The article offers one possible option for distinguishing between mass and high literature namely by relying on the specific features of the genre poetics. The definition of the genre by Mikhail Bakhtin is used as a methodological basis. Having regard to the historical poetics and evolution of the genre category that has been described in the works of Sergey Averintsev, Samson Broitman and others, the article substantiates the following hypothesis: in European literature, starting from the second half of the 18th century, we can see two main genre-forming principles that are existing in parallel: the genre canon and the interior measure of the genre. The interior measure of a genre that is the direction (vector) of its possible development, and it can be used as a characteristic feature of the high literature. The interior measure determines the artistic possibilities of a particular genre. The genre canon becomes a genreforming principle for mass literature. It forms, consolidates and replicates stable (repeating) genre features. As an example, the article considers genres of the novel in verse, the Gothic novel and the historical novel. On their basis, various possible ways of correlating the genre canon and the interior measure of the genre are shown.

The article deals with the role of the antithesis “cultural – natural” in the mythopoetics of the Caucasian megatext. The study is based on the texts of Russian writers (A.A. Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, A.S. Pushkin, M.Yu. Lermontov, L.N. Tolstoy), in which the Caucasus is the scene of action. At the same time, the thesis that the integrating role in the megatext is played not by locus, but by the underlying mythologeme of all the texts in question. The motivic complex of initiation, established as the basic one for the Siberian megatext of Russian literature, is under consideration as a basis for the Caucasian megatext, since both megatexts arose as a result of perception of Caucasian and Siberian locus as a symbolic “land of the dead”. However, the Caucasian text also contains a complex of motives cultivated by the mythologeme of the world tree, which manifests itself in the form of a number of value-marked oppositions, including pairs “north – south”, “west – east”, “civilization – barbarism”, ultimately ascending to the binary opposition “culture – nature”. Those antitheses are implemented at different levels of the literary text organization: focalization and plot, motives and mythotectonics, the artistic system of the author. There is a semantic tension between the fields “cultural” and “natural”, which is usually resolved through an appeal to the motivic complex of sacrifice, which also ascends to the archetypal iconic complex of the world tree. Consequently, the antithesis “cultural – natural” plays a world-modeling role in Caucasian texts which are pieces of a single megatext. The antithesis superimposes on the motivic complex of initiation and creates an ambivalent chronotope of symbolic death and spiritual rebirth.

The object of research in the proposed article is the semantic organization of a dramatic work. The subject of the study is the peculiarities of updating the meaning in a dramatic work, due to its generic specifics. The specifics of artistic meaning are described in this article with the concept of incarnation (implementation). At the same time, the article reveals not theological, but aesthetic (based on the works of Bakhtin of the 1920s) and the hermeneutic content of the above concept. The article focuses on identifying the generic features of incarnation of meaning in works of both classical and modern drama. The scientific novelty of the article is determined by the fact that for the first time (through the concept of incarnation) it reveals the generic features of updating the meaning in a dramatic work, namely: 1) emphasis on the process of transition of the meaning of the characters’ being from the mode of possibility to the mode of reality; 2) placing in the center of the world of drama a character who is in a situation of making a choice of his own life meaning from a range of possible options for its implementing; 3) artistic understanding of the characters life as a limited horizon for the implementation of semantic possibilities, as indicated by the specifics of the image of time (as conditional “now”, unfinished present) and space (as limited and visible conditional “here”); 4) in a non-classical drama, the connection of incarnation of meaning with the image of characters throwing “their being at opportunity” (Heidegger) is mainly not in the space of interpersonal communication, but in the spheres of consciousness and/or language.

