Przegląd Rusycystyczny 2023 nr 2

strona tytułowa

Strona redakcyjna

Strona redakcyjna

Wspomnienie o prof. Alicji Wołodźko-Butkiewicz

The so-called Russophilism of Ukrainians is an important identity and geopolitical element in the context of Eastern Europe. It would be a too far-fetched simplification to explain it only by the imperial policy of Russification. The territories of modern Ukraine were the center of historical Rus. Tsarist Russia built its national mythology on the basis of its tradition. Enlightened Ruthenian or Ukrainian elites were the co-creators of this mythology. The tradition of the Orthodox Church, also known as the Ruthenian Church, bound not only because of the doctrine of faith, but also external shapes: language, common saints, common names, etc. Under Russia’s rule, Rusophilism was a kind of natural state of mind for Ukrainians. The emergence of a strong Russophile camp under the rule of Austria and Hungary testified to the deep roots of this kind of understanding of one’s own identity. Despite the fight against Russophilia in the 20th century, it remained deeply rooted in the consciousness of some of the inhabitants of Ukraine. This explains the current situation in this country, the war and the social crisis.

The aim of the present article is to examine Levinas’ texts with the intention of showing and verifying the realization of his idea of philosophizing as “deciphering of what has been hidden in palimpsest writing” (écriture). I discuss Dostoevsky’s verbal and semantic layer (“word-sense”) present in Levinas’ palimpsest discourse. I offer an insight into the function of many of Dostoevsky’s concepts, such as the notion of “insatiable co-suffering” with another human being, the dogma about the accountability of “everything and everybody”, negative (see the many aspects of the “Cain’s answer” connected with the question of human reliance on himself only and a total lack of restraint) and positive formulas in relation with the Other, resulting in defining one’s personality (by means of communion with Thou, love for one’s neighbor and the effort to make one’s image beautiful in the moral sense) that have been found in the pages of Levinas’ writings. I show the means by which Dostoevsky’s polyvalent formulas, correlated with The Bible and its heavily charged with meaning position (The Book of Genesis, The Book of Isaiah, The Gospel of St. Matthew, and others), get semantically enriched and absorbed, as key components, by Levinas’ philosophical thinking and his hierarchy of values. I discuss the extent to which they determine his conceptualization of “subjectivity of ethical subject”: the concept of “I” in the accusative (“me voici”), the “I” summoned to be responsible “for everything and for all men”, to be a “guardian of one’s brother” on one’s way to “being-in-God”. In the article I also focus on the productivity and significance of Levinas’ methodological stance, which determines his philosophical hermeneutics and the palimpsest character of his discourse, i.e. their being orientated towards: 1) continuation and preservation of the “ancient”, original sense and its creative growth in a new “ideological environment”, 2) disclosing interrelation between “truth” and the philosophical method of emphasis and sublimation; this allows one to explain an important role of rhetorical figures and the increasing repetitiveness of topoi of thought in Levinas’ discourse, which come from/send one thinking of Dostoevsky (as well as of myth, Shakespeare and others), but approach a new level of knowledge and understanding.

This article aims to look at the phenomenon of the first wave of Russian emigration through the prism of the so-called personal history. The anthropological turn in the humanities, which took place in the second half of the 20th century, contributed to an increase in the understanding of the importance of an individual and an interest in the culture of everyday life. Egodocuments play an important role in exploring these phenomena, thanks to which we learn about the specificity of everyday life of Russian emigrants and the unique inner world of an individual. Such an opportunity is offered by Alexei Gvozdinski's letters to Elizaveta Miller, who recorded in his correspondence a far from harmonious existence in the German capital of the early 1920s. The Russian émigré petrified in his letters several weeks of life in Berlin, which were mainly marked by loneliness, poverty and being lost in an unfriendly, gloomy juggernaut, in which — unlike Constantinople or Rome (earlier stops on the émigré road) — he could not see anything positive and beautiful. His perception of the city was influenced by both subjective factors and stereotypical perceptions.

The purpose of this article is to draw attention to the possibility of analyzing Yury Dombrovsky's debut novel "Derzhavin" using methods and tools developed on the ground of postcolonial theory and research, in particular, based on the metaphor of "internal colonization" developed by Alexander Etkind. Dombrovsky's construction of the space, time and place of the piece of work's action and, above all, the silhouette of the main character, provide an opportunity to explore the links between power and literary text.

This article presents selected literary works by writers of contemporary Russian literature, whose hero is an elder-monk or miracle man. 
Writers as Lyudmila Petryshevskaya, Evgeniy Vodolazkin, Tikhon Shevkunov and Maya Kucherskaya in their works refer to the genres of religious literature such as patericon,
 hagiography and the apophthegma. The author's interest in the character, directly referring to the tradition of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and elder Zosima,
 from the novel "The Brothers Karamazov" is an expression of longing for national values related to the spiritual
 culture of Russian Orthodoxy and a reflection of the dialogue between religious and secular literature that is taking place today.

