The Problems of Historical Poetics

14-24

Authors: Vladimir Nikolaevich Zakharov

Original as it was, the phenomenon of pochvennichestvo (roughly translated as «native soil») in Russian thought and literature is often accompanied by a number of myths, misperceptions and erroneous commonplaces. It is not infrequent that those who never shared the ideas of pochvennichestvo are described as its adepts, and those who did, are often misquoted, with some notions, ideas and phrases misattributed to them. The ideological and literary agenda of pochvennichestvo was formed by the Vremya (1861—1863) and Epokha (1864—1865) magazines published by the brothers Dostoevsky — Fedor and Mikhail. Their outlook and vigorous action, discussions of submitted articles at board meetings, polemics with other periodicals — all of these factors contributed to the general trend of pochvennichestvo with its typical mutual influence of all its members. Fedor Dostoevsky's role on its development was decisive, as he kept consistently substantiating ideas which were new for Russian literature. Our article analyses the pochva (soil) metaphor in the ideology of new school of literature and political movements which Dostoevsky helped set up in 1860s—1870s. According to him, pochva includes everything that gives birth and unites: people, homeland, native language and mother earth. They are all linked together by the mystery of Russia as the keeper of Orthodox faith and Christ as the «ideal of the people». One has to reunite with the pochva by becoming one with the people and strive to see all estates united. To be a pochvennik meant to love Russia and its people, to be a Russian and identify as one, to follow the faith of the fathers and honour the native land. In the 20th century, pochvennichestvo resolved the old argument between the Westernizers and Slavophiles. The word pochvennik was applied to the authors who stayed loyal to Russian traditional values, rural communities and traditions of Russian literature. Various authors and critics have been included in this circle, but it definitely includes D. S. Likhachev and A. I. Solzhenitsyn, V. G. Rasputin and V. P. Astafiev, V. I. Belov and V. M. Shukshin.

31-40

Authors: Vyacheslav Anatolyevich Koshelev

Natasha was P. A. Katenin's first work to be published, famous for its lyricism which made it the author's greatest success with both critics and readers. Traditionally Natasha was classified as a ballad, with G. A. Burger's Lenora named as its source. We claim to have discovered a more obvious source of this text — The Martyrdom of Sts. Adrian and Natalia in St. Dimitry of Rostov's version of the Menaion. It was included in the Menaion entry for August 26 — the day of the Battle of Borodino. This hagiographic source sheds light on numerous episodes in Katenin's lyrical tale — a text which started the “Natalia text” tradition in Russian literature. The symbol of birth (the name Natalia is derived from the Latin word for birth) is thus linked to death (via the day of one of the bloodiest battles of the 19th century). Katenin introduces the idea of death as a chance for a happy future, as his protagonist dies to keep on living with her beloved. Katenin's tale opens the new type of poetic expression of patriotic consciousness. Natasha was the first war text in Russian literature to glorify peaceful life of common people, rather than war.

49-58

Authors: Vladimir Dmitrievich Denisov

The article analyses several notes made by Nikolai Gogol shortly before his death in the light of their links to his other works and the Gospel text. The author seems to have understood that he was dying and was preparing to meet his death as a Christian should, to an extent matching the events around him with those in the Gospel. His artistic eye and hand did not fail him. His dying notes feature a brief sketch of a man in a cab and a profile of a man being shut by a closing book. Calligraphic handwriting Gogol had developed by mid-1840s differs from both the large scribble of the draft text of Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka in the 1830s and the small hand of his historical notes, articles and novellas of the mid-1830s. His new hand was that of a man who knew the value of words, and not of a copyist working with government papers. Overall, the notes are permeated with the mood of contrition and humility. Gogol writes that Satan has already entered the world and the last days are approaching when man is abandoned by God and considers solitude the highest good. He sees his actions as the only true way and takes pride in his sins and ignorance as if they were virtues. The decay of “the temple of his soul” leaves no chance for love and harmony, disconnecting people and ruining the world. Gogol wants to prevent this by uniting people in the Gospel. The longest of his dying notes is addressed to his friends. Every true Christian can be viewed as such.

