Book
Triumph der Rache: Joachim Wilhelm von Brawe und die Ästhetik der Aufklärung
The chapter juxtaposes Veselovsky’s theory of the persistence of forms with the set of critical practices known as New Historicism, and shows that both approaches exclude the possibility of new forms arising. The chapter suggests that both the oblivion of an old form and the rise of the new result from a fundamental shift in perception that occurs within the order of verbal creativity and does not lend itself to a historical-deterministic explanation.
This article analyzes how the ‘progressive’ imagination of democratically minded intellectuals in Russia discursively produces the internal ‘other’ – Vladimir Putin’s supporters – as a singular monolithic subject whose ‘underdeveloped’ intellectual condition is judged against an imagined scale of human progression. Discussing the case study of a Russian independent radio station Echo of Moscow, the author argues that its democratizing anti-Putin discourse is organized along the lines of a mythological narrative well known since colonial times: struggle between ‘moderns’ identifying themselves with progress and ‘barbarians’ whose barbarian identity is ascribed to them by modernizers. Drawing on postcolonial and media studies, the author suggests that antidemocratic divisions into ‘civilized’ wedom and ‘underdeveloped’ theydom are unavoidable until we realize the full extent of the enslaving potential of the progressive narrative of the Enlightenment.
The duty of the patriot prince: Russian manuscript translations and monarchical discourse of the Enlightenment in the third quarter of the XVIII-th century
The article examines three translations made in the 1750s-1760-s from French into Russian. The first is François de Fenelon’s Directions pour la conscience d'un roi, which was translated by prince Mikhail Shcherbatov (1758), the second is the anonymous Pensées politiques sur les devoirs d’un roi citoyen, which was the work of an unknown translator, most likely by the order of Roman or Mikhail Vorontsov (between 1754 and 1756), and the last one is known in two copies and was done from the French translation of Idea of a Patriot King by Henry Bolingbroke (first half of the 1760s) - one of them belonged to the brothers Nikita and Pyotr Panin.
Studying the Russian translations of Western political writings allows us to reconstruct the intellectual context in which a new discourse of power emerged in the third quarter of the XVIII-century. These texts reflected the “state of mind” of the Russian ruling elite, who, under the influence of the Enlightenment ideas, demanded «freedom of the Nobility» and «moderate monarchy». Circulation of these translations in handwritten form showed a limited circle of readers for whom these books were intended. All three texts are characterized by an almost messianic expectation of a perfect monarch, who will improve the morals and manners of his subjects and return their liberties by the establishing of a true «uchrezhdenie» (constitution). The Russian educated nobility had a common way of thinking and it was very similar to the political conceptions of the Western European elite, which actively produced in the Age of Enlightenment an updated monarchical discourse, at the centre of which was the idea of the «king - citizen/patriot», who dedicated himself to society’s good. At the same time, the “common good” in this conception always coincided with the basic interests of the ruling elite.
The O.A. Zhukova's article presents the idea that Vyazemsky creates aesthetic canon of Russian classics, showing the process of universalization of aesthetic values in Russian culture. He consistently defended the thesis of the necessary of national literature in relationship with spiritual traditions and civil institutions of the people. The author reveals the aesthetic sense of the Vyzemsky's program, wich structural elements are the language as a form of expression of thought, historism in the formation of national literature and the ideas of the Enlightenment.
Aristotle’s neat compartmentalization notwithstanding (Poetics, ch. 9), historians and playwrights have both been laying claim to representations of the past – arguably since Antiquity, but certainly since the Renaissance. At a time when narratology challenges historiographers to differentiate their “emplotments” (White) from literary inventions, this thirteen-essay collection takes a fresh look at the production of historico-political knowledge in literature and the intricacies of reality and fiction.
Written by experts who teach in Germany, Austria, Russia, and the United States, the articles provide a thorough interpretation of early modern drama (with a view to classical times and the 19th century) as an ideological platform that is as open to royal self-fashioning and soteriology as it is to travestying and subverting the means and ends of historical interpretation. The comparative analysis of metapoetic and historiosophic aspects also sheds light on drama as a transnational phenomenon, demonstrating the importance of the cultural net that links the multifaceted textual examples from France, Russia, England, Italy, and the Netherlands.
The paper is focused on the study of reaction of italian literature critics on the publication of the Boris Pasternak's novel "Doctor Jivago". The analysys of the book ""Doctor Jivago", Pasternak, 1958, Italy" (published in Russian language in "Reka vremen", 2012, in Moscow) is given. The papers of italian writers, critics and historians of literature, who reacted immediately upon the publication of the novel (A. Moravia, I. Calvino, F.Fortini, C. Cassola, C. Salinari ecc.) are studied and analised.
In the article the patterns of the realization of emotional utterances in dialogic and monologic speech are described. The author pays special attention to the characteristic features of the speech of a speaker feeling psychic tension and to the compositional-pragmatic peculiarities of dialogic and monologic text.