Vol 16, No 2 (2024)

The study presents a thorough review, conducted from a linguocultural perspective, of the primary principles used in expressing spatial relations in Finnish through linguistic categories and means. It covers the genesis and changes of cases in the Finnish language, paying special attention to those that conveyed spatial meaning at a particular stage of the language development. The issue is particularly interesting as there is an ongoing debate about the application of certain cases owing to the significant influence of dialects in Finnish, which is characterized by an egocentric spatial orientation. The study aimed to explore the instances of diverging spatial representations regarding the direction of actions in different linguocultures, with Finnish and Russian linguocultures taken as examples. The research applied a quantitative analysis approach to examine competing forms, with a corpus of YLE newspaper texts from 2011 to 2020 as the research material. The study analyzed instances of differing depictions through verb-noun pairs and verbs related to sensual and tangible perception (vaikutelmaverbit). Additionally, we investigated the variations in verb usage of the latter and the verb ‘käydä’ (‘to go, to visit’), which is generally presented as ‘static’, but expresses its dynamic qualities in different collocations. The analysis indicates that the system of spatial relations in Finnish is characterized by linguocultural specificity and is expressed grammatically through local and non-local case forms, prepositions, postpositions, and verb-noun syntactic structures. Furthermore, one and the same name in the internal and external case forms may convey not only distinct grammatical but also different lexical meanings. The use of local cases with certain verbs can lend expressions and verbs a figurative meaning that is only loosely connected to position in space.

The study deals with the phraseologized comparative-and-evaluative syntactic construction <P ni razy ne N₁> (which can be translated as <P is not at all N₁>) (Tol’ko padcheritsa byla ni razu ne Zolushka i spat’ v yashchike s zoloj sebe ne pozvol’ala, i. e., But the stepdaughter was not at all Cinderella and did not sleep in a box with cinders). The paper analyzes the functioning of the construction in modern everyday speech and identifies its characteristic features. In the structure of this construction two objects of comparison are necessarily present, so the verb simply cannot be placed after the phraseologized element ni razy ne. During the comparison, object P is evaluated against the background of N₁. The construction can carry both evaluative (Ya, konechno, ni razu ne pisatel’, i. e., I am definitely not at all a writer) and comparative-evaluative meaning (Pattison, imkho, voobshche, ni razu ne D’urua, i. e., IMHO Pattison is not at all Duroy). The peculiarity of the comparative seme is the implicit and explicit expression of the feature of comparison. Since the construction in question is primarily evaluative, it is common to use the figure of the author as one of the objects. The syntactic scheme is not limited to the form <P ni razy ne N₁>: the study revealed a number of ‘expanders’ that can vary the construction. The adverb voobshche is the most common such element (Gonkong voobshche ni razu ne London). In combination with the unit in question, speakers of the Russian language often use introductory words and word combinations that express the speaker's attitude to what is said. The study revealed the cases of using introductory units of the following types: credibility, emotion, and evaluation of the style of the statement. The considered construction is a grammatical basis of a sentence in which the nominative part of the predicate is expressed by a noun in the nominative case (N₁), so among the ‘expanders’ there are particles such as vot and eto.

The article presents the results of a comparative analysis of the categories derived by the authors in the terminology systems ‘Судостроение’ and ‘Shipbuilding’. These terminology systems are historically established vocabulary strata in the corresponding languages and, at the same time, they are actively developing. During crosslingual professional communication, there arises an acute problem of inconsistency between terminology systems of the same subject area existing in different languages. It is often difficult to select an equivalent term while translating in shipbuilding area from English into Russian and vice versa or during international communication between naval engineers and shipbuilders. This problem requires a comprehensive linguistic analysis to be solved. The novelty of the study resides in the fact that terminological asymmetry is revealed by means of comparative-and-contrastive analysis, through which the phenomenon of the asymmetry of the terminology systems ‘Судостроение’ and ‘Shipbuilding’ is described as a complex issue. The methods used during the research include the following: definition analysis, categorical analysis, context analysis, quantitative analysis, logical- and-conceptual analysis, comparative-and-contrastive analysis. The study was conducted in five stages, starting with the selection of material, i. e., Russian and English shipbuilding terms, and the collection of statistical data for quantitative analysis, then proceeding to the categorical analysis of the collected material (at the third and fourth stages) and finally concluding with a comparative analysis of the categories and with the description of the identified terminological asymmetry. The structure of the terminology systems ‘Судостроение’ and ‘Shipbuilding’ revealed significant similarity, but the final stage of the study found discrepancies at a lower hierarchical level of categorization of the considered terminology systems.

