magazine also contained visual materials: photos, drawings, caricatures. It is worth noting the original design of the magazine cover made by Ts. Sampilov. Along with other publications in the Mongolian script, Erdem ba Shazhan promoted the development of atheistic education. The magazine illustrated the most diverse aspects of the life of the Buryat population with an emphasis on the scientific nature of events. Thus, the publication of the magazine Erdem ba Shazhan had a significant impact on the development of the atheistic movement in the republic, along with more accessible forms of printed propaganda in the form of posters and other visual means, such as cinema and theater. In general, this magazine compensated for the lack of specialized literature in the Buryat language, being the only methodological guide for a network of atheist cells in rural areas.

El mundo está en todas partes: la creación literaria de Bernardo Atxaga ed. by Iker González-Allende, and José Ángel Ascunce Arrieta

Reviewed by: El mundo está en todas partes: la creación literaria de Bernardo Atxaga ed. by Iker González-Allende, and José Ángel Ascunce Arrieta David Laraway González-Allende, Iker, and José Ángel Ascunce Arrieta, editors. El mundo está en todas partes: la creación literaria de Bernardo Atxaga. Anthropos, 2018. Pp. 318. ISBN 978-8-41755-602-0. Few living writers know what it means to bear the weight of an entire literary tradition, representing it synecdochally to readers who lack linguistic access to its primary sources. Fewer still know what it is like to work in a language as poorly understood and as limited in its geographical and demographic reach as Euskera. In this regard, Bernardo Atxaga (the pseudonym of Joseba Irazu Garmendia) is in rare company and, although he is by no means the only author writing in the Basque language who currently enjoys a readership beyond the borders of Euskal Herria—his contemporary Ramon Saizarbitoria has found some success in translation, as have younger writers such as Kirmen Uribe—, his works remain, for most of his readers, their primary connection to the Basque-language literary tradition. If Atxaga remains for a majority of readers the primary point of entry into that tradition, then this new collection of essays provides a helpful on-ramp to Atxaga’s work for readers and scholars whose knowledge of him might be non-existent or limited to just one or two books. The title of this volume of Spanish-language essays, El mundo está en todas partes: la creación literaria de Bernardo Atxaga, evokes the now-canonical declaration that originally appeared in the epilogue to the Spanish-language translation of Atxaga’s most celebrated book, Obabakoak (1989): “El mundo está en todas partes, y Euskal Herria ya no es solamente Euskal Herria, sino . . . el lugar donde el mundo toma el nombre de Euskal Herria” (10). The fourteen chapters that comprise El mundo está en todas partes (along with the editors’ introduction and a lengthy interview with Atxaga) aim to locate Atxaga’s literary worlds with respect to the broader literary and political worlds that encompass and interpenetrate them. If these essays share a common theme it is that, to borrow a concept from Annabel Martín’s excellent contribution to the volume, Atxaga’s work is shot through with a fascination for problems of scale and scalability, between the intimate details woven into his misleadingly unassuming and accessible tales and the abstract questions of ethics, politics, and one’s place in the world to which they seem to inevitably give rise. The essays gathered here are notable for not only the diversity of their concerns and the methodological tools that they bring to bear in the exploration of them, but the number and range of Atxaga’s texts that they examine. Obabakoak is far and away the most popular of his works and it is rightly the focus of a well-crafted essay (by José Manuel López de Abiada); so too are his other best sellers, including Gizona bere bakardadean (The Lone Man) (essay by Annabel Martín) and Soinujolearen semea (The Accordionist’s Son) (essay by Mari Jose Olaziregi). But perhaps the primary virtue of El mundo está en todas partes is the fact that Atxaga’s most canonical works do not monopolize the spotlight. An unusually broad cross-section of his texts receive attention here: these include his early avant-garde poetry (cf. the essay by Lourdes Otaegi Imaz on Etiopía) and his less heralded but otherwise important formal experiments gathered in Poemas & Híbridos (the subject of an illuminating study by Juan José Lanz). Often overlooked by critics but much appreciated by his Basque-language readers, Atxaga’s popular juvenile literature receives scrutiny here as well, in no fewer than three separate essays. And lesser known, more recent, texts such as Nevadako egunak (Days of Nevada) are the subject of the attention of some of Atxaga’s most celebrated scholars, including Jon Kortazar. It seems safe to say that these essays in particular are likely to provide essential reference points in the future as scholars increasingly turn their attention to some of his...

