The article is about one of the little researched narratological categories, brought into narratology from rhetoric. Against the background of the historically most productive ethos of rest, duty and desire, attention is focused on the ethos of conscience, which has not been previously studied in narratology. Conscience is first discovered as an ethos in the narratives of the New Testament. In fiction, the ethos of conscience was clearly manifested in the Russian classical novel (especially by Dostoevsky). The ethos of conscience is also found in modern novelism, which does not break with classical traditions.

The article is about identifying and describing the features of incarnation of meaning in the verbal structure of a literary work. Despite the fact that the study of the language of fiction has a long history, the connection of verbal organization with the features of updating the artistic meaning in a literary work remains not clear enough and needs to be studied. The purpose of this article is to study how the incarnation of meaning is reflected in the verbal organization of the work. Incarnation of meaning is understood as its “translation” into the being of a hero in an act of aesthetic communication. As the material of the study, the poem by A.S. Pushkin “Military leader” was chosen, since it depicts through the artistic word a work related to another – non-verbal – type of art, namely painting. As a result of the analysis of the “Military leader” a number of features of updating the artistic meaning in the verbal structure of the work are revealed, namely: 1) the connection of the incarnation of meaning, on the one hand, with the ontologization of the word, on the other hand, with the verbalization of the depicted being; 2) strengthening the representativeness of the incarnated meaning; 3) explicit opposition of the discreteness of the verbal structure and the continuity of artistic meaning; 4) actualization of the communicative nature of the depicted being.

Since Mikhail Bakhtin coined the term “polyphonic novel,” polyphony understood as a complex combination of equal voices has become a cliché of Dostoevsky studies. However, the eras of Dostoevsky and Bakhtin are at least fifty years apart, and those five decades saw a radical change in conceptualizing various kinds of art, including music. Yet the question of what these two eras took polyphony to mean and whether these two polyphonies are identical has been raised only recently. This article will consider Dostoevsky’s creative method through the lens of two terms: mimicry and layered voicing. Mimicry is Dostoevsky’s main principle of handling ideas: his antiheroes’ false ideas mimic true ones, Dostoevsky’s ideologues pretend to be what they are not. Layered voicing is Dostoevsky’s special narrative technique of combining several voices in a single statement. This technique is particularly relevant when interpreting quotations, both directly attributed and hidden ones, that Dostoevsky uses in his works. By distinguishing these voices, readers can arrive at the true idea that antiheroes’ false ideas mimic.

The article analyzes the scenes in the theatre presented in the novels “Petersburg Slums” by V.V. Krestovsky and “War and Peace” by L.N. Tolstoy. From the author’s point of view, the symbolic space of the theatre in these and other novels of the 19th century appears as a capacious model of society, and the strategies of depicting characters in that chronotope usually pursue socio-critical goals. The analysis of specific texts with reference to the concepts of social imaginary and social dramaturgy allows identifying the specifics of artistic modelling of sociality in the texts considered.

The article analyses special features in the functioning of the category “Event” in Leo Tolstoy’s novel “War and Peace”. Eventivity is considered both at the level of “mental” (related to the personal experiences of the characters) and “historical”: in both cases the narrator uses the concepts of “chance”, “causality” and “necessity”, the meaning of which varies depending on the context and, importantly, are realised in the poetics of the novel narrative. In order to analyze the paradoxical nature of the event in War and Peace, the concept of “contingency” is used to take into account the complex relationship between “freedom” and “necessity” in the structure of the novel.

The article considers the context created by two of Anton Chekhov’s works – the story “The Bride” and the comedy “The Cherry Orchard”. The basis for contextualization are the resonances between the texts (both: purely textual and at the level of artistic techniques), which contribute to the explication of the author’s worldview.

Analysis shows that the contexts formed by Chekhov’s separate texts, the parallels between which can be seen over different parameters, give depth to meanings that in the texts taken separately are not always perceptible.

The article studies and comments some of military essays written by a famous Soviet novelist and war correspondent V.S. Grossman in the second half of 1944, during a Red Army offensive. The texts are cited from newspapers and journals of that era.

The article is about the description and analysis of corporeal categories arising in the work of the Soviet uncensored prose writer Pavel Ulitin. Although the role of one of the most “musical” writers of samizdat was fixed for the writer, his texts, despite the author’s distinct interest in the melody of speech, bring to life the complex of issues that in modern humanities is associated with the body. Constant attention to the design, interaction with various ways of representing the text (from calligraphy to typewriting) reveal the corporeal foundation of writing as such. Meaningfully, the works of Ulitin, often completely eliminating the usual depiction, also turn to the body. The methods of non-classical representation of the body are of interest to us first of all, however, in addition to immanent analysis, we will attempt to consider the identified strategies in synchrony: in the context of practices, contemporary to Ulitin not least related to the appearance of the Noveau Roman, the poetics of which is considered in relation to the processes taking place in the philosophical culture of Europe of the second half of the twentieth century.. The book “How does he hold a paddle?” as the most striking example of the author’s poetics was used as a research material.