The article considers some artistic features of the image of the main character of the story “The Overcoat”. Gogol’s novel in a peculiar way transforms the event series of the source text – “The Life of Acacius of Sinai”, fragmenting the biography of the character, reducing it to essential episodes of his life. Special attention is paid in the article to the onomapoetics of the text, clarifying its additional semantic meanings. The space-time relations in the text are metaphorized, Bashmachkin’s personal space is initially closed, the character is closed from him. The turning point in the narrative is the acquisition of a greatcoat, which turns out to be a guide to the world of passions and feelings for the personage. He discovers the outside world, the embodiment of which is St. Petersburg, and as the character learns about the surrounding space, he is approaching his death. The article presents the main moments of the main character’s transformation – from external to deeply personal, which could not help him establish himself in the world.

The article considers the semantics of space formed by the system of object-details and sonosphearic elements in the finale part of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. The theatrical version of the play created at the Moscow State Theater “Lenkom” (dir. Mark Zakharov) became a starting point for the analysis of the literary text. Detail is studied as regards the formation of motifs involved in constructing the spatial organization of the artistic world, as well as an element of the material world that constructs a space in a certain way. Such characteristics of place as narrowness, length, isolation, “verticalization” or ‘horizontalization”, as well as the properties of its boundaries create a semantic field for the world of objects and things, in which Firs finds himself at the end of the play. The contextual analysis of the world of things makes it possible to identify the role of certain characteristics in the topos of the house and estate, the semantics of their transformation, and to assess the role of details in creating the meanings associated with the ontological sphere and its change and in unfolding that meaning in the character and the reader (spectator)’s minds. The significance of the transformation of the place in the final scene makes it possible to trace the connection between the inner state of the character and the “state” of the house itself and read the play’s final scene in terms of the connection between man and place.

“Sentimental Tales” is a book about the struggle of a “little man” for existence during the NEP period. The prose demonstrates a “mosaic of quotations” in which classical tradition is clearly discernible, specifically, the artistic intertextuality of sentimentalism is particularly strong. The author uses the method of intertextual analysis to study how Zoshchenko transforms the tradition of sentimental literature and what functions the intertexts perform. Following the study he concludes that “Sentimental tales” as a whole is a variation on the theme of sentimentalism. Elements of idyll became a means of philosophical comprehension of human existence at the turn of time for the writer. Zoshchenko transforms the motive and plot reminiscences from sentimentalism, and puts them in his time in order to demonstrate a hard distinction between the old and new eras. Through the titles of the stories there runs author’s sentimentalism as well as his empathy and compassion for the characters of his works. Besides the theme of the destruction of idyll have a kind of connotation of anti-utopia manifested in two directions – the correlation between “Personality and Society” and “Technology and Art”.

The article provides a comparative analysis of O. Mandelstam’s poem “Skillful mistress of guilty glances” and “It is not that the Muse is gathering water in the mouth…” by J. Brodsky. It proves the fact of Brodsky’s borrowing the imagery of O. Mandelstam’s poem with its over re-denotation and deliberate stylistic degradation. The analysis focuses on such concepts as “love”, “death” and “speech”, each of which, while retaining the original connotations of Mandelstam’s poem, acquires a new, reduced meaning through the use of certain lexical means (for example, colloquial and jargon words) Thus, the concept of “love” in Brodsky’s poem turns out to be an ironically reduced memory, in which the lyrical subject focuses attention not on the object of his love, but on himself, unlike in Mandelstam’s poem of address. The concept of “death” is also deflected sarcastically by Brodsky, since his subject of speech speaks already from oblivion, representing “nothing inside”. The notion of “speech”, although it has a rather negative semantics in both poems, turns out to be mute in Brodsky, characteristic of just such a lyrical subject who has already crossed the threshold of death, at which the lyrical subject of Mandelstam’s poem stops.

