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 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.

Квинтэссенция творчества Мандельштама

Рецензия на книгу Mikhail Goldis, Memoirs of a Jewish District Attorney from Soviet Ukraine. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2024.