kolejny numer kwartalnika - dział główny poświęcony zagadnieniu "Codzienność w literaturze rosyjskiej XX wieku"

The Intoduction to the series of articles about the theme of daily life in contemporary Russian literatury.

As it is known, Полторы комнаты, the Joseph Brodsky’s essay, is the example of a poetic prose in which out of a dense network of philosophical deliberations autobiographical memories of the creator of Рождественский романс emerge. Accordingly, in this article the attempt is made to put together, from the scraps of poetic memories, a comprehensive picture of everyday life in Leningrad as it is perceived by the poetic “I” from the migration distance. The life that is connected with a given historical period, metaphorised in an obvious manner, and intertwined in its essence with an existential credo of an artist. Due to the multitude and complexity of themes and plots present in the works of Leningrad’s poet, in the given text the attention is solely drawn to the three coordinates, i.e. Family, Home, City, inasmuch as they show the path towards comprehension of everyday life from the perspective of the former child of Jewish parents, the poet and the immigrant. As we attempt to prove, the Brodsky’s eponymous essay is the commitment towards parents and this place. Besides, the migration distance sharpens the contours of memories and, thanks to that, the feelings and places previously ordinary and imperceptible become more vivid in the poet’s memory.

The purpose of the article is to analyze the novel by Victor Pelevin Generation “P” in the context of the theory of “fluid modernity” by the Polish philosopher and sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. Both the Russian writer and the Polish scientist point out the negative effects of the modern - unusually flexible, fluid, free from borders and conditions - commercial civilization on a person’s daily life, his mentality, value system, self-identification and selfesteem.

The paper aims at analyzing the question of immortality in the context of everyday life. The exemplary works include the ones written by contemporary Russian fantasy and science fiction authors, who deploy the relevant motifs: Vladimir Sorokin (Day of the Oprichnik, Kremlin Made of Sugar, Manaraga), Viktor Pelevin (The Helmet of Horror, Love for three Zuckerbrins), Anna Starobinets (The Living), Boris Akunin-Grigori Chkhartishvili  (Happy end), Dmitry Glukhovsky (The Future) and the film of Alexander Zeldovich (and V. Sorokin as the scriptwriter) entitled Target. Regardless of the applied convention the authors indicate that immortality is a curse for humankind for many reasons. Instead of trying to become God human beings should focus on retaining the already existing reality.

The article concentrates on the images of daily, which are widely used in the novels and monodramas by Evgeny Grishkovets. This problem has not yet been sufficiently considered. The paper considers Grishkovets’s works such as The Rivers, Asphalt, At the same time and How I Ate a Dog.

The rural areas, remaining on the periphery of the power centres’ interests, especially strongly felt the effect of the systemic transformation. This crisis had a significant impact not only on the economic issues, but also on the family and neighbour relationships, since communism had damaged the harmony of human coexistence with nature and relations inside the local communities. The author presents a look at the rural daily life of the late twentieth century in Poland and Russia using examples of Tales of Galicia by Andrzej Stasiuk and The Yeltyshevs by Roman Senchin – books describing the reality of the countryside in each of the countries. A comparison of these two works reveals significant differences in the ways of capturing reality of the countryside in Poland and Russia.

For the native of Moscow, Mikhail Tarkovsky, Siberia became not only a new home, but also a prevailing artistic world picture. This article discusses the peculiarities of the portrayal of Siberian everyday life in the first novel written by the author of Toyota Cresta. Using the example of Siberian brothers Vasily, Yevgeny and Andrey Barkovtsov’s fates, three models of everyday life and their structures are analyzed. In this context, the relationship of the characters to their native space acquires special significance: attachment to the place or deliberately chosen wanderings. In the analysis of this problem, the functioning of a comparative „Siberian-Moscow” text, being an important layer of the work, is also examined.

The aricle The Picture of Russian Everyday Life i The Novel Text Of Dmitry Glukhovsky  describes different attribute of a everyday life and reality in contemporary Russia. The author uses  the category of strangeness, contrast, fatalism and pessimistic determinism to characterize one of the most important motifs in his novel based on the life of the main character in the story. Glukhovsky shows the everyday life in Russian capital city and Moscow’s area referred to works of the biggest writers of XIX century (Lev Tolstoy, Fiodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov) and to contemporary Russian authors.

Gelasimov – a representative of contemporary Russian prose – chose for the hero of his novel Cold an artist lost in the world of media expectations. Confronted with extreme weather conditions, the hero tries to cope with his own past, which is portrayed through changes in his looks. The text analyses the stages of this transformation, stressing that modifications in the attire – from the western kind, unsuitable for the climatic conditions, to the one typical for local Russian culture – reflect the process of the hero’s maturation and self-acceptance.