Post-Soviet Russian-language dramaturgy is text-centric and literature-centric. The most important point of reference for its creators is the widely understood text. Both literary and cultural text. In their works, playwrights replace performative representation with retrospective storytelling. The center of interest is not so much the surrounding reality as its cultural image. In recent years, this image has become more and more virtual. Dramaturgy willingly uses information technology. Dialogues resemble online chats, and the characters' relationships evoke associations with contact maintained via social networking sites. The reduction of the presented world to the level of virtual space results in the degradation of humanity. The protagonist of a contemporary drama, immersed in the space of the Internet, loses contact with the world around him. This in turn leads either to a complete demoralization, or even to a complete dehumanization. In the discussed texts, man becomes his own digital simulacrum. Dehumanization is either literal or metaphorical. In the first case, the hero either loses his human nature or is not human at all. He ends up in the virtual world, turning into a character from a computer game, as in the play "Net" by Valery Pecheykin. Or maybe he's part of that world himself - a video blogger with a camera instead of a hand, or an intelligent personal assistant named Siri. The protagonists, addicted to the Internet, immersed in virtual space, are metaphorically dehumanized. The characters of the plays "Journal of Alona Cziżuk" by Julia Woronowa and "Grisza" by Inga Wosk communicate with each other only through chats and social networking sites. The man described by contemporary Russian-language playwrights often uses an online nickname instead of his name, and treats sex, usually virtual, as an escape from reality, losing the ability not only to love, but even to feel physical pleasure. The intertextual, text-centric "new drama" is slowly giving way to a new phenomenon that can be described as the Internet "new-new drama". It is also text-centric, but at its center is virtual text.

This article looks into the presence of irony in the artistic output of Olga Mukhina. This notion is not only a literary device in the playwright's plays but above all a way of thinking of the postmodern man. The ironic component and the accompanying categories of carnivalization and play are used by Mukhina to highlight the impression of the instability of the postmodern world, for instance through illogical, seemingly incoherent, and ironic dialogues of the characters. The following works were analyzed: Tanya-Tanya, You, and Flying.

The aim of this article is to analyze the narrative strategies and techniques present in Dmitry Sokolov-Mitrich's reportage. The author of the article focuses on the relationship between the "objective" genre form of reportage and the ideological message hidden in the text. The study includes objectivizing narrative techniques as well as persuasive forms that are linked to the reader's automatic psychological mechanisms and by "soft" means update the image of the world that Russian state propaganda tries to impose aggressively.

               The author of the article comes to the conclusion that the classic form of reportage, based on a system of objectifying strategies and not containing textual determinants of fiction, cannot guarantee the objectivity and truthfulness of the presented facts. Belief in the truthfulness of the story told can only be the result of the "referential pact" and not the formal procedures used by the reporter. The analysis of Sokolov-Mitrich's work shows that the text of a reportage can be used not only to secretly influence the audience, but also to disguise views and ideas criticized in the primary (literal) layer of the text.

The polysubjective perception of the world in Dina Rubina’s novel allows us to observe the author’s voice in the narrator’s comments and the characters’ remarks. The author coordinates all the subjects of narration, and in his comments he makes a connection between the time the hero experiences the event and the time the reader comprehends it. The author’s commentary includes direct judgments from his own life experience, figures of silence (semantic gaps), as well as incorporated constructions. Through those ploys it is possible to present the picture of the world in the novel which is largely determined by the phenomenon of transition of the character’s internal state and his external displacement (emigration).

The main attention is focused on the structural components of LIGHT with a consistent consideration of quantitative and qualitative characteristics, as well as constructions that verbalize the concept, different in part-speech and linear length. It has been established that Light can be a characteristic of ‘living reality’, sometimes it is associated with the existential experiences of the characters and is accompanied by religious allusions. As a property of reality (the world), light can come from the sky, water, architectural buildings, or constitute the nature of cities. The variety of lexemes used to denote the process of luminescence, the characteristics of light, serves to create a three-dimensional picture of the magical process. The most informative are constructions of 3, 4 or more components, which, with the help of comparisons or homogeneous constructions, allow the reader to more fully present what is happening in the text.

The article is devoted to the linguistic ways of depreciation of Ukraine as an independent state. The analysed material allows us to conclude that the linguistic plane of the studied discourse reflects several ways of depreciation and delegitimisation of Ukraine as an independent state. In addition to the almost mechanical replacement of the name Украина with Малороссия, which is derived from a simple denial of Ukraine's right to independent existence, there appear such units which express certain arguments characteristic of imperial discourse: about the lack of real independence of the state (e.g. филиал, укрпроект), about the illegality of the procedures for the election of its authorities (государственный переворот), their illegal, violent character (e.g. хунта, диктатура), about the chaos prevailing on the territory of Ukraine (мазепинская самостийность, самостихийность). A characteristic feature of the Orthodox variety of imperial discourse, on the other hand, is even an indirect reference to the essentially medieval religious argumentation by pointing to the non-Christian character of the Ukrainian authorities (безбожная власть

Axiological aspect shows a reflection over the phenomena associated not only with semantics, but also with pragmatics, as well as with linguacultural factors. As it can be shown by means of the materials represented in the paper, such lexical units as horoscope and astrology have similar dynamics in terms of increasing/falling popularity. In addition, at the present time, including the period between the late XX and early XXI century, there is a predominance of negative emotions related to these concepts, and this fact can be considered as the evidence of ironic attitude to the LE horoscope and astrology, as well as to this lexical and semantic group in general. To achieve our main goal and objectives, the author used data from the National Corpus of the Russian Language; text fragments were extracted from the corpus by means of continuous sampling technique. The data excerpted from the language corpus allows us to objectify the study, as well as to use elements of statistical analysis based on the quantitative data presented in the corpus. Research procedure included (1) analysis of text fragments containing lexical units mentioned above; (2) analysis of the correlation between those words, on one hand, and positive/negative/neutral parts of the evaluation scale, on the other hand.

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