Том 17, № 3 (2019)

Largely overlooked by scholars the religious context of Ryleev’s writing became the focus of our research. The narrative poem “Vladimir the Saint” originally called duma was not published during the poet’s lifetime. Being studied in an axiological aspect the central conflict of the poem is interpreted from a completely different angle. An analysis of the artistic structure covers a number of important points, that distinguish the duma’s plot from the historical source, and prioritizes the opposition between Christianity and paganism that brings forward the antithesis of true and false values. The study clearly shows that the motif of conscience occupying the central place in the plot directly associates the ideological system to Christian anthropology. So, the transformation of a traditional impulse for the protagonist’s separation from the world being usual for Romanticism elevates the idea of salvation as central and plot-generating in the poem. The final leaves the impression of incompleteness, thus, the title of the work anticipates future events and the poem depicts only the initial situation whereof the prince’s path to holiness begins.

The article is dedicated to a comprehensive analysis of the problems of studying the poetic “The Missive of Belinsky to Dostoevsky” (“A knight of a sad character…”), that is a burlesque text hardly survived to our days in the lists of different credibility and without a definite authorship. The former research approaches to the problems of poem’s sources, authorship and dating are generalized and analyzed in a critical way in the article. A hypothesis, put forward before by V. N. Zakharov, about the participation in the creation of this joint writing of Ivan Panaev along with Turgenev and Nekrasov, is confirmed. Based on the analysis of the architectonics of “The Missive…” a reasoned hypothesis about two editions of the text — an early, brief one and a final, detailed one, is presented. The article makes an attempt of reconstruction of the brief edition that complies better with a genre type of “The Missive…”. In the context of the given hypothesis about the history of the text of the writing the approaches to its dating were specified. The article makes comments on some content elements of the text providing additional information for solving the given problems.

The motif of the “fateful inheritance” in the novel “The Idiot” by F. M. Dostoevsky is discussed in the article from three viewpoints: first, its facts related to the Moscow world of the Kumanin family, many members of which became prototypes of the characters of the novel are commented; second, the “Kumanin’s trace” is evidentiated in its plot. The real commentary is accompanied with the analysis of a mythopoetic model of the inheritance motif implementation. Its attributes are the “bundle” in the hands of Knyaz Myshkin (Knyaz is a historical Slavic title, used both as a royal and noble title in different times of history and different ancient Slavic lands) and the “case” (“letter”), which are “mysteriously” interlinked. A chain connection between these details in the novel reflects a consistent plot development of the motif of the fatal inheritance, elaborated in accordance with a cumulative logic of the solution to a folkloric riddle. Another characteristic feature of its mythopoetics is a symbolic parallelism of destinies and characters of Rogozhin and Myshkin. Third, the article reveals the connection between the inheritance motif in Dostoevsky’s text and the literary tradition, primarily with the works of L. Tolstoy and Balzac. Thus, the parodic reactualization of an early essay “Unhappy” written by the French writer in the libel of Keller and Lebedev marks Dostoevsky’s transition to an “eminent realism”, that is confirmed by the general dynamics of the work upon the “Idiot”, that is finally reduced to the synthesis of personal experience with literary tradition and cultural memory. As a result, the article comes to a conclusion that during the process of an artistic implementation of the fateful inheritance motif in the novel “Idiot” there took place a contamination of the autobiographical narrative with the corresponding folkloric-mythological and literary models. 

The article is devoted to theoretical and practical issues that emerge while preparing the historical (“real”) commentary on Dostoevsky’s writings. The work studies traditional and modern approaches to commenting of literary texts, provides variants of the classification of linguistic commentaries of different types, and identifies types that are relevant to the study of Dostoevsky’s works. In the article, as exemplified in Dostoevsky’s novel “The Idiot” (its handwritten and printed texts), the question of the tasks, subject, content and limits of a historical (“real”) commentary on literary texts is examined. The problem of the word interpretation is analyzed taking into account the semantic context. The article analyzes the issues of commenting the names of real historical persons and characters, allusions to historical ideas, biblical quotes, literary intertexts, including auto-reminiscences. As a result of the accomplished analysis, the historical (“real”) commentary on Dostoevsky’s novel “The Idiot” was refined, clarified and supplemented.

The article implements a socio-cultural approach to the study of a work of art. The text containing information for reconstruction by the reader of social and cultural space, contemporary to the writer, is emphasized in the work of fiction. The content of the story “The Figure” by N. S. Leskov is determined by the socio-cultural conflict that develops during Easter days, which contradicts the atmosphere of joy, harmony and triumph of faith typical of Easter. This situation allows the writer to show the originality of socio-cultural relations in society. Easter, like other religious holidays, expresses Christian cultural universals, archetypes and values that determine (though not limit) the content of the “cultural core” of society. One of the universals is the idea of forgiveness, manifested in the text in the motif of forgiveness. However, this cultural dominant is contrary to the idea of “officer’s honor” and “noble pride”, which is centric for the army and noble subcultures, and is responsible for the behavior of their representatives. Leskov shows that as a result of the conflict, the main character, carrying out into practice the idea of forgiveness day-to-day, becomes a maverick, creating his own social niche, which also becomes a refuge for an outcast Christy and her illegitimate daughter. The marginal group formed by the characters becomes the guardian of the basic Christian values (“cultural core”), designed to unite Russian society. An image of the Figure is an image of a righteous man. All Leskov’s men of God are marginalized in the context of their social status. The analysis of the socio-cultural text in the story “The Figure” makes it possible to understand the deep reasons for the contradictory attitude of society (social classes and groups) to the phenomenon of righteousness, to the righteous as people who implement the Christian commandments in worldly life and aspire to God. The use of a socio-cultural approach to the analysis of a literary text allows us to conclude about a large scale of the author’s picture of the world: even in the works, the plot of which is based on an anecdote or a curious case from the life of the character, the writer creates “conditions” for their understanding in the socio-cultural context.

The article studies personal and creative relations as well as mutual opinions of A. M. Remizov (1877–1957) and V. V. Khlebnikov (1885–1922), mainly by the elder writer. Remizov became the first writer-symbolist Khlebnikov got acquainted with in 1908 after his arrival in Saint Petersburg. In the context of personal relations the article presents and interprets a number of facts testifying about close ties established between the writers in the period from autumn 1908 to January 1910, when Khlebnikov considered Remizov his elder friend and teacher. Klebnikov’s attitude became especially clear during the so called “Remizov’s plagiarism case”, when the poet was ready to challenge to a duel the insulter of his friend. But the thing that really brought them together was their interest for East Slavic mythology and archaic layers of the Russian language. The involvement of Khlebnikov in the movement of futurists and his aggressive position towards the symbolists let to the altercation with Remizov that, however, did not influence their common creative focus on the search for a “Russian style”. During the years of emigration Remizov’s interest for the personality and work of Khlebnikov manifested in the memoirs of the writer, was to a great extent maintained by philologists and men of letters of the Russian expatriate community, among them D. P. Svyatolpolk-Mirsky and particularly, V. F. Markov who was working on the history of the Russian literary avantgarde. The article comes to some preliminary conclusions about a common edifying role of Remizov and Khlebnikov in the literary process (“writers for writers”) and the belonging of both of them to a “patriotic movement” in the literature of Russian modernism of the first third of the 20th century.