cały numer

strona tytułowa

strona red.

Introduction

In the article M. Shishkin's novel «The taking of Ishmael» is considered as a text in which the key principles of narrative and specific internal world, determining the author's manner, are approbated. Vl. Shunikov reveals synthesis of different discourse characteristics, in particular genre forms and strategies, modes of expression in the aspect of «public — intimate», «sacred — profane», a plexus of diverse realities and stylistics, multidirectional communication in grammatical time, ambivalence of subjective and objective narrative, factual and literary, original word and quoting. All this forms a communal, synthetic narrative and determines image syncretism in Shishkin's novel.

The article investigates emergence and development of motive rows, in which the author employs as emotive rows such heterogeneous components as an ear-flap cap, a bicycle, cheese, Seagull, a hare, a fortress, as well as others. This motive net series as an explication of Shishkin’s all-round invariant themes, such as cohesion of life and death, of the past and the present, of things visible and invisible. This motive set is offered in variable combinations (the ear-flap cap plus the bicycle, the ear-flap cap plus the hare, the bicycle plus the red-haired girl, the red-haired girl plus the “Seagull”,  the semantic twinkling of motives (Seagull as Chekhov’s play and as a car’s brand, cheese for tamed mice and “Cheese!” in photographers’ argot) creating additional valences for forming up of new motive ties. In this way motive combinatorics opposes centrifugal forces of plot bifurcations, mending chronological gaps and uniting stories which develop in different dimensional and temporal localities. Hidden reflections help build up the framework of this or that microplot and allow it to freely shift from one plot to another

Mikhail Shishkin's novels form a complex system of artistic motives. One of the most obvious is the motive of disease. This paper is devoted to the analysis of this motive in the novel “The Taking of Izmail”. The narrative motive of disease is manifested at different levels of the text structure: the plot (illness as the cause of character's action and, respectively, as the "engine" of the plot), the character (almost all heroes of the novel suffer much), the chronotope (repeatability and "interchangeability" of time and space is concerned with the motive of disease). In addition, the motive of disease is included in the complex of motives of life and death. It allows us to talk about the gradual development of the artistic concept of Mikhail Shishkin from “The Taking of Izmail” to the following novels.

The article is devoted to the issue of memory in Mikhail Shishkin’s novel The Taking of Izmail. The main purpose of the present research is to include Shishkin’s novel into memory studies. The approach to the memory aspect of the novel is based on Renate Lachmann conclusion that the literature is one of the mnemonic construction of the world. The analysis of memory issue in Shishkin’s novel indicates the author’s compound and heterogeneous model of narrative identity and external reality construction.  

The article focuses on aspects of gesture in Mikhail Shishkin’s novel Taking Izmail. The concept of gesture is frequently evoked in search of an alternative to speaking and rational meaning, since gesture, as a figure of muteness by itself, signals the nonsensical in the text and its production problematising the very possibility of verbal expression. Analyses of gestures in literature are faced with the same methodological conundrum as literary texts: how to verbalise the mute body. The article outlines possible directions of a gesturological criticism in Shishkin’s prose and grapples with gestures in Taking Izmail with respect to the motifs, the narrative structure, and the language expression. The recourse to the category of gesture is aimed at hidden potentials of the text and offers a different optics, or perception, of language. Gesture underlies the title of the novel (taking), the figures of authorial intervention (a grasping and punishing hand), the narratological metalepsis, and the organisation of the text as a system of convergences (flows) and divergences (series) intersected by a paradoxical element; finally, gesture is revealed in the temporal dimension (aion) articulated by the metaphors of a crack, a pendulum, and the circling Easter procession. Following the logic of the genesis of sense (Deleuze), gesture is defined as a formal medial element within the text structure occurring at the point of intersection and shift between body and language.

Article is devoted to a research of the genre nature of the Shishkin’s novel Izmaial's Capture. Considering its certain fragments as the sphere of realization of a genre invariant of a robinzonada, the author analyses the transformation of its parameters. In a modern robinzonada the border between "mine" and "others" is comprehended in a new way. The space represented in novel becomes multiple and loses the definiteness, unambiguity. Functions of such special composite and speech form as diary also change. The author comes to a conclusion that Shishkin's appeal to the genre strategy of a robinzonada is connected with the necessity of comprehension of identity crisis relevant for modernity.

The illusionist in Mikhail Shishkin’s novel The Taking of Izmail and in Vladimir Nabokov works appears in reference to the Platonic tradition, in the context of creative efforts, which, in turn, are associated with the divine creation of the world (the Creator - illusionist – writer triad). Therefore, the character of  the magus often functions as a metaphor of the author of the text: he also has the ability to create something out of nothing; he can make something disappear or undergo transformations. Both Shishkin and Nabokov (e.g. in King, Queen, Knave, and Pale Fire) compare the creation of literary worlds to the art of illusion, which is especially associated with the origin of the universe in contemporary prose writers. An important motif related to the art of illusion is the disappearance / death of heroes (The Potato Elf, and The Luzhin Defense by Nabokov), which has its roots in the tradition of Russian literature and is connected with emphasizing the role of the author of the text as the driving force for the development of the story.

 The Image of the Collector in Mikhail Shishkin’s Novel „The Taking of Izmail”

The article is dedicated to the problem of the collector in Mikhail Shishkin’s novel The Taking of Izmail. Using the works by Krzysztof Pomian and Walter Benjamin, the author establishes that the term “collector” refers rather to the author and the narrator of the novel than to its main character. In the article, collecting is regarded as the attitude towards the world and is considered in the context of the main traits of Shishkin’s works, among which the author identifies longing for wholeness resulting from the experience of fragmentation of the world, palimpsestic nature, and intertextuality.

The paper is concerned with the most basic compositional division to be found in lyrical texts, i.e. that between fragments referring to some kind of experience open to the author (lyrical subject), and fragments where the author, based on this experience, discovers an important more general truth. It is shown that this opposition may be marked by the structure of relevant tropes, since there is a strong tendency for more informative tropes to appear in fragments of the latter type.

The author analyses the translation strategies used by the translators of S. Lem’s The Futurological Congress to Bulgarian, Czech and Russian languages. The significant differences in the approach is noted — H. Stachová, who translated to Czech language, tries to preserve in all the circumstances the author’s idea of challenging the reader with ethymological puzzles — and succeeds in that task very well. The Russian translator, K. Dushenko and the Bulgarian translator, S. Petrova, choose different approach, trying to maximalize understandability for the target language reader. With this approach quite a lot of intellectual challenges disappear from the text. The other discovered fact is, that with very high probability S. Petrova must have been influenced by the Russian translation.

Review on Tadeusz Szczerbowski, Polskie i rosyjskie słownictwo slangowe, Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Pedagogicznego, Kraków 2018, 392 s.

noty