The article presents an overview of Russian-language literature in Latvia following the criteria for defining it as a minority literature. The author describes the autonomous mechanisms of legitimisation — Latvian publishing houses, periodicals, poetry festivals specialising in the popularisation of contemporary Russian literature — and identifies several strategies of self-identification of Russian-speaking writers in Latvia. She also concludes that in the new, “after 24 February 2022” context for Russian culture, the Russian-speaking Latvian literary community, just as after 1991, is experiencing serious tremors, leading to its greater polarisation. The author paid special attention to the artistic presentation of the new social reality — ‘emigration without emigration’ — with the leitmotifs of the new refugee and counter-memory, which have recently gained in importance.

The subject of considerations is the role of artistic imagination and the causative power of aesthetic creation of the title character from the story by Goar Markosjan-Kasper. In the work, maintained in a postmodern style, the writer combines the problem of imagination with the category of memory/oblivion. He also uses the concept of an artists to show the duality of the imperfect material (real) world and the ideal world created by the causative power of the mind. Improving the world that takes place — pars pro toto — through changing the face of Tallinn has both a geographical and human dimension — communing with beauty triggers altruism and love in people.

This article analyses the letters of Inna Lisnianska and Elena Makarova, published in 2017 in the book Имя разлуки. Makarova and Lisnianskaya's correspondence covers a remarkable moment in the history of Russia and Russian emigration, when censorship and self-censorship receded into the background. It is a testimony of great factual and literary value. The publication Имя разлуки is not only a treasure trove of knowledge about the creative biography of female authors of letters, about social, political, literary and cultural life after the collapse of the Soviet empire, but, importantly, proof that in Russia it was possible to save good epistolary models and restore the importance of the genre of letters in literature.

The article is devoted to the analysis of space in the “DAU” project, directed by Ilya Khrzhanovsky in cooperation with Yekaterina Oertel, Alexei Slyusarchuk and Ilya Permakov, among others. Feature films and documentaries that constitute the project were shot in the years 2009–2012, mainly in Kharkiv, in a closed scientific institute, built exclusively for this purpose. The aim of the article is to examine selected spatial solutions in the project, to contextualize them, and, consequently, to link the film architecture with the behavioral sphere and the corporeality of the characters. The methodological tool, supporting the research of the text, is the category of the underground, embedded in the work Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. In the process of interpretation, the author draws attention to the connections between the mechanisms of oppression functioning in the totalitarian system and the symbolic language of the body and architecture.

The study offers an analysis of the latest work of Ludmila Ulitskaya from the point of view of cognitive poetics, considering the conditions of the book’s publication, the situation of the recipients’ first encounter with the Шестью семь cycle and associations related to the author’s current activity. Ulitskaya is among the most recognizable authors of contemporary Russian literature, and her emigration from the country which started a war is perceived as a political and moral declaration. This has led to some new ways of reading her works published after leaving Russia.In this article, the symbols contained in the plots of short stories and the structure of the cycle form the basis for the interpretation of the apocalyptic sense implied in the work. The author of the study states that the specific narrative, resembling Olga Tokarczuk’s concept of “the tender narrator” and including some traits close to the Eastern tradition of wisdom literature, strengthens the positive message of the work. Thus, the apocalyptic vision presented in the last part of Ulitskaya’s work opens to the eternal perspective and assumes waiting for salvation.

In the novel "Untraceable" Sergei Lebedev focuses his attention on analyzing the genealogy of contemporary evil, its specificity, and responsibility for it. In this case, the impetus for the described story was the attempted poisoning of Sergei and Julia Skripal. Once again, the author turns to a current theme, but one that has not been thoroughly explored (also in literature) - "the poisoners from the Kremlin." Using the example of the main character - Kalitin - a chemist, the inventor of the perfect poison (the eponymous untreaceable), Lebedev warns not to forget about evil just because it belongs to a theoretically bygone era. People (especially scientists) should take it into account, take responsibility for their decisions and actions, because if crimes continue to go unpunished, it will not be possible to oppose "the terror of toxic fear”.

The study is devoted to the analysis of images and metapoetic codes associated with two cities — Moscow and Berlin. In Vladimir Sorokin’s epitexts, i.e. interviews and a documentary film about him (Sorokin Trip), as well as in his collection of essays (Normal History), geographical names carry concise symbolic meanings,
with the names of the two cities often becoming the starting point for metaphysical reflections. Sorokin links the ontological opposition (or lack thereof) between the spaces outside and inside to the relationship between the individual and the authority. One of the key points of comparison between Moscow and Berlin is the different approaches to the past, to traumatic historical experience.

The article investigates the Diaspora theme in Appendix, the debut novel by poet Alexandra Petrova. Published in 2016, Appendix was awarded the Andrei Belyi Prize the same year. It is a novel with a complex structure and plot, a multitude of narrative lines, and a rich, erudite system of quotations. The main theme is the troubled condition of the ‘Other’, the immigrant, the outsider who finds himself in an unknown foreign city, in this case Rome, itself founded by a ‘stranger’. Petrova takes up the Virgilian theme of Aeneas as an explicit reference to the fate of the Trojan hero as image of immigrants Rome. Petrova is one of the voices of the new Russia Abroad even though she remains in many ways a voice on the threshold.

The article discusses genre features of the “boring dystopia”, the novel Радио Мартын by Filipp Dzyadko. Among the most important features of the novel are the image of a pseudo-carnival, the situation of a “state of emergency”, intertextual quotation, the activity of a dystopian protagonist. The exchange of letters between the now deceased becomes a symbol of the rupture of the chronotope. The syntax of the novel is subordinated to the aim of the genre. The novel can thus be understood as a confession of an emigrant-writer to his readers.

This article explores the relationship between the past and the present in the metanovel City in the Valley, written by the Russian émigré author Alexei Makushinsky. The discussion focuses on the protagonist, who makes an unsuccessful attempt to write a novel about the Russian Civil War. The aim of the article is to uncover the reasons and key aspects of the creative failure depicted by Makushinsky, addressing oppositions such as past vs. present, personal vs. historical, and memory vs. imagination. It also delves into the interactions between author and text, and ultimately, fiction and history. The main conclusions are that City in the Valley demonstrates the futility of using literary texts as tools to resurrect the past and that fiction cannot replace memory or transform historical events into personal experiences. Artistic and historical elements can complement each other, but a complete synthesis is evidently impossible.

The present paper aims at analyzing the images of the past and the future in the prose of two contemporary Russian émigré writers — Vladimir Sorokin and Sergei Lebedev. The author has selected two relevant texts from their works which produce certain similarity in understanding the interrelations between the past and the present. Sorokin’s dystopia depicts the New Russia yet to come, but strangely resembling its deep past. On the other hand, Lebedev uses a literary motif of a nonlinear perception and flow of time, which shows an ambiguous relationship between the present and the past.