67-76

Authors: Sofiya Viktorovna Melnikova

The initial thesis of my article is the unity between ecclesiastic and secular literature which Russian culture has preserved in the Modern period. The interrelation of ecclesiastic and secular traditions is shown here on the example of the Siberian regional literary process in the 19th century. We primarily focus on nonfiction written by the Orthodox clergy: memoirs, autobiographies, travel notes. Memoirs were a new phenomenon in church literature of late 18th — early 19th centuries. These compositions were of special significance for the literature of Siberia: half of all memoirs of Siberians at that time were written by priests and missionaries. We argue that memoirs of the clergy can be considered not only as sources on the history of the Russian church, but also as cultural texts and literary monuments. All major features of the 19th century Siberian regional literature are conspicuous here: a focus on Siberia proper, a combination of art and non-fiction, a special importance of prevalence of a genre of travel notes, etc. In their genre poetics and language, memoirs of the clergy also followed the practices of secular literature, which made them an integral part of the regional historical and literary process. At the same time, literary works of the clergy preserved the specific features of religious consciousness and the link with traditional church literature, primarily hagiography and pilgrim travelogues. It can be seen, for example, in the sacralization of the Siberian space and the strong emphasis on apostolic service.

86-113

Authors: Viktor Viktorovich Dudkin

The article looks at the 'eternal' problem of the inexpressible in the cultural and historic forms and motives it took in the works of Dante, Goethe and Dostoevsky. We view the inexpressible as a product of subject-object type of relations. In the case of Dante, the issue of the 'inexpressible' stemmed from strict subordination of subject-object relations in the Middle Ages, where the object was universal and sacred (with God as its highest form) and the subject was something 'under' (cf. the meaning of Latin prefix 'sub'), something incomplete and not self-sufficient, with their cognitive capacity limited. The integrity of the world according to Goethe is achieved through the dynamic unity of its constituent parts rather than through their vertical hierarchy. In this unity, the external (objective) mingles with the internal (subjective) and vice versa. In the vision of earthly paradise in Dostoevsky's The Dream of Ridiculous Man the visual dominant is set up by the protagonists's cosmic guide: “To see everything...” Dostoevsky adds a new twist to the issue of the inexpressible, which takes the shape of a certain metalanguage the paradise dwellers use to communicate. The issue of the inexpressible has remained urgent since the days of Dostoevsky, as indeed it had been long before Dante. Multifaceted as the problem may be, it can be defined as a translation issue, if we view translation itself as a cultural rather than simply a linguistic phenomenon. Analysed this way, translation includes: 1) the translation of creative process into its outcomes; 2) translating the visual into the verbal; etc.

125-132

Authors: Natalya Nikolaevna Romanova

The article looks at the parallels with the Gospel text that arise in F. M. Dostoevsky's novel Netochka Nezvanova. We analyse and compare the parables of the New Testament that implicitly appear in the text of the novel, as well as their artistic transformation. The main focus of our comparative analysis is on God's judgement of the fallen man and human judgement (that of the Pharisee). Among the parables woven into the fabric of the novel we find that of the Pharisee and Publican, of the prodigal son, the lost sheep, the called and the chosen, of the talents and the narrow gate. The comparative analysis is run on both lexical and semantic levels. Biblical allusions are important signals which allow us to reach the deep layer of the text's original meaning. Both the characters and their possessions have an allusive level of meaning. The article also deals with the issue of sacralization of the female protagonist.

143-162

Authors: Olga Vladimirovna Zakharova

The criticism that Dostoevsky's Demons attracted in his lifetime is relatively unpopular with modern scholars. The reason for this is clear: the critics did not understand Dostoevsky's novel. Our article provides an analysis of the reviews of both the journal and the book versions of Demons (1871—1873). The earliest responses to the novel appeared immediately after the publication had begun in 1871. For two years, the author had been reading the critics' opinions which in this or that way could have influenced his creative process. Dostoevsky could have accepted or rejected these contributions, but the criticism definitely did leave a mark on his writing. Among those who took part in the critical discussion of Demons were the reviewers from the Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti, Golos and Iskra newspapers, as well as the magazines Otechestvennye Zapiski and Delo: V. Burenin, L. Paniutin, A. G. Kovner, M. G. Vil'de, A. M. Skabichevsky, D. Minayev, N. Mikhailovsky, N. Demetr, P. Tkachev, etc. Common for all of them was the claim that the novel is a phantasmagory and thus has little artistic merit. On the whole, critics did not react positively to Demons, attacking their author as a reactionary, a renegade, obscurantist, or deranged epileptoid. Dostoevsky was accused of slandering the youth. We make a special focus on the Christian aspects of the novel and the earliest critics' discussion of these aspects, including negative responses.

