The article summarizes the results of analyzing the systemic relations of the category «observer» with the levels of artistic work: focal, glossal, plot, compositional, rhythmo- and mythotectonic, – which are considered through the prism of the methodology of functional pragmatism. The levels are typologized in accordance with three dimensions: concreteness – abstraction; isolation – fusion of aesthetic subject, object and addressee; meaning – text.

The article provides an analysis of the concept of artistic integration proposed in 2013 by M.V. Dutsev for the scientific study of modern architecture as applied to other objects of art, on the basis that many of them have integrative properties that are included in the research fields of various humanities. Combining different cultural and semiotic codes in a work of art becomes the main reason for conducting interdisciplinary research. Meanwhile, the syncretism of cultural and art objects becomes the main issue in such a study, requiring the development of a new integrative method for scientific analysis. Using the phenomenon of the author’s children’s book as an example, the article analyzes the types, methods and causes of artistic integration, suggests ways of scientific description of such interdisciplinary research objects.

The article asserts the thesis that the innovation of Turgenev’s dramaturgy consists in combining musical and verbal texts. There are many works considering the writer’s allusions to musical works in prose genres. There are known studies on the joint work of the writer and singer – Pauline Viardot. A number of works show the influence of music on the artistic style and philosophy of the writer’s work Alekseev M.P. [Alekseev 1918], Gozenpud A.A. [Gozenpud 1994], Domansky V.A. [Domansky 2018], Samorodov M.A. [Samorodov 2015], Rybko I.A., [Rybko 2021], etc.). However, we are not aware of works that consider musical inclusions in the text of comedies and scenes of early Turgenev. The article shows that the techniques of including musical numbers in the texts of the librettos written by Turgenev for operettas to the music of Polina Viardot were tested by the writer in his dramatic experiments of the forties. Comedies, scenes and librettos of operettas should be considered as a single system. This approach allows for seeing how the writer’s dramatic concept and his understanding of theatricality were formed.

The article considers one of the specific types of «staged narratives». It is shown that a large number of stories told by the characters of «The Seagull» are characterized by plot and discursive autonomity. At the same time, such «random» episodes from the past (pronounced, for example, by Sorin and Shamrayev) make up a significant layer of the characters experience and determine their worldview.

It is proved that the world pictures and narrative modalities identified in their stories, are integral qualities of their personalities and mental worlds for each of the characters, which, in turn, forms the character system of the play and determines its genre specifics.

The author of the article investigates the poorly studied I. Shmelyov’s story «Alien’s blood» about the Russian soldier Ivan Grachev who was captured by Germans in the World War I. While working for the German Bauer in the village of Grünwald the Russian soldier observes the life of Germans with surprise: their lifestyle as a contrast to what he is accustomed to. The aim of the research is to analyze the story from the point of view of imagology, involving textual, plot, problematic and other analysis methods. The author considers the stereotypes of perception of Germans by the Russian man and vice versa, their ideas of each other, investigates the alienness of the two nations and analyzes the core of the conflict between Ivan and Fritz, which eventually led to Ivan’s death. The author refers to the historical context of the events noticing that Shmelyov represented the Russian myth about the exaggerated welfare of Germany on purpose, in order to make the contrast of Ivan’s suffering stronger. The article concludes about antithesis as the main way of constructing the story, underlines the role of folklore motifs. The novelty of the research is conditioned by the insufficient study of the mentioned story by I.S. Shmelev in general and in the imagological key in particular.

The author of the article makes a holistic analysis of Arseny Tarkovsky’s poem «The Book of Grass», based on the theories of deixis, primary phenomena, discourse/genre. The aesthetic integrity of the poem is given by the deictic projections underlying the image, as well as metonymy and gradation, the contextuality of syntactic and lexical units, and the neutralization of an actively semantized boundary. Behind the motifs of creative work, purity, roots, childhood, birth/death/immortality, the saving, prophetic power of the word, introducing a person to eternity with the help of art and nature in the «Book of Grass» there are the primary phenomena of peace, sadness, emphasized by the softness of emotional deixis, and the primary phenomenon of desire, resulting in the final performative. The ability of objects to be reflected in water, glow, and disappear is associated with the death and rebirth of a person. The delicacy of syntax and vocabulary correlates with the depiction of the magical fusion of man with nature, the liminal sensation of death as birth. The poem «The Book of Grass» presents itself as a self-definition of the lyrical protagonist that takes place in a dialog with another person.

