The subject under consideration is the prominence of history of literature in the work of English modernists. The author analyses Virginia Woolf’s (1882–1941) approach to history, and her view on history as a subject of representation in her novel-cum-biography “Orlando” (1928). In conclusion, Woolf’s literary project is appreciated against the background of some historical concepts of the second half of the twentieth century. 

The article outlines the contour of understanding the methodological principles underlying the strategy of researcher’s scientific activity in line with the methodology of functional pragmatism. It analyzes the structure of scientific concepts and clarifies the scope and content of the terms “concept” and “category” as well as the hierarchical class structure (intensional) of the categorical concept “observer”, which allows to distinguish it from related concepts, such as: visual in literature, artistic whole, direct and reverse perspective, point of view, subject of vision, speech, evaluation, and others. In addition, detailed comments are given for each of the hierarchical classes of the categorical structure of the concept “observer”, which are successively generalized into a single definition. 

The article attempts to define the boundaries of the experimental concept of “intermedial hero”/“intermedial character”, in relation to verbal literary texts. By its nature, the term is collective and is associated primarily with the verbal representation of a specific subject of action (artist, sculptor, musician, etc.), creating works of other arts within a literary text and, most importantly, transforming the structure of the work inner world, making it intermediate (not only in the main plot, but also at thematic, compositional, and mythotectonic levels). 

The article deals with the analysis of the metafictional commentary of the auctorial narrator in M. Chulkov’s novel “Mocker” in the light of the poetics of reflexive traditionalism. The analysis of the structural level and subject masks of the verbalization of a metafictional comment is carried out. It also traces the unity of textual, metatextual and paratextual metafictional reflection. Its types of commentary, both compositional and thematic, are distinguished in connection with the level of verbalization and its rhetorical decoration. 

The article introduces the concept of “staged narrative”, which is defined as the story of a character in drama, recited by him at the moment of his presence on stage. The category is specified and divided into: intrigue-forming, autonomous and incorporated staged narratives. The research material is the text of A.P. Chekhov’s play “The Bear”. It is shown that the suggested category can be useful in study of composition, plot and the character system of a dramatic text. In the process of a comprehensive analysis of the characters’ narrative replicas, their characteristic worldviews, ethos and strategies of narrative are revealed, and the place of stage narratives for clarifying the characters of the storytelling heroes, as well as to define more convincingly the entire character system. The obtained conclusions can be extrapolated to Chekhov’s dramaturgy of the mature period, and the very technology of analyzing stage narratives can be successfully applied in the study of other drama texts. 

The term reduction as a method of transforming a “alien” text in the process of its reception is not widely used in literary criticism. However, the term characterizes, in our opinion, one of the constant trends in the intertextual engagement of two texts – precedent and generated – when truncation occurs, “cutting out” some elements of the plot and accentuation of others in order to create new meanings. We will consider that trend using the example of a chain of literary texts interacting, in V.N. Toporov’s terminology, in the “resonant space” of “Three Sisters”.

Nikolai Evreinov’s report “The theatricalization of life. Ex cathedra” (1911) and Velimir Khlebnikov’s manifesto “Our Basis” (1919) demonstrate a similar idea of the beginning of human civilization. Both authors insist that the performative function of language preceded the communicative function, that performativity was the ground for complete understanding, and that present-day process control requires the attainment of a special speed of oral speech, through which the alienation of the primordial state is constructed. The symbol of performativity for both becomes a scrap of cloth that transforms the one gifted with it into a sound puppet, so that language is interpreted along the lines of the puppet game. The origins of such commonality are found in Kant’s treatise “The Conjecturable Beginning of Human History” (1876). The assimilation of Kant’s ideas is assumed, not directly, but through the interpretation of the Fall in the fundamental theology and middle school religion lessons. The anthropological interests of Evreinov and Khlebnikov proved productive in challenging the dream of synthetic total art. 