173-187

Authors: Rima Hanifovna Yakubova

The article discusses the issue of dialogic convergence of biblical and literary fabulas in The Adolescent by Fedor Dostoevsky. We also examine the issue of the author's creative dialogue with the previous traditions, and the synthesis of biblical and literary sources in the novel's fabula. A special emphasis is made on the author's attention to biblical fabula tradition and the role of biblical subtext in the plot of the novel. We have outlined a set of images and motifs which link The Adolescent with its source in the Old Testament and provide a comparative analysis of the fabulas in Pushkin's The Station Master and Dostoevsky's Humiliated and Insulted and The Adolescent within the general context of the Old Testament tradition. The article examines the transformations of classical fabulas, their convergence and resurgence in The Adolescent thanks to the open, convergence-oriented type of artistic consciousness that we find in Dostoevsky.

196-202

Authors: Elena Anatolyevna Osokina

The article draws a parallel between divine service and art, using Dostoevsky's last grand masterpiece as an example. We begin by defining the canon as a genre and as a liturgical order. The order of songs in the canon and the liturgical order resemble the sequence of Dostoevsky's novel and make it ordered and recognizable. The form chosen by the author was more organic for Russian consequence than the novel in its Western version and more expressive for a piece of art. By shaping his novel into a canon as a hymnographic piece, Dostoevsky created a special form which helped his novel attain perfection. The form of canon as a hymnographic text is found in the novel's structure (“a form of a plan”) which is made clear by the positioning of the life of Zosima. The novel's hidden meaning was thus expressed in its form. The structure of a canon reproduced in a piece of fiction allowed Dostoevsky to link the contemporary and the all-embracing, bring up eternally important issues of losing faith in God and provide true answers in the discovery of new faith in Jesus.

216-223

Authors: Sergey Sergeevich Shaulov

Soviet literary criticism, especially in the first decades after the 1917 Revolution, was quite biased in its treatment of Dostoevsky and his works. The reasons for this bias lie both inside and outside the sphere of political ideology. We suggest that there exists a genetic link between some Soviet readings of Dostoevsky and a number of interpretations made in the author's lifetime. Also analysed are the attempts to 'domesticate' Dostoevsky and adapt his works to drastically different cultural conditions and political norms. It is indicative that this adaptation has always passed the stage of mythologizing the writer and his works. This mythologization paradoxically became a convergence point for Soviet (Lunacharsky), anti-Soviet (Berdyayev) and purely philosophical (Bakhtin) readings of Dostoevsky. Ultimately, the central Dostoevsky myth in post-revolutionary Russia was a version of Romantic mythology often directly expressed in comparing Dostoevsky with Prometheus. We also look at the negative readings of Dostoevsky, which construed the author as a certain mythological antagonist of the proletariat as the collective messiah. Such readings (exemplified in our article by Pereverzev's and Livshits') point at the ultimate limit of ethical assessment of Dostoevsky from the standpoint of rational secular humanism and the Soviet humanitarian thought as its version. Dostoevsky's artistic practice incorporates this tradition within the intranovel dialogue as just one of the voices and demonstrates its ethical insufficiency, which in its turn provokes the mixed reaction of 'appropriation' and 'rejection' from both Soviet thinkers and their contemporary heirs.

241-251

Authors: Nataliya Petrovna Vidmarovich

The issue of frequent confusion of the notions of impudence and boldness in patristic texts is explained through the problem of confusing vice and virtue. In the context of virtuousness and sinfulness, these two notions became the focus of two stories from N.S. Leskov’s cycle on the righteous: — Odnodum (The Singlethought) and The Pygmy, where they are crucial for understanding and interpreting the notion of official duty. Leskov's characters both show Christian mercy and prove a wonderful example of a Christian view of official duty, when every dutiful act turns into a higher service that requires true boldness. The choice between an act of justice and an act of mercy, therefore, turns into a choice between the word and spirit of law stemming from Evangelical lawfulness and legalism. In the context of the two approaches to justice, we also touch upon the question of royal service under Emperor Nicholas I.