Ivan Bunin’s Attraction: The Formation of a Creative Personality

This article examines Ivan Bunin’s early work Attraction (1897), whose complete version was first published in 2019. The author demonstrates that the story features a number of attributes related to the portrayal of characters, plot organisation, chronotope, narration, and intertextuality, all of which help compare the young writer’s style with his later works, understand the patterns of his style’s evolution, and trace the genesis of Bunin’s original artistic philosophy and writing manner. The first chapter is a classical exposition and not only is it an example of well-learned lessons of Russian literature, but it also unveils the author’s creative search. It is characterised by compositional completeness, contains a prequel of the main story and a description of the main character, and sets the main plot lines. The first chapter is already indicative of the writer’s style / narrative strategy, which unites lyrical and epic aspects on the one hand and has features of a unique identity on the other. From there on, the writer builds his narrative based on the “manor text” of Russian literature, focuses his attention on the most important features of the text (such as the motif of silence), complementing them with new tonal and semantic shades, and an emphasised and even excessive substantivity of description. The characters’ psychological attributes are original too. Their system and order are akin to the traditional love triangle pattern complicated, however, by depicting the lead character surrounded by female characters, which, aside from the “manor text”, connects this story with Natalie. A wide variety of literary sources as well as the inaccuracy of citation show the future writer’s tendency to “rewriting” quotes, which was to become an important factor of conceptualisation of the author’s thought in Bunin’s creative work. The analysis of the story also shows that the aspiring writer felt free and organically fit the world of Russian literature.

Time for Childhoods: Young Poets and Questions of Agency by Rachel Conrad

Reviewed by: Time for Childhoods: Young Poets and Questions of Agency by Rachel Conrad Amy Fish (bio) Rachel Conrad. Time for Childhoods: Young Poets and Questions of Agency. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2020. Time for Childhoods insists on the value of poetry authored by children for its own sake, in its own time. Merging literary criticism with social science, Rachel Conrad works to dispel common biases against young people's writing and shape an interpretive approach to the genre. She urges a "shif[t] from thinking of children as potential artists training for a future in which they can express themselves and contribute to cultural life … [to] acknowledging that young people can be artists or poets in the present, now, while they are young" (xii). The resulting study not only makes "time for childhoods" but also clears space for future research and teaching on child-authored literature. As she advocates for young people's verse, Conrad champions interdisciplinary childhood studies. Perspectives from psychology, sociology, and education studies enable Conrad to conceptualize young people's agency and to critique teleologies of development that evaluate young people solely in the terms of their potential as future adults. These social science elements frame literary close readings of youth-authored verse, which build on lyric poetry criticism, as well as recent work on child authorship by such scholars as Victoria Ford Smith, Laurie Langbauer, and Katharine Capshaw. Whereas these three critics represent the strength of the field in historical cases of children's writing, Conrad devotes half her book to young writers of the twenty-first century. This contemporary emphasis may inspire us to attend to present-day children's ways with words as seriously as we monitor the ongoing production of adult-authored children's literature. In a fresh contribution to conversations on young people's literary agency, Conrad focuses on child poets' exercise of "temporal agency" (1). "Rather than taking time as an unproblematic given or fixed timeline," she argues, young people use their verse to "work with time as a pliable medium that they can shape and reshape" (40). Conrad grounds this idea in children's everyday experiences and actions, as illustrated in an anecdote of her young child Sammy's use of "slow-motion leave-takings" (13). By taking as much time as possible over such preparatory acts as the donning of socks and shoes, despite parental preferences otherwise, Sammy found a way to manage transitions in activity and setting. The concept of temporal agency proves equally relevant to young people's negotiations of intersectional structures of power, as in Aurelia Davidson's [End Page 208] "Trapped," a 1980 winner of a prize for youth-authored verse created by then-Illinois Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks. Conrad tracks the timecentered moves by which Davidson's speaker escapes her constrained state as "'a little Black girl TRAPPED'" by "'the white man.'" As repetitive lines communicating futility and frustration give way to a fast-paced array of assertive actions—"'I look, / I learn / And I sing, / And I dance'"—the speaker shakes free of the set terms of oppression: "'And OUT I COME—/from the past'" (51). Davidson thus consigns to history what Conrad aptly terms the "drawn-out present" while laying claim to an agential future (53). Drawing on Michelle M. Wright's work on the epistemology of blackness, Conrad suggests that only by disrupting linear time, a poetic practice that Conrad terms "dynamic temporality," can Davidson liberate her identity as "a little Black girl." This specificity regarding young poets' confrontations with racism and patriarchy attests to the value of Conrad's temporal lens and constitutes a strength of Time for Childhoods as a whole. An introductory chapter unfolds the role of time in children's work, setting the stage for four case studies surfacing temporal agency in young people's verse. Archival research drives two historical chapters, each focused on a black woman poet's work with primarily young writers of color. Chapter 2 highlights Brooks's cultivation of child poets in the 1970s and 1980s. Chapter 5 examines The Voice of the Children, a Brooklyn-based youth writing collective directed by poet June Jordan and teacher Terri Bush in...