The article considers for the first time the note by D.S. Merezhkovsky “Who killed?” (1913), which is included by the author in the collection “It Was and Will Be.Diary. 1910–1914” (1915). The note is considered from the point of view of textual criticism and real commentary. Based on archival materials from the RO IRLI (Pushkin House) of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the cropped fragment of the text is reconstructed and its dating is specified. Appeal to the newspapers of the period of the trial in the sensational “Beilis case” (“Birzhevye vedomosti”, “Den’”, “Zemshchina”, “Kievlyanin”, “Novoe vremya”, “Rech’”, “Russkie vedomosti”, “Russkoe slovo”, “Utro Rossii”) made it possible to comment on the religious-philosophical, socio-political and legal contexts of the note by D.S. Merezhkovsky. It helped to get closer to establishing its pretexts, previously unknown, and to concretize the sources that the writer used in polemics with his contemporaries, primarily with V.V. Rozanov. Thanks to the periodicals, it was also possible to restore the content and course of the meeting of the St. Petersburg Religious-Philosophical Society of October 19 (November 1), 1913, at which D.S. Merezhkovsky made the report “On the Relation of the Old Testament to Christianity”, which is directly associated with the history of the text “Who killed?”. 

The article deals with the poetics of color, in particular, the functions of color contrast in a literary text. Color contrast in the short stories by E. Zamyatin and A. Green, chosen as research material, is a marker of contrasting spatial or temporal characteristics, motives and images, thereby organizing the inner world of the fiction work by visual means. Contrasting color play a significant role in the representation of boundaries and borderline states. Special attention in the article is paid to the principles of highlighting color combinations and “contextual” contrasts, in particular between the chromatic and achromatic palette. Distinguishing the individual functions of color allows us to considering it as a significant element of the artistic world, complementing it and providing additional ways of understanding and interpreting. 

Jacob Gordin [1853–1909] was an influential reformer of Yiddish theatre in first half of the 20th century. His dramatic works were created in the U.S. period of his life, but they were also popular in Russia where they were adapted and directed on the Russian scene. The article focuses on the Russian version of Gordin’s Yiddish King Lear. The play juxtaposes Jewish and European cultural elements and unites Russian and Jewish audiences. Situations of Shakespearean plots happen in streets of Jewish towns and neighborhoods. But at the same time Gordin fills the European plot with Jewish features, such as the polemics between religious movements, ideas about the purpose of man (tikkun olam, pikuach nefesh). The reference to the classical European fabula breaks down the public perception of Jews as a group isolated by the Talmud and rabbis, off the axis of history.
In parallel, the text demonstrates to the Jewish viewers that the European world is its own cultural space for Jews as well is a relevant place for them, too.

The paper considers two poems by Y.D. Levitansky from his book “Cinematography” (1970): “Remembrance of Colored Glass” and “Remembrance of Red Snow”. The paper is aimed at studying methods of visual representation of memory in lyrical texts. To that end it analyses the subjective structure, space and time, as well as sound and visual images, including color. In addition, the poems are related to each other. As a result, conclusions are made about the specificity of the visual image of memory in those poems.

The article is about the categories of musical and visual in Yu. Levitansky’s poem “How to show autumn” (Cinematograph, 1970). The text clearly shows the connection between these categories, as well as their role in the construction of artistic reality and the plot of the poem. In turn, the functions of the musical are considered, namely how sound can influence the organization of the figurative system, visual perception and also how the musical becomes visible. The article shows how the categories of musical and visual become inseparable components of the artistic world and build its holistic image.

The article analyses some features of the way Elena Schwarz, a representative of Leningrad uncensored poetry, used the means of poetic language. In her texts, most often written in compliance with all the norms of traditional syllabic tonics, she actively practiced form and word – creation, invented new words and sentences without a semantic layer, introduced foreign borrowings, ready-made quotes from other literary works and abusive language. In some cases, she could also conduct experiments with non-standard graphic presentation of text, trying to achieve ideal symmetry. Studying the uniqueness of the poetic idiolect (language means regularly repeated in texts, new verbal constructions, whole words or forms of words, syntactic constructions) of one of the “uncensored” Leningrad authors helps the reader to better understand how her artistic world was created.