In the focus of David Samoilov’s poem «Semyon Andreech» and the little poem «The Tsyganovs» is a peasant who according to the author’s idea, discovers «the powerful specifics of his mind». The integral and complex personality of the hero is morally close to the narrator-intelligent. The article considers the common features that combine the two works into an epic diptych. It is a combination of the epic and lyric, noted already in the criticism of the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, At the level of the artistic world, these are the laws of the universe and images of the traditional way of life, which are thought of as unchangeable. The characters positively perceive their inextricable connection with the world order. The material basis of existence is described as a value. The ambiguous image of a horse acts as an object of love, as the personification of beauty and as a manifestation of changeable matter. Various techniques emphasize the rapprochement of the intellectual narrator with the bearer of a different cultural code. There are themes of male friendship and marital love and harmony. The death of heroes who have not reached old age appears as part of the life cycle. The poet depicts heroes in an environment of war and peace, resorts to heroic and idyllic pathos, illuminating different sides of the image. In the finales of both works, the beauty emerges as a category that can, as the characters think, justify the contradictory life as a whole. The moral authority of the peasant warrior allows the author to confirm his hypothesis about the meaning of existence.

The paper studies the category of fantastic through the example of fantastical poetry by Vadim Shefner, focusing on texts like «Cosmic Legend», «Martian», «Electronic Fairy Tale», and «Fantastic». The analysis of fantastic, which is seen as a specific type of imagery, is conducted in two levels: lyricalplot and verbal image. Special emphasis is placed on the visual characteristics of the poem’s inner world, as transgressive (indirect) vision is often utilized to depict the fantastic. The specific features of the fantastic and visual in V. Shefner’s poems is determined by a conclusion, with the gaze serving as a means to cross the boundary between worlds.

The article considers some features of the use of poetic language by Sergei Stratanovsky, the St. Petersburg underground writer. The author’s texts, even despite his adherence to all the canons of traditional syllabic-tonic versification, represent a synthesis of archaic layers of vocabulary, stable ideological clichés of the Soviet period, common speech, strong language and original neologisms. Studying the originality of the poetic idiolect (language means regularly repeated in texts, new verbal constructions, whole words or forms of words, syntactic constructions) «uncensored» by the author helps the reader to better understand how his artistic world was created.

The article is concerned with the issue of the enumeration of grammatically homogeneous elements and the function of that enumeration in epic and lyrics. Repetition, including repetition with variations, is recognized as one of the fundamental elements of a literary text. We will be interested in repetition grammatically and partly syntactically, as a syntactic reproduction of grammatically similar structures (an example is the so-called «infinitive writing» by Zholkovsky or the principle of «verblessness» by M. Gasparov). It will also not be possible to describe their diversity in one article, so we will focus on the very principle of repeating grammatically homogeneous elements and we will show how this principle works in epic (using the example of Sorokin’s novel «Queue») and in lyrics (using the example of Sapgir’s poem of the same name). The sequence of the queue’s replicas in Sorokin generates narrativity, building the whole from parts, philosophical generalization, and «accumulation». Overcoming heterogeneity and diversity is carried out through narrative and plot schemes. In Sapgir’s poetry, the list of grammatically homogeneous structures (words and sentences) shows the impossibility, absurdity of the whole, irony in relation to philosophical generalization. The repetition of words, the same or grammatically similar, but different, reveals the complexity and versatility of the world, it’s irreducibility to a single pattern.

The article considers patterns that can be identified when analyzing the Russian rock poetry in the prism of a chronotope, called «chronotopic patterns». The spatiotemporal-semantic connection underlying the concept of «chronotope» can be identified in many works by Russian rock poets. In the course of the present study, we attempted to classify stable chronotopic images in accordance with deterministic nominations based on the ultimately generated meanings in the text of rock poets. Of interest is the range of forms that the chronotope can acquire in a rock text due to the verbalization and concretization of time and space. The plot-forming function of the chronotope is due to the importance of the coordinates of space and time in the coordinate plane of the work of art, along with images, but the key role is played by the perception of time and space by both the lyrical characters and the recipient, which underlies the principle of the author’s influence and forms the holistic unique concept of the rock work. Chronotopic patterns as repeating stable patterns of thinking have different ways of manifestation, concretized by certain nominations at the lexical level, either of which contains a deep meaning and a key to understanding the work as a whole, becoming a springboard for the development of the plot.

This article analyzes the specifics of narrative organization in V. Erofeev’s poem «Moscow–Petushki». Thus, in particular, it is proved that the peculiarities of narration in that very fiction text are conditioned by the abnormal state of consciousness of the narrator. Since we have proved that the abnormal can be realized in artistic works in two forms: as an abnormal narrative that presupposes an abnormal depicting consciousness and as a narrative of an abnormal state of consciousness that presupposes a conventionally «normal» narrator whose narrative object is an abnormal consciousness, therefore it is obvious that in the analyzed text we are dealing with an abnormal narrative.