How to Build a Story … or, the Big What If by Frances O'Roark Dowell

Reviewed by: How to Build a Story … or, the Big What If by Frances O'Roark Dowell Deborah Stevenson, Editor Dowell, Frances O'Roark How to Build a Story … or, the Big What If; illus. by Stacy Ebert. Dlouhy/Atheneum, 2020 [128p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781534438422 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781534438446 $10.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 3-6 Multitalented author Dowell (of the Sam the Man early reader series and subtle, insightful older fiction such as The Secret Language of Girls, BCCB 7/04) turns here to advice for young writers. After a quick introduction, the book offers compact chapters on starting your story, building your characters, working your way through the challenging middle section, and the importance of obstacles and adversity to storytelling. Dowell keeps her advice usefully technical and thus actionable, including examples of hypothetical possibilities as well as shoutouts to well-known novels, and wrapping up each chapter with quick go-to sections entitled "The Big Take-Home," "Writers, Start Your Engines!," and "Let's Write!" While some of the advice is of the tried-and-true variety that's in other writing guides, Dowell's focus on the challenges of each part of the book and wise advice are sure to help aspiring writers, and the format and friendly illustrations help make this accessible to younger audiences, especially those eager advanced readers keen to become writers. The advice about how to find a good "editor" (reader who will give feedback) and ways to share work outside of brick and mortar publishing are particularly novel, to pardon the pun. Hopeful young authors will find this a highly useful and confidence-building guide. Copyright © 2020 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Homo Holocaustus, or Autobiographical Female Experience of the Holocaust

The aim of this paper is to present the motif of the Shoah in female autobiographcial prose after the year 2000. The paper shows that, in recent years, more and more female authors in the second and third post-Holocaust generations have been recording their traumatic experience, and that the reason for it lies in the social stigmatization of Jewish people. It is stressed here that the issues of the Holocaust are part and parcel of a cultural taboo and – similarly to female written prose – they are frequently ignored or evaluated negatively. The Holocaust issues are tackled by contemporary young writers of Jewish descent who – contrary to the previous generation authors – have not experienced the mass murder of Jews; nevertheless, they feel its effects today. This paper proves that the research into trauma studies is not really conducted in Poland, and paying attention to a female viewpoint is very rare. The examples referred to in the paper of the autobiographical novels by Ewa Kuryluk, Agata Tuszyńska, Roma Ligocka and Magdalena Tulli demonstrate that this kind of writing is becoming more and more important within the literature focused on the Shoah. Compared to the autobiographical fiction by Marek Bieńczyk, Jan Tomasz Gross and Michał Głowiński, female Holocaust stories are distinguished by their authenticity, emotionality, intimacy and honesty of narration. The stories are devoid of any pathos, and they highlight the figure of a mother. Moreover, their confessions are based on the physical feeling of the legacy which has remained in their hearts and minds after the trauma that their loved ones had to experience. An attempt to describe prose post-Holocaust prose is made in comparison to Jewish literature in Poland, drawing the reader’s attention to the characteristic features of these issues compared to the autobiographical works by men.