The paper analyzes the album of the music band Zveri ‘Everywhere is a desert to the lonely man’, dedicated to the works of the writer Anton Chekhov. The aim of the study is to find the features of Chekhov’s poetics that are interesting to Russian rock and to show how Chekhovian images are transformed in the album. It is shown that citation of the classics in the rock poetry under study is systemic; it forms the ideological and thematic unity of the album as a lyrical cycle. The perception of Chekhov’s works by the rock poets turns out to be deep and multifaceted. Even some individual techniques are adopted: repetitions reflecting the mechanical reproduction of life, superimposition of a modern plot on fable prototypes. All this occurs despite the fact that Chekhov seems to be one of the least ‘rock’ classics, since his characters have little in common with the romantic heroes on whom rock poets largely focus.

The study leads to a conclusion that the texts included in the album also form a complex system and are replete with ‘thematic echoes’. Only together they are able to reflect the most characteristic features of Chekhov’s poetics: a truthful and partly ironic depiction of the ‘vulgarity’ of life, meaningless, but frightening in its hidden subordination to the logic of absurd and forcing a person to hide in his ‘case’. Female images (heroines of the stories The Darling, The Lady with the Dog, The Grasshopper), personifying love as a state, serve as a kind of antidote and affirm the hope that it is possible to endure the weight of the world without losing the ability to love and gaining the courage to leave one’s case, since loneliness is a deviation, not the norm. The fact that Zveri use Chekhov’s ‘text’ as a basis for their album shows that the issues raised by the writer have timeless significance for Russian spiritual culture.

The article is devoted to the study of two parody literary texts – Evil Illness by Ivan Goncharov and So They Rented a Dacha! by Vladimir Solonitsyn. Both texts relate to the creation of the image of the Maikov family and its members. Both Goncharov and Solonitsyn were closely connected with a family where advanced aesthetic problems of the transitional period of the 1840s, these reflecting the struggle between romanticism and realism, were discussed and embodied in works of art and literature. The friendly parodies by Goncharov and Solonitsyn are united by focus on the romantic worldview of the heroes, the prototypes of which were the members of the Maikov family (Ekaterina Maikova, Nikolai Maikov, etc.). In his first story, Goncharov addressed the main aesthetic conflict of the era using the aesthetics of the Flemish school of painting, since ‘Flemishism’, along with the traditions of High Italian painting, embodies the essence of Goncharov’s aesthetic category zhivopisaniye (which can be translated as depiction, vivid depiction). Goncharov’s ‘Flemishism’ as his style feature manifested itself already at the beginning of his literary path (Evil Illness) in the form of extreme penchant for details, attention to the beauty of everyday life, humorous elements in the description of everyday scenes. Sketches of everyday life in Goncharov’s first story are consonant with the theme of the painting by Adriaen van Ostade Tavern Scene. In addition to the parodic, ironic content, Goncharov’s story is associated with the synthesis of the ‘sophisticated’ and the ‘everyday’, and not a one-sided manifestation of life in art. In this regard, Flemish painters were extremely important for the novice writer Goncharov, who later became close to the ‘natural school’ of Vissarion Belinsky that proclaimed depiction of ‘the beautiful in the ordinary’ to be the main task of Russian literature.

