Vol 84, No 2 (2025)

The article reconstructs the history of playwright Alexander Ostrovsky’s participation in the “literary expedition” of the Naval Ministry along the upper Volga in 1856–57 on the basis ofarchival documents from the Russian State Archive of the Navy, the Bakhrushin Central State Theatre Museum, the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, the Institute of Russian Literature RAS, and the Russian State Historical Archive. For the first time, the role of the writer’s brother Mikhail Ostrovsky, as well as Ivan Turgenev and officials of the Naval Ministry Dmitri Obolensky and Dmitri Tolstoy in the organization of this trip is identified and described. New sources allowed to correct widely accepted version of Ostrovsky’s cooperation with the magazine “Marine Collection”. Two unpublished letters of Ostrovsky to the official institutions of Tver province are published for the first time. In conclusion, a unique set of “common people’s anecdotes” of the first half of the 19th century, collected by the writer during the expedition, is described.

An interest in the culinary theme is obvious in many of the classicʼs works. The motifs of “food” in Goncharovʼs works have not been ignored by researchers, but at the same time they have not attracted much attention. Since the “food motif” in the writerʼs works is a topic for a large study, in this article the author limits himself to examining Goncharovʼs letters.

The surviving epistolary heritage (archival materials) allows us to judge the writerʼs personal culinary preferences, his views on the dinner ritual and etiquette, which significantly expands our understanding not only of Goncharovʼs everyday life, but also of the culinary preferences of the characters in his works.

The article examines the dramatic work of Tristan LʼHermite, defines his exceptional place in the history of French classical tragedy. Due to the heterogeneity, “eclecticism” of his dramatic writing, which combines archaic elements of the pre-classical tragedy of the 16^th century and new principles of discursive and rhetorical construction of the text, LʼHermiteʼs plays visibly differ from those forms of the tragic genre, within the boundaries of which it functions in the first half of the 17^th century in the works of P. Corneille, J. Mairet, J. de Rotrou, J. de Scudery and other contemporaries of the author. In Kermit plays, the nature of the tragedy of these periods is clearly traced: the Racine (“The Death of Crispus”), the educational (“The Death of Seneca”) and the romantic (“Osman”). In “Osman”, LʼHermite showed the exhaustion of the historical plot, as it was developed by the classic tragedy with its heroic and political ideological foundation, and brought out a new type of hero, whose exclusivity is revealed in his opposition to an inert, undignified crowd and whose power is not evidence of social status, role-setting behavior, but an expression of his spiritual potencies and efforts of will/action in achieving an fundamentally unrealizable ideal (both in politics and in love). Osmanʼs behavior is an insistent demonstration of pride, a desire for absolute freedom in overcoming any obstacles, a challenge to the impossible. LʼHermite has found a new nature of the tragic conflict – the incongruity of the personality with historical time, in its essence antiheroic, absurd.

Experiential semantics indicates that a given situation occurred at least once and its participant, or the subject of experience, has acquired certain qualities due to participating in it. This meaning figured prominently in studies on Slavic languages due to the peculiar use of imperfective forms in experiential contexts exhibited by East Slavic and Bulgarian. However, the marking of such contexts in Ossetic, which is described as a language with Slavic-style aspect, has not been discussed yet. In this paper, I analyze the usage of perfective and imperfective verb forms in 59 contexts with experiential semantics in the 2004 Iron Ossetic translation of the New Testament. They were extracted based on their coding in eight languages as a part of the project devoted to creating a database of typologically relevant grammatical contexts: they are expected to feature the means of experiential marking, if a language has one. The Ossetic translation turned out to use perfective verbs in 38 cases and imperfective verbs in 20 clauses (one context is changed). This can be compared to 50 uses of imperfective verbs in Russian Synodal Translation. I show that the choice of aspectual forms in Ossetic depends on the actional class of the verb: achievement verbs are perfective, activities and states are expressed by imperfective forms, and accomplishments combine withboth types. Such distribution is close to that described for West Slavic and some South Slavic languages, in which the choice of aspect in such “peripheral” aspectual contexts as experiential ones is determined by the actional characteristics of the verb rather than contextual semantics, as, for example, in Russian.

The article is devoted to the features of magical realism in the prose of Elena Ferrante. The features of the magical worldview are revealed based on the “Neapolitan Novels” (“My Brilliant Friend” (“Lʼamica geniale”, 2011), “The Story of a New Name” (“Storia del nuovo cognome”, 2012), “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay” (“Storia di chi fugge e di chi resta”, 2013) and “The Story of the Lost Child” (“Storia della bambina perduta”, 2014). The analysis reveals that magical in the texts is rooted in reality and manifests itself in the strictly defined space of Naples. Meanwhile, the real description is associated with urban myths and various superstitions, which allow us to see the opposite essence of things. The research has indicated that the basis for such a perception of reality should be sought in the borderline state of the main characters of the tetralogy.