The article is dealing with the theme of memory, the correlation between the categories of imagination and forgetting, as well as the presence of boundaries between the concepts on the example of Yuri Levitansky’s poem “How slowly I was forgetting you!..”, 1959. The article considers ways of depicting memory and forgetting, reveals their visual aspects. An important role in the representation of memory is played by the imagination of the lyrical subject, who, being prone to forgetting, turns to the imaginary, thereby completing the lost memories, filling in the gaps in memory, relying on his feelings and emotions. The article shows how the presence of boundaries between memory, forgetting and imagination does not prevent the consciousness of the lyrical subject from returning to the past, but rather helps and contributes to the acquisition of lost memories.

The article is about the transformation of the Epitaph genre in modern lyrics, in particular, in the work of Tatiana Danilyants. Despite the relatively recent interest in the genre of Epitaph, quite a lot of observations have already been made on the genre in the twentieth century. The Epitaph as a genre focuses on both elegiac and ironic pathos, throughout its development it is on the border of several modes, having a clearly defined character of the inscription, which varies from the inscription on the tombstone to the inscription about death (sometimes even epigrammatic). With that background, it is important that Tatiana Danilyants marks the genre of her texts by collecting Epitaphs in a cycle and setting their genre reading by the title. The works of Danilyants is permeated with the theme of memory, memory allows winning back what time takes. Therefore, tragic pathos prevails in the texts, but it prevails, giving place to other features that are not mandatory in the classical memorial genre. The Epitaphs in Tatiana Danilyants’ book “Red Noise” reveal the author’s transformation of the genre: the Epitaphs combine elegiac sadness, sarcasm and bitterness, and a hymn to life. The Epitaph of Danilyants does not develop along any one path, but incorporates several vectors of transformation characteristic of modern poetry.

Gender as a category helps to clarify the specific nature of the aesthetic object and the aesthetic event in fiction prose. The gender component reveals itself in visual manifestations of style. As the language proves to be the means of realization of human biological intentions, gender tends to influence the formation of the aesthetic object and the aesthetic event valid for the triad author-character-reader, accounting for its variability.

The first novel by the Pulitzer Prize winner Barbara Kingsolver, a writer of the second wave of American feminism, is an illustration of such processes.

Features of Buddhist philosophy as interpreted by the counter-cultural writer J. Kerouac play an important role in the artistic self-determination of the British poet and musician D. Bowie and the formation of his creative personality. The article suggests that Kerouac’s motif of the road has Buddhist philosophical overtones, which Bowie adopts to create the poetic “persona” of Aladdin Sane, functioning in a unique way in the album cycle of the same name. Aladdin’s “persona” is presented as schizophrenic, but at the same time embodying the concepts of “transience” and “absence of self”, close to Buddhist philosophy in Kerouac’s interpretation.

Alexander Barulin’s most notable results have to do with the communicative aspects of the human protolanguage. This kind of research differs from the conventional reconstructions of proto-languages because it cannot rely on material traces left by ancient humans, and the linguistic structures properly speaking are hardly available. Thus, linguists cannot put forward a description of phonetic and grammatical systems of the languages of the first humans. Instead, conjectures are usually made based on the etological-communicative studies of animal behaviour. Following Alexander Barulin, animal communication displays certain signs analogous to ‘hedges’, whose main function consists in accommodating information conveyed as a sort of ‘goods’ in communicative ‘exchange’. Hedges of “possibly” vs. “probably” types belong to linguistic techniques extensively used both in West-European and in Russian discourses. Lexical properties of such hedges interact with grammatical and pragmatical categories of tense, mood, and negation.

The paper studies the frequency of epistemic parentheses (bezuslovno ‘definitely’, verojatno ‘probably’, kazhetsya ‘likely’, konechno ‘of course’, etc.) in the news issued by the official media channels in Telegram. The article analyzes the hypothesis that the excessive or rare use of such linguistic units by the media channels may reflect not only their thematic or stylistic preferences, but also their political orientation. As the statistical analysis shows, the media that “prefer” parentheses expressing certainty tend to follow the official Russian ideology. According to authors’ observations the pro-government agencies often use the parentheses of uncertainty to introduce a subjective opinion and to frame the indirect questions (proposals) and rhetorical questions. The oppositional sources, on the contrary, avoid the active use of lexical units that clearly indicate the speaker’s certainty or uncertainty in the reported fact, using other methods of speech impact.

The frequency of epistemic parentheses in the media texts can serve as a quite reliable marker, not only of the political orientation of the channel and the general content of its news, but also of the potential manipulative influence of its texts on the readers.

Below are fragments of the investigation file of A.Z. Lezhnev-Gorelik dating back to 1937. The source of the material is Central Archive of the Federal Security Service (FSB) of the Russian Federation. Provided with the fragments are the publisher’s notes.

The review considers the book by S.A. Kibalnik “From the history of detective literature in Russia: the case of Chekhov”.

The author demonstrates the importance of the book both for philological comprehension of Chekhov’s legacy and for deepening the understanding the ways in which literary detective fiction is developed.

The publication is a review of a new book “Rock Poetics” by the well-known philologist Yurii Domanskii, which offers a new perspective on the study of rock poetry as a specific cultural practice of the present.