Przegląd Rusycystyczny 2024 nr 4 całość

Przegląd Rusycystyczny 24/4 tytuł

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The purpose of this article is to bring closer the specifics of the relationship between the main character of A Gentle Creature by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and her husband. The key factor that has a final impact on the story development is the silence of the characters. Initially used as a pedagogical tool to re-educate the wife, over time it becomes the main means of communication. In this article, we expose its binary potential: communication capacity and source of spouse’s alienation. Analyzing the character of the heroine's husband, we come to the conclusion that his struggle for power in the relationship, emotional lability, escapist behavior, and his wife's rebellion had a decisive impact on the nature of their marriage and its unhappy ending.

This paper analyzes the early journalism (‘Voronezh period’ 1919–1926) of the Russian writer Andrei Platonov (1899–1951). It contains a maximalist philosophical and social utopia, according to which the new Soviet era would lead humanity to absolute fullness and immortality. It says about the necessity of transforming the whole being and human, and calls for the destruction of the universe and genocide. I argue that the key word used by Platonov is ‘fire’ and trace its inner logic. I also attempt to show that the utopia is ontologically self-destructive, and Platonov will have to struggle with its consequences in his further works.

The author analyses two articles by Gaito Gazdanov (1903–1971) in which he attempted to assess the life and creative output of Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852). The first text was written in 1929, while the second one was created in 1960. There is a 31 year-long gap between them, which created several opportunities for the Russian first wave migrant to look at the biography of the author of Dead Souls from various perspectives. While in his 1929 article Gazdanov highlighted the fantasy aspect of Gogol's word art as a highly original feature which distinguishes him significantly from writers who focused on social issues, such as Victor Hugo (1802–1885), Émile Zola (1840–1902), Nikolai Nekrasov (1821–1878) or Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883), in his 1960 essay the author of Night Roads exposed the existential approach in the process of interpretation of Gogol's works and emphasised the existence of multiple crucial contradictions in him as a human being and in his works, where – in his last years of life – didactics and a prophetic approach were voiced and visible especially in Selected Passages from Correspondence with My Friends (1947). At that time Gazdanov negated the meaning and value of Gogol's preaching and mentoring practices, however, at the end of his creative life he himself started to write texts with educational and remedial message of literature. The researcher points out the fact that Gazdanov's existential point of view of Gogol ties him closely to Vasily Rozanov (1856–1919) and to Lev Shestov (1866–1938), which on one hand visibly lowers the originality of the concepts of the author of The Spectre of Alexander Wolf, but, on the other hand, it solidifies his insight into the best Russian tradition of existential approach to word art.

Transgressive elements in the prose of Lyudmila Ulitskaya based on the short stories Подружки, Алиса покупает смерть and Иностранка from the cycle Тело души.

The concept of spirit and body, assuming the sacredness of the latter also in its erotic and physiological aspects, shatters hitherto ideas about the dualistic nature of the human ‘self’. According to Ulitskaya, the ideal being, which concretises itself in the body, confers upon the latter the status of what is necessary and constant in the eternal circle of life and death, making it the element of love and goodness. Hence, corporeality, earthliness and mortality constitute an existential unity in the ‘dance of existence’ of the heroines predestined for it. These, as we will try to show, are the ‘bodies of the spirit’, living and dead, whose corporeal, transgressive ‘spirituality’ will constitute the essential object and purpose of the analysis in this study, with the account taken of the strategies of femininity and typical elements of poetics peculiar to the Russian postmodernist.

As the attempt will be made to prove, the nature of the ‘sacredness’ of a woman in the texts of the author of Медеи и ее детей paradoxically unites in itself the sacred and the profane. The higher means the things which arouse terror, recognition and adoration. This also means the prohibition implying transgressive erotic raptures, incessant licentious dance of life and death, hiding at the bottom all the anxiety and fear that were born from the awareness of one’s own mortality = discontinuity. In light of the above, the lust to overpower it, enveloped in the violation of all the laws, in the overcoming of shame, in the externalisation of weakness, illness, imperfection, animalisation, sexuality and physiologism, can be found in abundance on the pages of Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s short stories.

Keywords: transgression, the sacred, the profane, eroticism, death.

Maria Stepanova's feminist Girls Without Clothes in polish translations

The purpose of this article is to discuss two Polish translations of the poem Girls Without Clothes (2019) by the eminent Russian poet Maria Stepanova. The author of the first one is Krzysztof D. Szatrawski, the author of the second one ¾ Katarzyna Roman-Rawska. The theoretical basis for the translatological analysis is Edward Balcerzan's assumption that ‘translational engagement with a literary text is a subject to the same methodological reflection that accompanies literary studies efforts.’ Thus, the translations are reflected from the standpoint of structuralism, hermeneutics and deconstructionism. Additionally, Stepanova's poem will be discussed in consideration of the feminist criticism.

