Том 22, № 3 (2024)

The authors analyze Shakespearean criticism and translation principles of Pyotr Petrovich Gnedich (1855–1925), prose writer, playwright, art critic, and famous theater figure of the turn of the 20th century. The purpose of the work is to clarify Gnedich’s place in Russian Shakespearean literature and to elucidate the vision of Shakespeare in his criticism. The objectives of the work include an overview of Gnedich’s translation and production contribution to the history of Russian theatrical Shakespeare; a study of Gnedich’s criticism of Shakespearean drama on the Russian stage; consideration of Gnedich’s translation principles as the precursors of the accurate translation school. Results of the work: Gnedich writes about Shakespeare, translates his plays and stages them over the course of his life; he does not deviate from the idea that Shakespearean drama is advanced and challenges the theater, first and foremost, the Russian theater. Gnedich measures the development of theatre according to Shakespeare and notes the sad neglect of his plays in the history of Russian theater: despite all of his efforts, from the dominance of everyday plays, the Russian theater shifts towards a predominance of new drama and symbolism. Gnedich’s translations are also inspired by the idea of updated, more accurate Shakespeare on the Russian stage. Thus, in his appeal to Shakespeare, Gnedich pursues new principles without yet naming them: in production work — he leans towards director’s theater, in translation — towards accurate translation (which will later be called “equirhythmic”.) Gnedich was the first to introduce “Julius Caesar” to the Russian stage in 1897 and the first to stage Shakespeare on a chamber stage (at the St. Petersburg Maly Theater of A. S. Suvorin). In 1922, Gnedich offers an unusual concept of the image of Hamlet as a typically Russian passive character, regarding the play as a kind of warning against the position of an inactive “superfluous man.”

This article examines “The Dead Man’s Mocking” (1834), one of the inserted stories from V. F. Odoevsky’s novel “Russian Nights” (1844). The ethical and aesthetic aspects of this story are analyzed from the viewpoint of the eschatological paradigm. It demonstrates that thanks to this paradigm, driven by the author’s religious worldview, which permeates all his works and predetermines the author’s special attitude to philosophical and social topics, the ethical and aesthetic aspects also acquire a religious meaning. The absence of love in the heroine, named Lisa by the author and “diametrically” compared with Karamzin’s heroine with the same name, is associated with her loss of religious faith, which emphasizes the impossibility of her resurrection within the framework of the eschatological paradigm. The composition of the “Fourth Night” from “Russian Nights,” to which “The Dead Man’s Mocking” belongs, reflects the spiritual crisis of the story’s fictional author and its overcoming, which leads to a rethinking of the role of romantic irony in the context of the eschatological paradigm. Taking into account the historiosophical and religious context, which develops in the novel through the dialogues of four friends led by Faust, the plot of this parable warns the reader against forgetting the humanistic and religious values inherent in the Russian people from time immemorial, against being carried away by European rationality, self-interest and from adherence to the essential and useful. The apocalyptic flood scene described in the short story serves the same purpose. Thus, attention to the eschatological paradigm helps to interpret both the poetics of V. F. Odoevsky’s story and its teleology.

The fairy tale “Putem-dorogoyu” by M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin is traditionally regarded to be an “accident” in the cycle of “Fairy Tales,” and is interpreted as a social story in terms of genre and thematically — as an invariant of the fairy tale “The Voron-Chelobitchik.” The author of the article believes that “Putem-dorogoyu” is an original work with its own problematics, which is not classified as “a story of everyday life” already by virtue of the author’s designation of the genre, namely, “conversation” (dialog). The dialog genre presupposes the fusion of philosophical and literary discourses; “conventionally schematic” type of interlocutor characters who often represent a certain ideological contrast. The heroes of “Putem-dorogoyu” Ivan Bodrov and Fyodor Golubkin personify opposite types of national consciousness, which is manifested in the semantics of their names, which have a stable system of connotations in the Russian anthroponymicon; the names largely determine their mode of behavior. In addition, the heroes’ dialog is projected onto mythological and fairy-tale plots about the dispute between Truth and Lie (Krivda), which allows to consider the problem of the search for Truth in the context of deep national-cultural attitudes and stereotypes; the struggle of the Christian world against the “non-Christian” world; to qualify the readiness of one of the heroes (Fyodor) to fight against the hostile society as readiness for Christian heroism and, hence, martyrdom. The poetics of the fairy tale, formed at the junction of philosophical dialog, magic-tale motifs (serpent-fighting, the way-road) and folk mythological symbolism, leads the reader to a complex of philosophical and historical reflections regarding Russia’s fate. The author’s concept of “Putem-dorogoyu” relates to the problem of violence, “blood” in history: the fairy tale can be regarded as the writer’s forecast of the upcoming historical upheavals.

