Vol 82, No 4 (2023)

. Mikhail Prishvin and Andrei Platonov are usually discussed as like-minded writers, proponents of Russian “cosmism”; however, during their lifetime, there existed a complex relationship between the two writers, and polemics arose between them more than once. Their debate was not limited to the literary plane; it expanded to include issues of environmental management and public good. Thus, Platonov very critically assessed Prishvin’s novella “Zhuravlinaya rodina” (“The Crane Homeland”) both as a writer and as a knowledgeable landscape ecologist. Yet another irritating coincidence, which added fuel to the annoyance, was the fact that Andrei Platonov’s literary “twin” – Alexey Platonov – happened to contribute his novella “Makar – karaiuschaya ruka” (“Makar-the-Punishing-Hand”) to the very same issue of the “Novy Mir” journal that contained “The Crane Homeland”. The present article examines in detail the hidden, but at the same time very cutting remarks by Andrei Platonov aimed against Prishvin and the literary group “Pass” – the remarks, which found their way into the posthumously published preface to his chronicle “Vprok” (“For the future”). The article ventures to account for such a stance.

The article traces the intertextual recoding of the iconic motifs of F.M. Dostoevsky’s novel “Crime and Punishment” (1866) in two conceptual novels by Yu.V. Mamleev “Wings of Horror” (1993) and “Wandering Time” (2000). In the process of analysis, the plot-forming role of the motive of voluptuousness in the works of Dostoevsky and Mamleev is revealed and its antinomic mystical-metaphysical modification is emphasized, as well as the semiotics of this motive in the ideological and compositional whole of these novels are compared. It is established that in “Wandering Time” the ideological murderers Raskolnikov and Poseev are divorced and converge through double recoding, the logic of which is due to the difference in the artistic and metaphysical views of both writers. The dynamics of such end-to-end images-symbols as “louse”, old woman (old man), “axe” is also studied in a comparative way. As a result, in comparison with previous studies, the framework of the “Dostoevsky code” in the novelistics of the founder of “metaphysical realism” is expanded and a number of its components gets comprehension. It becomes obvious that the reception of Dostoevsky by Mamleev consciously uses a segment of the language of Russian culture, of which Dostoevsky’s motives, images, symbols and concepts, as well as the meta-text that has arisen around them, to produce new meanings relevant, according to the writer of the turn of the 20th–21st centuries, spiritual and aesthetic trends of our modernity. The relevance of the article lies in the expansion of the analysis of Dostoevsky’s reception in the literature of the turn of the 20th–21st centuries. Scholarly novelty lies in the priority attraction of new material (Mamleev’s novelistics) and the hypothesis about the antinomic character of the motif of mystical voluptuousness. The conclusions of the article are obtained taking into account the scholarly context on the issues under study and call for further discussion.

The article is devoted to the analysis of literary relations between M.N. Muravyov and D.I. Khvostov. It is based on materials held by the Department of Manuscripts of the Russian State Library, the Department of Written Sources of the State Historical Museum and the Manuscript Department of the Institute of Russian Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences. These materials have not yet attracted the attention of researchers. In the paper we publish and comment Muravyov’s poem “To Dmitry Ivanovich Khvostov&8j1; and 13 letters to Khvostov. The new data shows that Muravyov played the role of an “intermediary&8j1; between the authorities and the Khvostov, and, consequently, participated in the formation of the cultural policy of Empress Catherine II.

The article analyzes the peculiarities of understanding the most important category of verisimilitude (vraisemblance) for the French aesthetics of the 17th century from the point of view of the French writer Charles Sorel, author of the “La vraye histoire comique de Francion” (1623–1633). Sorel attaches great importance to the category of verisimilitude, even to the point that he makes “vraisemblance” the main one for building the evolutionary system of the novel genre. In this case, in order to properly understand his creative and aesthetic views, it seems necessary to determine what exactly he understands by verisimilitude. Considering two fundamental aspects of the category of verisimilitude of the 17th century – rhetorical and mimetic – we analyze the particularities in the understanding of the category of verisimilitude by Sorel. Sorel rejects everything that concerns the rhetorical aspect of verisimilitude, that is, he denies everything that concerns the moralizing attitude of the work, focusing on the mimetic aspect, that is, on the proper embodiment of reality in a work of fiction. Nevertheless, despite the apparent similarity of Sorel’s position with the concept of mimesis, when analyzing his works, we see that his views are so different from the generally accepted model, allowing researchers to talk not about mimesis, but about Sorel’s counter-mimesis. This position anticipated the specifics of the literature of libertinage of the 18th century and the laws of realism in the literature of the 19th century.

In the present paper I make several observations on the semantics of Russian particle uzhe and alike. I suggest that contrastivity effect is central to its semantics. Crosslinguistically, such particles tend to develop into perfect markers in the course of grammaticalization process. I argue that it is exactly the presence of contrastive meaning in the semantics of such particles that favours this type of grammaticalization. The paper splits into two parts. The first part provides the semantic analysis of Russian particle uzhe. In the second part I show how the same type of analysis is applicable to the semantics of iamitive particles in the languages of the wold.