This article explores the motif of death, drawing on the short stories of Sholem-Aleichem Kasrilovka and the ethnographic sketch Podlipovtsy by Fyodor Reshetnikov. Although the aforementioned motif is not central or foregrounded in either work, but rather is more of an accompanying character and appears in the background of the main plot, it nevertheless takes on various symbolic, cultural, and socio-existential significance. The author discusses individual examples, taking into account the types of death appearing in the selected texts: pathological death resulting from disease, starvation, and unfavorable climatic factors; violent death resulting from an accident or suicide; metaphorical death understood as the abandonment of one's previous way of life; and death as an object of commercial and profit-making activity.
This article analyzes a key motive in the book The End of the Quote (1996) by philologist and writer Mikhail Bezrodny. Bezrodny emigrated to Germany as a Jewish refugee in 1991; his work reflects a Russian-Jewish emigrant’s perspective on the phenomenon of emigration itself. A recurring theme in the book is a specific nostalgia for a "homeland," embodied by the State Public Library (GPB) in Leningrad, where the author worked from 1979 to 1991. Furthermore, this motive is integrated into the "Petersburg text" of Russian literature—a concept central to Bezrodny’s work both as a scholar and a writer.
The acquisition of the Promised Land as presented in the Torah (the Pentateuch) is examined both in sequence and in its preceding stages, which are associated with the fulfillment of necessary conditions. On this basis, a structure of ten motifs preceding the entry into the Land of Israel is derived, along with an explanation of their meaning and significance within the general composition. Particular attention is paid to what, according to the Torah, determines the possibility of inheriting the land: a corresponding level of consciousness. The second part of the article is devoted to a typological correlation between these ten motifs and existing ideas of unusual, wondrous, and distant lands in Russian folk tradition – including fairy tales, legends, and oral histories. Three types of narratives are identified, each reflecting the derived motifs and related thematic determinants in different ways. Emphasis is placed on themes of grace and abundance, the hardships of the search and transition, and the hero endowed with exceptional abilities who introduces these realms.
This article explores the mechanisms of meaning-making and self-reproduction within Russian-Israeli literature (RIL). Building upon Roman Katsman’s theory of RIL as a dissipative replicator, the author addresses the unresolved question regarding the specific content of this replicator. The core thesis posits that the foundation of RIL is the "generative situation"—a structural condition emerging at the intersection of a rupture with the original cultural space and the specificity of Israel, where the subject's arrival is experienced as a "return." The ultimate realization of this situation is the "homonym" (a concept introduced by Alexander Goldstein)—a phenomenon where the Russian word, while retaining its phonetic form, produces a surplus meaning non-existent in either Russian or Israeli cultures independently. To analyze this semantic shift, the paper employs Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of "language games" and "forms of life." The evolution of the generative situation is traced through the works of Julius Margolin, Ephraim Bauch, and Gali-Dana Singer, demonstrating a progression from a mere positional return to a fully realized bilingual language game.
The article is devoted to the analysis of the main poetic strategies of the Russian-language Israeli poet Elizaveta Mikhailichenko, based on a reading of selected poems from her collection And You Will Touch the Mud with Your Wing… (2024). In the course of the research, the specific nature of her “poetics of no” is demonstrated — a rhetoric and philosophy that is negational, yet free from nihilism, which acquires particular significance in the context of the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Israel.
The article examines Friedrich Gorenstein’s novel The Place as a distinctive example of the twentieth-century epic novel. Challenging the author’s own genre designation of the work as a “political novel,” the research argues that The Place redefines epic form under post-Stalinist conditions by combining large-scale historical vision with an intensely subjective first-person narration. Particular attention is paid to the tension between the limited consciousness of the protagonist-narrator, Gosha Tsvibyshev, and the presence of an epic narrator articulating broader ideological and philosophical generalizations. The study analyzes the novel’s treatment of Stalinism, post-Stalinist disillusionment, and antisemitism by demonstrating how these themes function as structural elements of its epic poetics. The article situates Gorenstein’s novel within the tradition of Russian epic prose while highlighting its modern psychological and ethical complexity.
10.31261/IR
English
Język Polski