259-266

Authors: Marta Lukashevich

There are a lot of facts to prove that Nikolai Leskov placed great emphasis on the Bible in his career as a writer. His earlies contributions to newspapers were devoted to the issue of the Bible's accessibility. As a publisher and editor, he did a lot to improve the knowledge of the Bible among the Russian people, viewing this process as a basis for moral education. Leskov's works of fiction often feature biblical quotes, reminiscences and imagery. The objective of our article is to assess the importance of the Bible for the structure of Odnodum (The Singlethought) — a short story Leskov wrote in 1879. Set against other texts of the same author, The Singlethought stands out as a text where the link to the Bible is more accentuated both in form and content. We provide an analysis of how the Bible influenced the personality growth of the protagonist, Alexander Ryzhov, and his behavior models, as well as how the society views him. It is also important to provide the historical context of the discussions of the role of the Bible in the life of the Orthodox community, namely the debates on the Russian Bible Society and the Russian translation of the Bible. Ryzhov's reputation of “an eccentric” and “of doubtful faith” put him in the same class with Leskov's other righteous characters, making this protagonist timeless and important.

276-286

Authors: Nina Borisovna Cherepanova

The article examines the poetry of a relatively unknown poet of the Russian Silver Age, V. V. Gofman (The Book of Introductions, 1904; Iskus (Temptation), 1910) in the light of its links with the Gospel. As early as in Gofman's first collection of poems motifs from the Gospel come together with flower imagery. Flowers in Gofman's poems act as markers of the Paradise, the locus of eternity, truth and harmony. Flower imagery is also an important element of the image of the Faraway Lady — one of the centerpieces of Gofman's poems. Gofman's second collection, Iskus (Temptation) (1910) reveals more conscious and clear allusions to the Gospel: the title refers to the Christian tradition, and the most important flower in the poetic 'flowerbed' is the lily with its clear biblical symbolism. We conclude by reaffirming the conceptual importance of the biblical plane in the poetry of V. V. Gofman.

301-314

Authors: Nataliya Gennadyevna Sharapenkova

The aim of our article is to discover biblical allusions, motifs and plots in Andrey Bely's last and least studied novel, Moscow (1925—1930). Besides the biblical plane (both Old and New Testaments), the novel features a lot of eschatological imagery. We have analysed the key scenes of the novel where biblical motifs and imagery acquire the status of a sign. Our analysis allowed us to conclude that the Gospel plane of the text helps the reader comprehend the overall idea of the novel, i. e. the protagonist's initiation, his departure from the Old Testament regulations to the Christian idea of mercy and compassion, as well his discovery of the spiritual laws of nature and the universe. The image of the eccentric in the novel helps us more profoundly understand the continuity and transformation of the biblical, eschatological and anthroposophic motifs throughout the whole creative heritage of Andrey Bely.

328-342

Authors: Nikolay Ivanovich Sobolev

The article deals with the history of I. S. Shmelev's novella The Inexhaustible Cup. By analysing the draft manuscripts of the novella we have retraced the chronology of the text. Numerous rounds of correction found in the draft copies reveals the high intensity of the author's work on the text. We have outlined 7 draft versions which can be grouped in 2 stages of working on the novella. Stage 1 comprising the first three draft versions shows the author's intention to create the images of physically and spiritually perfect people and express the transforming power of beauty understood in the spirit of Vladimir Solovyev's philosophy. Stage 2 (draft versions 4 to 7) witnesses the author's change of the idea of his work. The structure of the characters evolves, with the protagonists developing new features echoing the types of Old Russian literature.

351-359

Authors: Evgeniy Mikhaylovich Neyolov

The article looks at the various aspects of appropriating the Christian traditions by Russian fantasy writing. We show that the Christian tradition has most significantly revealed itself in the genre of fantasy writing which is in high demand among early 21st century readers. Both the content and the formal poetics of this tradition have been taken into account here. One of the typical fantasy protagonists is a hero yearning for God, which is a familiar staple of Russian literature. By default fantasy deals with demonolog, thus becoming closely linked to Christian tradition of the struggle against evil. Demon (or devil) being a popular character in fantasy writing, the forgotten traditions of Old Russian literature get re-actualized in 20th and early 21st century and the demonological image includes both the demonic and the human. We conclude that contemporary fantasy authors develop their own versions of the Christian tradition, removing the conflict between the “faith” and “invention” typical for fantasy writing.