The article is the first part of the study of the features of philosophical and artistic futurology in Russian cosmism of the 1920s — 1930s. The key principles of the approach to the topic of the future in the religious/philosophical and natural/scientific branches of Russian cosmism are revealed: a projective worldview, the unity of futurology and anthropology, the will to idealism, designing the future as a perfect world order, unity of purpose and means, the personal principle of the relationship betweennature and man, the idea of the need to improve the external world, and human nature. The article demonstrates how these principles manifest themselves in the artistic and philosophical experiments of A. K. Gorsky and V. N. Muravyov in the 1920s and 1930s. It investigates the role of the science fiction element in their texts, in which, on the one hand, an integral image of the future is presented as the basis of mankind’s collective activity, and on the other hand, it offers a critique of “fractional ideals” in history, and flawed versions of the future. It demonstrates how the introduction of science fiction plots and motifs contributes to the test of futurological ideals for strength.

The article is devoted to the concept of the Future as one of the key and comprehensive categories that characterize the work of V. V. Mayakovsky. The importance of this concept was already realized by the poet’s contemporaries M. Gorky, K. Chukovsky, M. Tsvetaeva. However, in the Soviet years, the topic was narrowed down to an ideologically motivated “communist future.” A significant methodological update that took place at the turn of the century allowed to expand the context of research, to compare Mayakovsky’s works about the future with the philosophical views of Russian cosmism, N. F. Fedorov’s ideas of the resurrection, the scientific theories of Lobachevsky, Tsiolkovsky, and Einstein. These achievements of Russian science were successfully integrated into the global cultural space, where the phenomenon of Mayakovsky was actively received. Against the background of various theoretical and methodological approaches to the study and interpretation of the Future, Mayakovsky’s worldview examines the poet’s characteristic desire to create an image of the life of a person and society dynamically, from the present time to several centuries ahead. To systematize the concepts associated with the concept of the Future, we propose a kind of a metaphorical time scale, on which four constants are designated on a vertical axis: today, tomorrow, future, and eternity. Each of the ascending levels is associated with the reflection of ideas about the Future, with its active development, inherent in Mayakovsky throughout his life. The desire to anticipate and bring the Future closer through creativity and the construction of utopian models of life, love, art, and an ideal society is clearly reflected at all the levels under consideration.

In pre-revolutionary fiction, the struggle of the worlds was perceived mainly as a clash between earthlings and an extraterrestrial civilization. After the emergence of the Soviet state, the struggle between the Bolshevik and antiBolshevik worlds became one of the key themes in fiction. By the early 1930s, the formula “struggle of the worlds” existed in Russian literature both as fantastic and non-fantastic, reflecting a real social confrontation. However, the idea of a world revolution as the goal and result of the struggle of the worlds is actually eliminated from science fiction. The social struggle, which can transform into an interstate conflict, by the end of the 1930s turns into a war of the worlds, where the military clash between the USSR and a hostile state is the decisive factor. The changes taking place in the international arena led to the fact that in science fiction, too, England and France are replaced by Germany, Italy and Japan as the main opponents. In the war of the future the victory is determined not by heroism and national unity, but also by military and technical superiority. Along with the apparently fantastic weapons possessed by both the USSR and the enemies in the future, the writers described technical achievements, whose fantastic nature is not always noticeable even to a non-specialist contemporary, since some weapons that were fantastic in the late 1930s already became a reality during the Great Patriotic War. One of the distinctive features of the works of 1938–1939 about the future war is the minimal differentiation between the fantastic and non-fantastic. On the one hand, there is no war yet, on the other hand, the distance between the future and the present is practically absent, and the “effect of the future” is leveled due to image of reality that maximally corresponds to the present. This artistic technique helps to convey to the reader the confidence that victory is the logical conclusion of the present, and not a fantasy.

The purpose of the article is to identify and characterize promising vectors of development of the Russian literary estate in the first quarter of the 21st century, in connection with which the works on the “estate” theme of T. N. Tolstaya, Yu. V. Mamleev, V. G. Sorokin, A. P. Potemkin, E. G. Vodolazkin, G. Sh. Yakhina, A. I. Slapovsky, M. L. Stepnova, V. O. Pelevin, etc. are examined in a wide cultural context. The article demonstrates that the new quality of the estate text, in comparison with the classics of the 19th — early 20th century, arises in Soviet literature and continues in the post-Soviet times. The main categories for the development of a modern literary estate are estate heterotopia, estate habitus, dacha myth, crypto-estate mythology and estateness, as well as new modifications of the estate topos: garden-city, a window into transcendent meanings and the Euro-Asian phenomenon. However, the most significant factor in the future of the literary estate in the 21st century is the “civilizational approach,” drawn from historical science. The interdisciplinary phenomenon of the Russian estate is understood within its framework, on the one hand, as one of the manifestations of the universal archetype of world history since the Biblical times, on the other — as an important element of Russia’s national cultural code from antiquity to the present day. It is the “civilizational approach” that connects the futurology of the Russian estate with the “great historical time” and takes its history beyond the imperial period of the 18th — early 20th century, which previously delineated its existence. Thanks to him, the signs of Moscow Russia of the 16th–17th centuries in a number of “estate” texts by modern authors can be perceived as a trend, rather than a curiosity. The relevance of the article lies in the desire to elaborate the paths of Russia’s civilizational identity. Its scientific novelty is in the first comprehensively presented system of categories of poetics for the study of the literary estate of the present and future. The conclusions of the article are obtained with regard to the research context on the issues raised and call for further discussion.