The author of the article proves that M. Kurochkin in his drama “Kitchen” creates an interesting effect of the “kitchen in the castle” chronotope with the help of fantasy. In that play, the locus of the German medieval castle of the 5th century, which arose under the influence of the Nibelungenlied, is clear: here the epic heroes speak in a high style and follow the storyline of the source. The second locus is the kitchen in a Russian restaurant stylized as a castle: it is inhabited by restaurant employees (from its owner to a cleaning lady), whose language is distinguished by humor and everyday expressions. However, the high verse discourse of the locus of the German castle gradually flows into the locus of the kitchen. Locus of the medieval castle of the 5th century. and the locus of the kitchen. in a Russian restaurant of the late 1990s, stylized as a castle, flowing over each other, gradually reveal Kurochkin’s special metaphysics. In the play, the “kitchen in the castle” chronotope is present from the very beginning as a special metaphysical and fantastic world, but it does not appear immediately, but only when two loci are superimposed on each other.

By the example of a segment from Alexei Oleinikov’s play The Bread Factory (“Khlebzavod”) the article illustrates the way in which the subcultural fictional world in the literary text is constructed through the deconstruction of physical reality.

The paper considers the concept of labor in Vergil’s “Georgics” in different contexts from labor improbus of Book I to the myth of Aristaeus and Orpheus and labor of the poet himself. It is supposed that along with labor improbus which goes against the world order, brings suffering, and is often fruitless, there is another labor – labor probus. The agricultural labor of Books I and III is hard and often hopeless, and Orpheus lost his wife because his furor ruined him. But the labor of bees, Aristaeus and Senex Corycius is in harmony with the world and the gods, and this labor is not in waste. Bees are not lost irretrievably, Aristaeus following his mothers orders brought back the bees he had lost, and the Corycian garden is full of fruits. Granted the gods’ benevolence and patron’s protection, man of the poem “Georgics” can hope that his labor does not go to waste. That is how the poet also treats his work – the poem

This article attempts to define the boundary between the author and the hero, which is declared as the leading intention in J.-P. Sartre’s autobiographical novel “Words”. The boundary – category, as one of the central ones in the semiotics of culture, seems to be a convenient tool for analyzing the autobiographical narrative, a conventionally borderline literary genre, and is understood as an area of collision of two different spheres – nature and culture. The boundary that does not separate the text from the reference which he describes, and as a consequence the image of the author or character from the Author-Creator, but connects them. The article identifies such boundary markers as: theatricalization of the life experience, ironic distance as a technique, reflection on the achievable limits of the truthfulness in an autobiographical narrative and on the content of individual memory, the use of cultural memory as an explanatory context. Summarizing the article conclusions are drawn about how the explicit contouring of the boundary allows the author to distance himself from personal experience, but not completely exclude himself from the written text and preserve documentary as a certain quality.

The article analyzes the transformation of the literary text, which has a visual (photographic) component, into the material of film adaptation on the example of Georges Rodenbach’s novel “The Dead [City] of Bruges”, designated as a “photo-narrative” or “photo-novel”, and Roland Verhavert’s film “Brugge-die-Stille”. The intermedial transition involves three main elements: plot (narrative motifs), principles of the space organization (descriptive motifs) and the color symbolism (semantic motifs).

The review considers the book “Progressive Rock: Heroes and Destinies. Part 2: From Soviet Art Rock to Russian Progressive Rock” by E.A. Savitskaya. It is substantiated that the work may be called a milestone on the way of the deeper understanding of the musical genre featured in the title of the book and that the work is of the utmost importance for both the history of Russian music and the theory of culture.

 The following article describes the April 9, 2022 roundtable “Issues of the History and Theory of Intermedial Studies”. The event was held on the National Research University Higher School of Economics’ St. Petersburg campus under the auspices of the research group “Transmedial Literature Studies”. Participants discussed the history and theory of intermediality in three sessions before delving into traditional (opera, cinema, etc.) and modern (video games, rock music, etc.) media and their multimodal nature. Speakers, panelists, and audience members attempted to determine how literature influences the other media and how fruitful it is to use philological methods to analyze other arts. It was revealed during the discussion that “old” and “new” media strive for syncretism not only within the object, but also at the genre, plurimedial, and cognitive levels. Several approaches to intermedial theory were presented, all of which are primarily interdisciplinary.