Critically reading the chapter of the famous British specialist in the field of theory and history of the English historical novel, Jerome de Groot, ‘Transgression and Experimentation: A Historical Novel’ in the multiauthored monograph British Fiction: 1980–2018 (Cambridge, 2019), the author of the article reflects on the phenomenon of the primacy of the historical novel in the canon of the contemporary British novel both in the postmodernist and in the post-postmodernist eras. Agreeing with de Groot that the historical novel of the designated period not only preserved the core of the classical genre paradigm, laid down by Sir Walter Scott, but boldly stepped into modernity, modernizing both meaningfully and artistically the eternal dialogue of the past and present, originally inherent in the genre, the author of the article emphasizes how well the chapter fits into the general concept of the monograph – to show the dynamics of British literature precisely through the prism of the dialectic of tradition and experiment. The author of the article agrees with his English colleague that it has been since the 1980s that English contemporary historical novel began to plunge even more thoroughly and philosophically (ontologically), without responding too much to postmodern historical and epistemological doubts, into the eternal questions of existence, the complexity of the dialogue between man and the world, the fate of man and humanity, etc. The author of the article also agrees with the idea of the English literary critic that metafictional historiographical approach and self-reflection (according to Linda Hutcheon) in the British historical novel did not become absolutely dominant phenomena; that the English historical novel of the 1980s and 1990s and onwards, having quickly ‘overcome’ postmodern delights, still retained the tradition of socio-psychological realistic reading of history, even experimenting with narrative, time structure, and historiographical concepts, which was especially characteristic of the female reading of the past (A. Carter, J. Winterson, A. S. Byatt, S. Waters). Simultaneously with the postmodernist exercises inspired in the field of historical narrative and temporal parallel (synonymous, antithetical, alternative) historical constructs, another line matured in the English historical novel, not related to the postmodern game, but related to the desire to reproduce the past in its volume, in the integrity of its cultural appearance, to construct the image of the past, to the ability to immerse the reader in the very existence of history. With the example of the novels by H. Mantel, R. Tremaine, D. Moggach, etc. the author of the article demonstrates this side of the dynamics of the English historical novel, not emphasized by de Groot.

The subject of the research is the poetics of war stories about children referring to 1941–1945. The study aims to show Andrei Platonov’s understanding of the war from the perspective of the future of mankind through a comparison of the versions of the story The Iron Old Woman and their contextual analysis. The theoretical basis of the paper is the works by Russian cosmists such as V. I. Vernadsky, N. F. Fedorov, K. E. Tsiolkovsky; the contextual analysis developed by M. M. Bakhtin supplemented by observations of the fractal structure of the text as well as the principles of concealed metonymical writing substantiated by K. Ginsburg. The methodology of the work is based on the research by L. Karasev, L. Chervyakova, H. Günther and other scholars focused on A. Platonov’s stories to children and about children.

The research and its results were determined by the analysis of the socio-political and autobiographical contexts of A. Platonov’s life and work in 1943. At that time, the war was gradually changing from ‘a bloody slaughter to a victorious move’, which required its impeccable ideological coverage. From personal perspective, the year was overshadowed by the death of A. Platonov’s son. The logic of the research was determined by an attempt to penetrate into A. Platonov’s understanding of the war. Firstly, the research compares two versions of the story The Iron Old Woman (written in 1941, 1943). In the 1943 version, three new fragments have been discovered, showing the writer’s genuine attitude to the war as a new civilizational turn. Secondly, the new title of the story is justified by analyzing the fractal composition determined by ontological transformations that are manifested by metonymic rhetorical colors. The fabulousness of the transformations in the central characters’ duel clarifies the meaning of the story’s title. ‘Iron’ people are the result of the intellectual aspirations of mankind devoid of moral foundations. The war is understood as a property of modern civilization. The writer connects the possibility of a ‘better world than the real one’ with the ideas of Russian cosmism and, above all, the Project of resurrecting the dead. He passes on his faith in victory over Death to a little boy who epitomizes the embodiment of the future.

This article analyzes the poetics of the tale Triumph of Time (Triomphe du temps, 2006) by modern French writer Pascal Quignard. He tends to hybridize genres, to search for new forms of expression and reconstruct traditions, like many writers at the turn of the 20th–21st centuries. The tale Triumph of Time has features of a hybrid genre, it combines the features of an essay and a parable and differs from a literary tale typical for the modern literary process. The genre of this tale is experimental for the writer. It was written for a theatrical performance of actress Marie Vialle. The tale does not contain the author’s assessment of the epoch, the characters are archetypical (husband, wife, child, etc.), the time of events is not accurately determined, the space is metaphysical, the philosophical subtext and the author’s intention become the main thing. The key theme of the text is death; the images of water and a boat are associated with it. The child, who Quignard compares with an old man, becomes a link between the living world and the dead world. In the third and fourth tales, the living world turns into Limbo, a borderline space where the dead are wandering. The author builds an internal dialogue between the past and the present, the personal and the universal, consciousness and the unconscious through the form of a verbal tale. Various motifs can be distinguished in the text: mythological, biblical, folklore, philosophical. Such features as autobiographicity, allegoricality, ambiguity, symbolization, and generalization give reason to believe that the tale Triumph of Time is a variant of the genre, a philosophical essay with elements of a parable.