It Would Be Easier to Stop Talking to Your Ghost

It Would Be Easier to Stop Talking to Your Ghost Stella Li (bio) if I could compare you to pear blossoms, sister, licks of cream that drizzle the air smelling like shit. Buttery funk, stippled gold wooing salt from my eyes, maybe this is how spring is meant to be: a tremble of winter. But the shrine in your room beckons to me every so often. On Sundays and holy days, I line the shelves: A glass cat, a clay pot the color ofmud caked across a bay mare, two shadows of brown against parchment corsages. Shallow- welled candles and a lazy-eyed tiger. I ask after you this way, offering things brittle and withering and fragrant and dusted soft. I fill your bed with heaps of linen. Count down until you return. A bralette, rippled and pilled. T-shirts washed quiet against my skin, two holes in thearmpit. In the bathroom next to ours, I stare at the lace in the toilet bowl, the smattering of piss. I wonder if this mirror is a little kinder than the others, if she will forgive me for searching for your face in her. From the top of the stairs, your voicesounds like crumpling origami, pestle grinding mortar. I want to ask. Can you hear me listening mid- flight. Will I ever find a way to fill the emptiness with snow. [End Page 64] newton, no. 3 in shanghai I pulled my body through a temple / pushed an umbrella against the sky. under the soupy grey / I drew dishwater through my teeth / rumbled / hurled myself back into the wet. you / & I, over / and over / again: we pulled our ghosts / & held suitcases against our bellies / & lurched down the subway stairs, rain- / falling against our ankles. in his apartment, so quiet / so overwhelmed with bodies / I pushed the table in circles / pulled lotus root & sweet osmanthus / & pink- / pearled shrimp / & liver & skin-crisp / & sea / & cucumber into orbit. the clementine was green / I remember. I slicked apologies across my forehead / showered off the exhaust / spilt hot water on my knee / etc. etc. in my dreams, the yellow river was the color of coffee / cream, no sugar / it tasted like pith. tiger leaping gorge: the water fought itself white. it is still maybe / the ugliest feline I have ever seen. each day broke / on compromise. we could not push the mountain to / breakage so we pulled our feet up the steps. we climbed towards the lights in the canal / & lost at the mahjong tables. we climbed the splitting stairway / & melted milk popsicles into the dirt. I rowed into the water / biked on the walls / cupped a buddha’s cheeks in my hands / tripped through the bamboo. I curled my spine over a bridge / but grandma would not let me pull the cat / from below. in tibet we sucked oxygen into our lungs from / cans. paid extra just to breathe. in those months when I fevered at the cheeks I dreamt / the cicada shelled from the body became ring thumbed against my lips. I pulled / summers up from the ground by the fist- / full. the sun intensified / kindly / & the distance between home / & home shrank to the width of a freeway. in all of my dreams I am running away from some- / body. cigarette fumes and the musk of a flooded city follow me as I / knock apartment buildings down like dominos. watch the pushing & pulling. awake / I recall that there is no way back / forward. [End Page 65] Stella Li Stella Li is a high school senior from West Windsor, New Jersey. An alumna of the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop and an editor of Ephimiliar Journal, she has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, the Kenyon Review Short Nonfiction Contest, the National Flash Fiction Day Competition, the National Poetry Quarterly, and her mother, among others. Copyright © 2021 Pleiades Press

