For Russian-Israeli literature, the city of Jerusalem is a “medium” of multiple realities and meanings. Some authors view it as an eternal city immersed in biblical stories, while others see it as a multidimensional universe of mythical and real, historical and legendary. Nekod Singer, in his novel Drafts of Jerusalem (Черновики Иерусалима, 2013), created his own Jerusalem — a city-universe of world literature, a city of “an
infinite book of culture that encompasses all texts.” It may seem that by constructing a model of the universe
reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges’ The Library of Babel, Singer is participating in a postmodernist game, the goal of which is to show that “statement as such is an empty process” (Barthes), that cultural texts have long been written. All that remains is to ironize over the impossibility of breaking through to the “transcendental signified” (Derrida) and to engage in endless interpretations of one text through another. This paper aims to demonstrate the fallacy of such a judgment. By pretending to be a postmodernist, Singer is actively arguing against it, as well as against Borges’ “Library of Babel,” by constructing his own concept of the Draft as a mythopoetic generator of meanings and ideas, demonstrating the possibility of overcoming the crisis of culture.

The article examines the activities of the hero of the novels Переводчик (Translator) and (Once in
Bishkek) by Arkan Kariv — Martin Silber. The essence of this activity is translation, both in the literal sense
and in the broad sense — the transcultural mission of the hero. The article analytically focuses on the patterns
of such activity: Russian literary-centricity, the culturological intention of the hero’s actions and beginnings,
his linguistic philological hearing, metempsychosis as a traumatic form on the path of self-identification in
a multilingual and multicultural context.

The article analyses the appearance of dystopias in the literary legacy of Fyodor Dostoevsky as a literary metagenre. The author examines a number of texts in relation to the history of the totalitarianism in the 20th century, which manifests itself in the writer’s works through his creative intuition about the universal features of the human ontology. The mechanisms of evil are timeless phenomena and are not linked to a specific space. In the context of the European culture, the writer’s allusions to dystopia are read primarily in the greatest tragedies in the history of modern humanity: the Holocaust and the Great Terror. In addition, the author presents the prospects of the realisation of evil in a broader perspective.

The starting point of the analysis is a well-known motif from The Bible which makes Jezebel eliminate the God’s prophets and then she has Naboth stoned after an intrigue and false denunciations which make it easy for Ahab to inherit the longed-for vineyard. Jezebel is the wife of Ahab, the 7th ruler of The Northern Kingdom of Israel. She is a worshipper of Baal and Astarte (Asherah). As the result this causes the extermination of Jezebel just as Elijah the Prophet predicted. The data from the source materials make it possible to distinguish and describe three models being in close relations with each other: an oriented action (I’ll do to you / with yours what you did to me / with mine), acquiring by a swap (the killing of Naboth’s motif), the foretold annihilation (the murder of Jezebel and throwing her through the window). The shared element is doing evil which results in the inevitable effect of total elimination of the wrong-doer. The distinguished models are accompanied by the roles of the participants and their characteristics, the description of the semantic features and the predicative-componential schemes. The author draws conclusions of the possibilities of a similar approach to the motifs present in traditional texts.

В статье рассматривается возможность использования практики писательского мастерства для преподавания иностранным студентам темы Холокоста в литературе. Анализируются такие конкретные авторы, как Эгон Хостовский, Иржи Вайль и Йозеф Шкворецкий. Также обсуждаются конкретные практики творческого писательского мастерства, проявляющиеся в индивидуальных работах студентов.

At first glance, Death & Texas (2014), the title of the fourth short story collection by the British Jewish writer Clive Sinclair, appears somewhat misleading for several reasons. First, death may not seem a central theme in all the eight stories. Second, Texas is not the spatial setting in all stories, as some of them take place elsewhere in the USA or even in other countries. However, on closer inspection, both the theme of death and the American environment occur in most stories by means of their characters’ interests, as the protagonists are often Jewish writers or artists concerned with American and world history as well as the rendering of historical events in popular culture. This article thus aims to survey the theme of Jewishness and the reflection of world history in the collection.

The text reviews Marat Grinberg’s book The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf. Jewish Culture and Identity Between the Lines. The review’s author recalls Grinberg’s research goals oriented towards presenting the identity of Soviet Jews – its existence and dynamic development over the years. For Grinberg, the key to revealing the cultural awareness of Soviet Jews is their home libraries. The author of The Jewish Bookshelf… studies the relationship between the construction of this minority’s identity and the books they have read, examined and popularized towards the Jewish readers. The review’s author analyzes the various interpretation tactics used by Grinberg, who strongly relies on the Leo Strauss’ proposition of “writing and reading between the lines”. Showing its effects, the researches demonstrates that in the cultural circle of the times of the USSR it was necessary to smuggle knowledge about Jewishness in the form of allusions, hints, hidden cultural and historical contexts. As Grinberg’s studies show, passing the knowledge about the Jewishness between Soviet Jews with using this technique was fortunate. Search for identity in this group has a particularly strong meaning, so the readers not renounce their cultural belonging.

 Статья рассматривает проблему места на примере творчества 8-и русскоязычных поэтов Израиля