This article aims to depict a problem-centered presentation of three reactions by Czech writers to the onset of the war in Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The first thing that comes to mind is a podcast called “Fragments: The Russian Invasion of Ukraine Through the Eyes of Czech Writers.” Czech Radio Plus started the podcast and has ten authors contributing: Milan Uhde, Marie Iljašenko, Kateřina Tučková, Petra Hůlová, Emil Hakl, Anna Beata Háblová, Petra Dvořáková, Ondřej Macl, Jakuba Katalpa and Lenka Elbe. Interviews were conducted with them from March 24 to April 13, 2022. Preparing a short prose text was another task for the writers. A book with the same title as the podcast was published after it was finished, faithfully recording the entire broadcast. Another testament to the literary engagement with the war in Ukraine is the book “We Will Not Surrender: A Collection of Stories for a Fighting Ukraine.” A discussion on Twitter led to the inspiration for this work. As a result, 16 Czech writers have chosen to publish a collection of their prose texts, to show their support for Ukraine, which was viciously attacked by Russia. “Liliputin: War Stories“ is the third and final literary venture during the first year of the war in Ukraine — it was written by the well-known contemporary Czech writer Jan Němec.

Old Believers inhabit the north-eastern part of Poland and their largest population is found in Suwałki-Augustów region. While the most densely populated villages by Old Believers are Gabowe Grądy and Bór, they also live in Augustów town, Suwałki city, and Sejny town. A few families live in other villages, too. The Russian dialect of the Old Believers is an insular dialect, characterised by lack of territorial contact with its national language. Numerous features of the Pskovian dialect have been preserved in the Old-Believers’ dialect, for example, strong yakanie, comparatives formed with the suffix -оше, convergence of the dative and instrumental forms of plural nouns, and others. The Old-Believers’ dialect is strongly influenced by the Polish language at all levels. The influence of the Polish language is particularly visible as regards lexis, phraseology, syntax and phonetics. Borrowings from Polish are subject to phonetic, morphological, derivational and accentual adaptations. Along with loanwords, in the Old Believers’ dialect there are also loan translations (calques) and hybrid forms. A hybrid form is understood as a lexical unit based on the combination of units taken from two different languages, that is, a lexeme found in the Russian dialect and a lexeme used in the Polish language (in its dialectal or standard variety).

This article aims to present the results of a study on the changes needed to make philological education more effective and satisfying. An attempt was made to answer the following questions: 1) What suggestions do teachers and students have regarding the necessary changes in philological education? 2) Are the expectations of these two groups of respondents aligned? To answer these questions, a qualitative study was conducted using focus group interviews as the data collection technique. Two separate interviews were held with lecturers (6 people) and Russian philology students (6 people). The study results showed that the changes suggested by both groups of respondents align only in a few areas and are interpreted differently. Suggestions concerning changes both inside and outside the classroom were discussed.

This article is devoted to the elements of newspeak in the statements of Vladimir Putin. The empirical material consists of the speeches of the President of the Russian Federation dedicated to the conflict in Ukraine at the beginning of its two phases – the hybrid (2014) and the full-scale war (2022). The purpose of the study is to identify and describe the role of label words, which are one of the most important elements of the modern newspeak of the Russian authorities. The article characterizes the topoi that form the basis for the evaluative nominations of the enemy used by Putin, which fit into the opposition “friend – foe”. The study of labels in the texts was carried out using the method of content analysis and lexical-semantic analysis. The results of the study show that, in comparison with Putin’s speeches from the beginning of the conflict in Donbass (2014), in the statement from 2022 the enemy category has been expanded, covering in addition to the Ukrainian side, authorities of the US and Western Europe, as well as internal opponents.

The article examines the problem of studying text from the point of view of triangulation as an innovative integrative approach to text research. The main goal of the work is to generalize and systematize the modern view of text and discourse, taking into account various approaches to them, with the intention of developing a pragmalinguistic model of text research applicable in the process of text analysis. The introductory part of the article describes the nature of the development of modern linguistics, as well as some directions in the study of text, and reveals the research methodology. The first part of the publication is devoted to consideration of the development of individual text models. The second part presents the characteristics of the proposed pragmalinguistic model of text research with a projection onto the category of the addressee, and also provides a specific example of media text analysis. In conclusion, the main components of the study are described, which are proposed to be included in the pragmalinguistic model of text analysis.

The purpose of this article is to present the results of a survey on what changes are worth making to make philological education more effective and satisfying. An attempt was made to answer the questions: 1) what suggestions do teachers and students make regarding needed changes in philological education? 2) do the expectations of these two groups of respondents coincide? In order to answer the questions posed, a qualitative study was conducted, and the data collection technique was focus interviews. Two separate interviews involved lecturers (6 people) and students of Russian philology (6 people). The results of the survey showed that the changes suggested by the two groups of respondents coincide in only a few areas and, in addition, are interpreted in different ways. Suggestions for changes inside and outside the classroom are discussed.

THREE STYLISTIC EVENTS IN THE SCHOOL PROGRAM (GRIBOYEDOV, PUSHKIN, LERMONTOV)

This article is devoted to the study of three works of classical literature that have been part of the school curriculum for decades and served as the subject of essays (including the one about the ‘superfluous man’). It is shown that the widespread interpretation of them, as a rule, overlooks the comic component, which seems to be necessary for the author's intention. In the context of the presentation, such a reduction can be explained by the continuing influence of the first interpretation of these texts by contemporaries, in the context of the ‘nine-day wonder’.

Keywords: beau monde, classic, comic, mask, self-irony, superfluous man

The monographic book by Sergey Skorvid České etnojazykové ostrovy v Rusku na počátku 21. století (Prague 2024) is devoted to the little-studied Czech communities in Russia, in the North Caucasus, and Western Siberia. These communities have preserved the Czech dialects of their regions of origin, which have been subject to Russian and East Slavic influences for several generations.

Przegląd Rusycystyczny 24/4 noty