The article is an analysis of literary self-reflection based on the material of M. Naumenko’s songs “Suburban Blues” and “Suburban Blues no. 2” which are considered as a mini-cycle, including the original plot and the continuation plot. Both texts are distinguished by a high degree of visualization which is made possible by Naumenko’s mention of a large number of subject details. Visualization attains a cinematic quality, which is reflected in the way of naming the above works in the cinematic prequel and sequel tradition. From the point of view of genre specificity, the first song can be called a philosophical and psychological drama, and the second – a melodrama. Those genres are in demand today primarily in cinema. The author of the article concludes that the change in genre originality from the first to the second text can be explained by connecting the mini-cycle with the third song, “Bitter Angel”, which enhances the drama of the other two works.

The article deals with the analysis of opinions of F.A. Iskander on writers, which he made in his short prose of the post-Soviet period. The object of the study is small prose works published in thick literary magazines in the period from 1996 to 2006. Through an intertextual approach and content analysis, precedent names are identified: in addition to Pushkin, Tolstoy, the writer’s reviews of Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Rozanov, as well as Shakespeare, Goethe, Kipling and Darwin are analyzed. According to the results of the study, the following conclusions were made. Firstly, English literature as important to Iskander as Russian. Secondly, the dynamics in the writer’s humanistic views are noted, as evidenced by the changes in the assessment of Russian authors and the theory of evolution. Iskander believes in improving people, but with age he came to realize that it’s a very long process. Thirdly, with the help of a comparison of the most significant authors for Iskander, the key features for his work are revealed: the opposition of the West and the East, interest in evolutionary teachings, generalization, historicism, weakened didacticism. In terms of the genre, Iskander and his significant authors share an interest in complex prose genres, namely a novel in short stories and a collection of short stories.

The article analyzes the functioning of memory in two novels by S.A. Alexievich, included in the cycle of books “Voices of Utopia” – “Last Witnesses” and “Secondhand Time”, which are based on the memories of witnesses of the Great Patriotic (Second World) War and the dissolution breakup of the USSR. The features of the poetics of memory in above novels are highlighted by analyzing the subjective organization of the text and the system of points of view, speech organization and figurative structure, as well as spatio-temporal organization, which allows talking about features of the poetics of historical memory in the novels by S.A. Alexievich and about features of the poetics of memory in a literary work as a whole. The influence of the novels on the remediation of the memory of the Great Patriotic War memory and the breakup of the USSR is considered. 

The article considers two large stage directions from Yaroslava Pulinovich’s play “That Very Day”. Each of them is organized in such a way that it contains a list of events that, when converted into theatrical text, must happen on stage. Analysis of those remarks allows seeing some aspects of the creating of an event in modern drama and the meanings generated through such kind of stage directions. 

The article considers the un-avoidable manifestation of the author’s individuality in the design of a visual-verbal sign as a common feature between a graphic novel and Chinese calligraphy, which is realized firstly through handwritten input and secondly through machine text transformation.
The article also considers such an important issue as the lifelikeness as a point of convergence between the two arts. 

The article considers the issue of the intertextuality of Old English hagiography based on the material of prose and poetic works relating to Saint Guthlac, one of the first national English hermit saints. The author analyzes the degree of influence of continental hagiographic canons (including St. Anthony’s hagiography) and the Germanic heroic-epic tradition on St. Guthlac’s hagiographies. The lexical ways of expressing the epic motif of ‘exile’, characteristic of the Old English heroic elegies “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer”, are studied in the alliterative poem “Guthlac B”, which describes the death of the holy ascetic. 