The Steadfast Attention of Sigrid Nunez

The Steadfast Attention of Sigrid Nunez Tara K. Menon (bio) A Feather on the Breath of God by Sigrid Nunez (Picador, 1995)Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury by Sigrid Nunez (Harper, 1998)For Rouenna by Sigrid Nunez (Picador, 2001)The Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nunez (Picador, 2007)Salvation City by Sigrid Nunez (Riverhead, 2010)Sempre Susan by Sigrid Nunez (Riverhead, 2014)The Friend by Sigrid Nunez (Riverhead, 2018)What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez (Riverhead, 2020) In 2018, Sigrid Nunez won the National Book Award for The Friend, her rousing novel about a woman who, after the suicide of her friend, finds herself saddled with grief and a two-hundred-pound Great Dane. Nunez is no stranger to prestigious prizes (she is the winner of a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship) or to critical acclaim (each of her seven previous books was widely lauded), but the combination [End Page 640] of this award and the universally rapturous reviews of the novel finally found her, at the age of sixty-seven, the wide readership she deserves. (In my opinion, Nicholas Ortega’s gorgeous cover design with its regal Harlequin Great Dane and beach-ball-bright colors deserves partial credit for the novel’s commercial success.) Her modest acceptance speech at the awards ceremony displayed the same qualities — honesty, humor, warmth — that give the novel its appeal: I was lucky enough as a child to have had a mother and teachers who taught me that whatever happened in life, however bad things might get, I could always escape by reading a book. I was lucky enough to keep on meeting them, people who believed that reading and writing were the best things a person could do with her life. And to learn what Alan Bennett was getting at when he said that for a writer nothing is ever quite as bad as it is for other people because however dreadful, it may be of use. I became a writer not because I was seeking community but rather because I thought it was something I could do alone and hidden in the privacy of my own room. How lucky to have discovered that writing books made the miraculous possible, to be removed from the world and to be a part of the world at the same time. And tonight, how happy I am to feel like a part of the world. She was faultlessly gracious, but listening closely you got the sense she might have preferred to be at home with a book. Nunez views writing as an exalted vocation; it requires a lifetime of dedication and as few distractions as possible. She didn’t marry or have children, she supplements her writing income with adjunct teaching, [End Page 641] and you will not find her on social media. She is, in other words, the kind of writer whose demise the man at the center of The Friend laments. The man, who is the unnamed narrator’s friend, mentor, and onetime lover, is addressed as “you” throughout the novel. “You” is a writer and teacher who is full of contempt for his students. He rails against everything: the commercial ambitions of aspiring young writers, the desire for “safe spaces,” accusations about writing as cultural appropriation, and, especially, complaints about his inappropriate behavior in the classroom. For a man who has spent his life sleeping with his students, this political correctness thing really has gone too far. The old-fashioned word for “you” is womanizer; some might say shameless lech. Today, whatever you choose to call him, he’d be the subject of a Title IX investigation. For what it’s worth, Nunez doesn’t paint the young women as agency-less victims of his advances. Instead, the many willing participants are in it for “the thrill of bringing an older man in a position of authority to his knees.” (The novel teems with astute sociological observations.) The narrator paints a scathing picture of an out-of-touch and endlessly self-pitying man, but you also get the sense that she shares his dismay about the fragile youth, his contempt for self-obsessed, gossip-mongering...

«Другое дело Толстые...» А. К. Толстой в бунинском опыте исторической рефлексии: жанровый аспект темы памяти

The article deals with I. A. Bunin’s perception of the personality and works by A. K. Tolstoy. The key components of this reception are the system of philosophy of history views formulated by A. K. Tolstoy and his concept of historical memory. The belonging of the 19 th century poet to the large Tolstoy family was mythologized by Bunin and became a reason for understanding and determining the young writer’s own position in relation to each of the three writers: L. N. Tolstoy, A. K. Tolstoy and Bunin’s contemporary A. N. Tolstoy. The paper draws upon fictional and nonfictional documents by I. A. Bunin and A. K. Tolstoy. Bunin’s reception of the personality and artistic heritage by A. K. Tolstoy was determined by the history of his origin. The Tolstoy family attracted Bunin’s attention because it was an illustration of his own concept of the literary gift as a “family affair”. Leo Tolstoy enjoyed an undisputed genius and generally recognized family reputation. Aleksey N. Tolstoy’s biography, on the contrary, was ambiguous – the fact that inspired Bunin’s scandalous hints in his essay “The Third Tolstoy”. Aleksey K. Tolstoy’s biographical path of was also surrounded by similar rumors – but Bunin in his article “Inonia and Kitezh” prefers to keep silent on them. In the 1900s, A. K. Tolstoy appeared to Bunin as a rival poet, and in the eyes of Bunin’s contemporaries as the one of his main literary predecessors. Bunin’s poem “Kurgan” was a kind of poetic response to A. K. Tolstoy’s ballad “Kurgan” dedicated to the problem of historical oblivion. These works-doublets could serve as an illustration of one of the types of literary “revision” introduced by H. Bloom. Bunin developed the plot of A. K. Tolstoy’s “Kurgan” in the elegiac genre and demonstrated the value of the past in the present. Since 1918, Bunin’s perception of Tolstoy’s legacy has changed. A. K. Tolstoy’s views of the Russian history are publicly emphasized in the “Cursed Days”, “Mission of the Russian Emigration” and “Inonia and Kitezh”. According to A. K. Tolstoy, the historical catastrophe for Russia was programmed by “Tatar yoke”, which distorted the European character of the national culture and personality and later drove the nation to the particularly Asian, as Tolstoy thought, phenomenon of Ivan the Terrible. Borrowing some modern ideas from the natural sciences, Bunin transferred a number of A. K. Tolstoy’s observations into an anthropological sphere and pointed out specific signs of the “Mongolian” traces in Bolsheviks’ Russia.