Based on the analysis of the poem’s text, it is proved that the narrative organization specifics in the work is embodied through three ways: communication between the narrator and a certain presumed addressee, communication realized within the diegetic world and reflected in the conversations of the central character as a fictitious narrator with other characters as fictitious narrators, communication taking place in the form of internal dialogues between the narrator and his abnormal consciousness; in such a type of communication it can also be considered as «narration».

Many researchers have noted the humanistic orientation of Iskander’s works. One of the key concepts in his work is the concept of conscience. The article aims to characterize the specific features of the concept of «conscience» in the collections of notes and essays published by Iskander during the post-Soviet period of his career. Conscience, according to Iskander, is not solely related to God, as for example, Berdyaev believed. It is also in general irrational, as it can replace intelligence and even limit knowledge. The flammability is one of the most recurring features of conscience in his works. That is, Iskander notes both the creative and destructive power of conscience. He gives an interpretation of conscience as the foundation for the soul. Iskander sees in conscience a symbiotic creature assigned to animals by God, from which humans evolved. It is also worth noting that the concept of the state of conscience may have been influenced by Darwin’s ethical ideas. If one considers Struve’s classification, then Iskander could be classified as a subjectivist or idealist. It is interesting to note that Iskander’s descriptions are not particularly imaginative, but when he does use metaphors, he often fails to maintain a consistent figurative language. It reflects not only Iskander’s own associative and fragmented thinking, but also his lack of coherence in his writing.

The article deals with defining boundaries of the fiction anddocumentary in S.A. Alexievich’s prose. The objects of the research are novels «Boys in Zinc» (1989) and «Chernobyl Prayer» (1997). S. Alexievich’s creative method consists in collecting the testimonies of Soviet people about the humanitarian catastrophes of the 20th century. Nevertheless, in S. Alexievich’s prose, through the selection (according to the «principle of suffering») and montage of testimonies, the artistic beginning is realized. Several leading motifs are realized in the structure of the novels: death, fear of war, loneliness, faith in the idea, etc. S. Alexievich also manages to create a collective image of the protagonist. S. Alexievich also manages to create a collective image of the protagonist: a Chernobyl man and an Afghan «boy» with his personal tragedy, trauma and psychology.  

The article studies how the principle of plot construction, based on the hero’s violation of moral norms, is implemented in practice. The portrayal of contradictory characters who make difficult moral choices, often wrong ones, is one of the main features of the novel genre. The plot is a chain of events, and an event is the character’s crossing of a certain boundary one way or another, and therefore the chronotope of the threshold (and perhaps not literally realized) becomes more important in the novel. The heroine of the novel «Harassment» constantly finds herself on the threshold of a moral choice. The plot of the novel is based on the principle of cumulation: the heroine’s actions become more and more ambiguous from a moral point of view, until, finally, a catastrophe occurs. The heroine’s «fall» is not an isolated incident, but the result of moral degradation. In that sense, the woman depicted in the modern novel differs significantly from classical heroines, who were often considered a moral ideal, especially in comparison with male heroes. At the same time, the author remains in line with the Russian literary tradition, being an impartial depicting subject; as a creator, she gives the heroine the opportunity to experience not only collapse and punishment, but also repentance and rebirth.

The article compares two episodes from dramatic texts: the finale of Alexander Pushkin’s «The Feast in the Time of Plague» and the episode with the old man from Christopher Marlowe’s «The Tragic History of Doctor Faustus». The basis for comparison is the typological similarity of these episodes both in terms of the sequence of events and in terms of revealing the characters’ personalities. As a result, it becomes possible to correlate the scene from Marlowe’s play and the finale of Pushkin’s play into a context in which the motives for the impossibility of repentance and righteousness are actualized. Another important semantic point is the behavioral linkage of the Chairman from «The Feast in the Time of Plague» with the diabolical background that is not revealed in Pushkin, but is obvious in Marlowe; Through the above aspect, one can build the motivation for Walsingham’s speech behavior in Pushkin. In addition, the context of Marlowe’s play clearly shows how deep Pushkin’s characters are and how semantically complex the outcome of Pushkin’s play is – both in relation to The Tragic History of Doctor Faustus and in relation to its direct source – John Wilson’s play «The Plague City».