The article provides a comparative analysis of the translations of poetic text in the framework of assessing the quality of the translation of the artwork. Stylistic deformations are considered for the first time, as well as their influence on the perception of the text. The role of domestication, foreignization and deformation in the construction of poetic text in different languages (Russian and French) is studied in detail. The author identifies reasons for the use of the above strategies and translation transformations as well as the most common translation techniques. He also considers the diachronic aspect of the use of deformation as a strategy in the construction of a poetic text.

The article studies an issue of translating titles of literary works from Russian into Chinese. The author emphasizes that the title is one of the key positions in the text that influences readers’ perception of the image. The importance of choosing a title for the internal and external value of the work is also discussed. Using the example of the novel “Chapaev” by D.A. Furmanov, the author analyses the translation of the titles into Chinese, taking into account the peculiarities of the Chinese cultural and linguistic environment. The results of the study allow concluding that the semantics of each morpheme is important in translating the titles of literary works. The novelty of the article lies in applying diachronic analysis of translation variants of the novel “Chapaev”, as well as discussing the connection between human consciousness and individual fragments of a word.

This article provides a comparative analysis of the portrayal of Satan in John Milton’s epic poem “Paradise Lost” and Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy, focusing on genetic and typological similarities. Drawing upon scholarly research and critical interpretations of the above works, it studies the multifaceted nature of Satan’s character. It also considers contrasting perspectives, thematic implications, and narrative strategies. The article analyzes narrative techniques and symbolic aspects related to the portrayal of Satan, highlighting the significance of these works in addressing moral and religious issues. The author contributes to a deeper understanding of the literary and philosophical aspects of tradition and innovation in the depiction of Satan, based on the analyzed literary works.

In modern literary criticism, the emergence of gender theory in textual criticism and the study of the issue of the concept of a female lyrical subject is an important topic. In the present work, we consider the feminine lyrical subject in the poems of the great Iranian poet Parvin Etesami, in whose poems the feminine lyrical subject is creative, active, speaking and thinking. Parvin’s feminist views at the time she lived and in that society were unique; she, as a representative of all Iranian women, directly expressed the feminine point of view on many issues and where it comes from the person of a woman (the feminine gender is used in grammatical constructions) and with woman’s point of view. Such themes include women’s right to education, as Etesami openly discusses in her poems.

The genre of any statement is determined by the purpose, content and conservation in which it occurs. The narrative organization of the text determines the genre of prose (epic) fiction. The basis for the genre strategy of the parable is an imperative worldview within the framework of which a free individual has the need to make the right moral choice. The more modern genre of the story, in turn, historically dates back to it. “Amsterdam” by I. McEwan is, by definition, considered as a novel, but upon closer examination it is obvious that the genre features of the story are applicable to it: symmetry and cyclical plot, testing the hero as the event center of the work, the narrator taking an authoritative summary position in a reality that is unequal to the world of the characters. The life stories of the heroes duplicate each other, they are both faced with the need to make a choice, make mistakes and get punished for it. Their death looks like the world returning to normal, to a state of balance. The narrative, although conducted in an ironic manner, is serious and evaluative, which is emphasized by the introduction of side storylines, the characters of which show their best side, as well as references to religious texts, Shakespearean tragedy (a high genre of drama) and the lyrics of W.H. Auden and W. Blake.

The article deals with the identification and study of postmodernist features in the novel by J. Barnes “The Sense of an Ending”. The article provides a detailed analysis of the features of postmodernism in modern literature, explaining the conditions of their formation. Special attention is given to the discussion of such phenomena as the unreliable narrator and distrust of the truth, as well as the reconstruction of memories and moral relativism. The original article contributes to the formation of a comprehensive understanding in postmodernism as a literary movement.

The review considers the monograph “Criminal bestiary: beast – text – genre” by O.V. Fedunina, in which, through the prism of philological systematization and interpretation in a genre key, cases of the appearance in criminal literature of various hypostases and functions of representatives of the animal world are considered and comprehended.