Text in and out of school – a dialogical rhetorical analysis

Young people’s school texts and young people’s literacy practices are starting to get well explored. However, young people’s texts from out of school, and the relations between school and leisure time in young people’s textual utterances, are largely under-researched. Reading and analyzing young people’s texts from in and out of school can give a new angle to address this question of gaps and bridges. The present article gives an analysis of two texts from in and out of school by a fifteen year old boy, with the research questions concerned with how different texts and contexts produce different conditions for expressing oneself, and how a young writer answers to these through his texts. The analysis draws on terms from dialogism and rhetoric. The analysis shows that while the texts analyzed answer to different exigences in school and free time, the writer also to some extent uses similar textual strategies in his answering work.

LITERATURE AND ANTHROPOLOGY (ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF ROBERT MÜLLER AND ERNST JÜNGER)

e aim of the article is to examine some works of two authors from the first half of the 20th century, both native speakers of the German language in order to look for common mental constructs and symbols. Many literary critics comparing Robert Müller and Ernst Jünger emphasize the similar roles they played in the literatures of Austria and Germany, respectively. Robert Müller and Ernst Jünger leave the impression that they search for order in the contradictory universe and if they do not find it, they create it. They are both social analysts, they are multi-talented, both dreamers and travelers, obsessed by pure ideas, within whose framework they try to sort out everything that exists, they are both idealists. Robert Müller is Head of the Academic Society for Literature and Music in Vienna and founder of the illicit organization "Katakomba" and the Vienna Association of Magazines Pubishers and author of numerous publications. Despite the numerous attempts to portray his work in its true light and to show his great role in the German-speaking cultural area, Ernst Jünger's reception in Germany is permanently marked by his image of the person and officer Ernst Jünger. The reasons for this is, on the one hand, moral tabooing in Germany after the Second World War, and, on the other hand, his internal development, which has transformed the "scandalous" young writer into a fully integrated member of bourgeois life which he used to highly criticize in his early years.

SKILL OF CREATING A SIMPLE SYSTEM IN MODERN LITERATURE (ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE NOVEL “HARDENED FEELINGS” A.A. GANIEVA)

Contemporary Russian literature develops on the basis of Russian classical traditions, while at the same time creatively rethinking the problems and themes, principles and techniques of the artistic work of classic writers. Today, different artistic systems coexist at the same time, realism is developing in a complex interweaving with naturalism, modernism, sentimentalism, etc. All this makes up the general picture of modern Russian literature. Hence the understanding of the last decades of the 20th - beginning of the 21st centuries as a special period in the general development of Russian literature. Before you start talking about the modern literary process, you need to remember what the concept of “literary process” means. As we know, the literary process is a historical movement of national and world literature, which developed in complex relationships and interactions. Also, the literary process is the story of the accumulation of aesthetic and spiritual moral values. Today, there are several concepts of the modern literary process, which are very diverse and contradictory in content. Modern young writers and their work gain their circle of lovers and connoisseurs of Russian literature, which, at times, inspires with its number and scope. The author of the article focuses on the problem of the existence of realism, its place and role in modern Russian literature. For a more detailed analysis, the works of a young Russian writer, prose writer, critic and journalist - Alice Arkadyevna Ganieva are taken. The study revealed the main features of the image system in the work of this, still young, writer.