The article addresses the issue of the boundary between fiction and reality, which is increasingly viewed as markedly conditional in contemporary literature. Against such a background, the relationship between author and protagonist constantly become more complicated. The writer not only creates a text but also gets to be a part of his own mythology, within which the autopsychological hero functions. A similar approach distinguishes the work of Roman Senchin and Christian Kracht, the most important representatives of the latest prose.

The author will be interested in the specific characteristics of the autopsychological hero’s image; in that regard, the previously unstudied connections between contemporary Russian and German prose at the level of poetics and the author’s worldview will be compared.

Taking the example of the story «Minus» (2001) and the novel «Rain in Paris» (2018) by R. Senchin, as well as the novels «Faserland» (1995) and «Eurotrash» (2021) by Kr. Kracht, the autopsychological hero is analyzed as a kind of twin of the author.

In the article through analyzing the motif complex, consisting of the motifs of the soul, heart, gaze and dream in three stories from the collection «Vignettes» (1899) («Epilogue», «Hunger», «Human») of the Slovenian writer Ivan Cankar’s (1876–1918) the concept of the soul in his early work is studied.

The study revealed the transformation of writer’s understanding of the studied concept: from the position of the symbolists, according to which everyone’s soul is a part of the universal soul present in all living things (the story «Epilogue»), through the combination of Emerson’s ideas about «The Over-Soul» with the conviction that the human soul is a beautiful, unattainable goal to which the artist strives for (the story «Hunger»), to the idea of the existence of a soul in an ordinary person living an everyday life (the story «Human»).

The remaining elements of the motif turned out to be a constant component of the writer’s artistic arsenal. The gaze motif is used by Cankar to convey the inner world of heroes in the context of the presence or absence of the hero’s encounter with the soul, the heart motif appears to represent the hero’s feelings from meeting or failing to meet the soul or a marker of the hero’s connection to the soul the dream motif is present in the first two stories as the only space where a person can unite with his/her soul.

The article deals with references to Russian cultural figures in the works of the American poet F. O’Hara (1926–1966). References in the article are grouped into three directions – Russian avant-garde poets, F. Dostoevsky and Russian composers. The article also demonstrates how exactly those allusions are presented in the works of F. O’Hara. The end of the article demonstrates a tendency in references to people, mostly as representatives of the Russian emigration and dissident movement (with the exception of V. Mayakovsky and F. Dostoevsky).

The paper considers a correlation of the real world and the world of the imaginary in Domenico Dara’s novel «Malvinverno», in particular, the  role of the imaginary for understanding the protagonist’s inner world, as well as the theme of reading in the novel in general. It analyzes the author’s references to the works of L. Pirandello, F. Dostoevsky, M. Bulgakov and other Russian and foreign authors, their role in Dara’s narrative, the realization of metaphors and the characters’ transition from the plan of the imaginary to the plan of the real and back. Special attention is paid to the theme of death and the theme of duality as being central to the work in question.

The publication tells about war episodes in the biography of the historian of literature and philology, teacher N.K. Gudziy – about his two trips to the front of the Great Patriotic War (together with his colleague, literary scholar D.D. Blagoy), organized by the Political Directorate of the Red Army in March and July 1944. The first of them was connected with visiting combat units of the Baltic Front and giving lectures to officers and soldiers about Pushkin. The importance of the second was due to the participation of Gudziy and Blagoy in the work of the Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the atrocities of the Nazi Invaders in the Pushkin Reserve (the scientists visited the Pushkin Hills, Mikhailovskoye, Petrovskoye, Trigorskoye, and the Voronich hillfort). For a detailed account of their preparation and implementation, previously unpublished field diary entries by Gudziy were used. The text of Gudziy and Blagoy’s article «A Trip to the Front» is republished in full. In addition, articles by Gudziy and Blagoy, published in central and front-line newspapers in 1944 and written hot on the heels of the aforementioned trips, are cited.

The collection of early reviews by P.P. Pertsov is considered in the review not only as an important stage in the formation of a critic, but also as an evidence of the breaking traditional principles of Russian criticism, as a rule, focusing on the reliability, typicality, realism of a literary work. To a large extent, the collection of Pertsov reflects the process of transition of criticism to a modernist aesthetic paradigm, focused on formal innovations, the nonlinearity of the content structure. The work of the compilers, the thoroughness of the preface and the quality of the preparation of the publication are evaluated.

The review considers the collection «Word and Music in the Works of Alexander Bashlachev». The importance of the book is demonstrated, as in many ways the final result of three decades of philological study in the poetic heritage of Alexander Bashlachev, and at the same time, outlining promising paths for further research.