The author considers the second volume titled The epoch of dashing holiness of the literary project True stories of the ‘90s edited by the prominent Russian writer Aleksandra Marinina. The project contains memories of people who are mostly unrelated to writing and witnesses of changes in Russia in the last decade of the 20th century. The subject of the analysis is the everyday life of these people through the prism of their stories. Attention is drawn to the symbolic meaning of the title of the volume by distinguishing three pairs of semantic oppositions as well as stylistics and genre elements of stories. The features of everyday life are presented in three contexts: time perception, real and symbolic space, case studies. The analysis of the text is based on thematic blocks titled as: daily bread, total trade, spiritual search, the wind of freedom (happy decade), disappearance of the country.

The paper is focused on an as yet unstudied strategy of internal hierarchization of artistic discourse. The author claims that those fragments of the latter perceived by reader as distinguished, aphoristic and/or especially significant, more often than not display simultaneously the following features: (1) certain ideas conveyed by the relevant fragment may be considered as a mirror image of each other; (2) the similarity between them undergoes some detrivialization; (3) there is a strong anaphoric link between the relevant fragment and some of the previous ones; (4) its discourse relation with the foregoing portion of the text is highly predictable. Further, it is argued that this ‘mirror image machinery’ has many dimensions, some of which are readily detectable, while some not, and, as a consequence, it proves to be much more sophisticated than the best studied devices employed for grounding in discourse

The origin of the novel What is to be done? by Nikolay Chernyshevsky should be linked with the way Chernyshevsky understood the role of literature in the historical process. For that Russian thinker and writer, literature was a “quick intermediary between science and life”. Thus, for him literature become subservient to science and history, and the novel was the most convenient genre for illustrating various theoretical ideas. Chernyshevsky thought that in the event of a “lack of reality” literature should, in a sense, replace it. Since his novel were created and published in a country where, according to him, reality didn’t exist, then the novel itself was to become a “matrix” of reality. The artistic plot was, for the author of What is to be done?, only a pretext for presenting some ethical and economic ideas. As regards ethics, Chernyshevsky’s mentors were the thinkers of the French Enlightenment and Ludwig Feuerbach, who propounded the idea of the so-called “reasonable egoism”. According to that theory, everybody acts to protect their own interests. However, for the proponents of the “reasonable egoism”, one’s own advantage is possible only when more general, i.e. social, interests are taken into account. Only such a “calculated theory” explains the true motives of life and becomes one of the two mainsprings of a relative historical progress. The other mainspring of that progress was a correct organisation of economic life. In this respect Chernyshevsky’s mentors were the two continuators of the French Enlightenment: Charles Fourier and Robert Owen, who, in the first half of the 19th century were giving voice to and putting into practice the ideas of cooperative socialism. All the thinkers whose authority Chernyshevsky recognised were against the class conflict and bloody social revolutions. And it is in this spirit that the four main characters of What is to be done?: Vyera Pavlovna, Kirsanov, Lopukhóf and Rakhmetov are acting. As Chernyshevsky himself used to say, “whoever likes Fourier’s ideas is not going to like communism”. While being a man of the Enlightenment, and even though he turned against the “ideological routine”, and propounded new anthropological, ethical and economic ideas, Chernyshevsky didn’t want carry them out by means of “class egoism”, i.e. bloody “class struggle”.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the remake tool, popular in postmodern culture, which is increasingly used by the authors of the new Russian dramaturgy. The author attempts to characterize and classify this phenomenon, citing the work of Russian and foreign academics. The author supports her conclusions with examples of reinterpretation of classical works (Anton Chekhov, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ivan Goncharov, Leo Tolstoy and others) by contemporary playwrights.

Review of the Jerzy Kaliszan's monograph Русские омографы, Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, Poznań 2017.

Valery Igorevich Tyupa (born in 1945) – one of the most outstanding Russian literary theorists and the most important narrative theorists in the world, author of over three hundred and ninety scientific publications in the field of literary theory, communication theory and discourse analysis, comparative studies, narratology, aesthetics, rhetoric, professor at the Russian State University of Humanities in Moscow (RGGU). In Tyupa's scientific interests, two main problem areas are clearly outlined. The first concerns the aesthetics of literature, the second – narratology. The interview with the researcher was devoted to the latter. Tyupa explains what contemporary narratology is and why it is needed; he talks, among others, about the relationships between narratology and rhetoric, about the prospects for the development of comparative narratology, and about the project of creating historical narratology.