Literary imagology – a discipline of comparative studies which investigates stereotypical images of “different” or “alien” nations, countries, cultures, traditions, and religions in various works of literature – has already become quite firmly established in science. However, its theoretical bases are not yet completely formed. That goes for both the conceptual apparatus and the methodology of the research. The article proposes a mechanism for analyzing the image of the “stranger”, first of all, the foreign character. The author highlights the following “elements” of such analysis: physical appearance, costume, age, characters’ “speaking” names, their speech characteristics, pre-history, social status (class, profession), substantive details, chronotope, characterizations, the level of a foreigner’s being accustomed to the Russian life, his/her national consciousness, national character, mentality, the author’s marking a character as a “typical” representative of his/her nation, using antithesis to clear the difference between the “natives” and the “aliens”, reveal of a character within the narrative, his/her place in the system of characters. Moreover, the motives in the work, the author’s axiological position (reflected in tonality and emotionality of the narration), and the very genre of the work of literature may also transmit some imagological information. So, a literary text is a multilevel object of imagological analysis where even minor at first sight elements may be of great importance for the researcher. The theoretical foundations employed are supplemented with examples of such analysis made on works of 19th century Russian literature, the “elements” of such imagological analysis are illustrated. The article contains a brief bibliography on the current state of the issue in modern science.

The article covers some issues of Judeo-Christian relations as represented by the Russian-language journalism of converted Jews and assimilators. By studying the Conversion of a Jewish Legalist into Christianity Which Is Fascinating due to Its Typicality by Alexander Alexeev (Wulf Nakhlas) and ‘The Voice of Salvation’ Magazine Program (1884) by ‘Aizyk’ Kovner as well as his letters to Nikolay Leskov, the author shows how the journalists of both orientations test the established views of Jewishness and Christianity. Alexander Alexeev, a converted Jew, focuses his discourse about Jews on ancestry, while pushing religious affiliation to the periphery. Aizyk Kovner, an assimilator, wants to reform Judaism in such a way that in the eyes of Christians it appears to be part of the Christian continuum, but at the same time retains its traditional Jewish ethos. Both trends in journalism derive from the Jewish Question polemics and reply on expectations of the Russian audience. They are also a part of Jewish search for how to merge the old tradition with the fast-changing modern world. The marginal “tests of the pen” produced by 19th-century assimilators and converted Jews is yet another bridge between traditional Jewry and the secular Jewish-Russian culture and literature of the USSR era.

Alexei Kruchenykh compared the abstruse language (zaum) to the international pantomime of silent cinema. But that contradicted his original idea of abstruse language as endowed with national and local coloring and expressing the core of national poetry. But abstruse language and cinema appear to be united by the rejection of theatrical improvisation, by the presence of the script or film shot as a constraint that allows improvising only as a technical failure. Such an idea was continued in Vygotsky and Luria’s collaboration in the field of neurophysiology. According to Vygotsky, the ape’s mimesis is not theatrical but cinematic: it is not an improvisation but the predictable motility of pantomime. From that viewpoint, mimesis is impossible in cinema, unlike theater, and abstruse language remains in cultural memory not as a mimesis of national poetry, but as an eccentric construction.

The article deals with the issue of interaction between visual and musical in the story by S. Krzhizhanovsky “Nine crows”. The article consistently analyses the process of combining the external point of view of the narrator, reflecting a stipulated objective reality, and the subjective-imaginative inner point of view of the composer, in which there is a dynamic transformation of conditionally objective reality into musical signs. As a result, a conclusion is drawn about a specific intermedial interaction, which can be referred to as an unfolded visual and musical metaphor, the key to which is the composer’s point of view.

The article considers the meaning-forming function of the leitmotif of illness in B. Pasternak’s novel “Doctor Zhivago”. By leitmotif we mean the central motif of a fiction work. Illness is seen as an anomaly of life, which in its invariant represents a borderline, liminal situation, something non-normative. The novel presents revolution and civil war as social processes that are morbid in themselves and spread the disease, “infecting” people and the surrounding space. Illness in its various manifestations (both mental and bodily) permeates the entire fabric of the novel. The article, with the help of I.V. Silantiev’s method of the motif analysis, studies several events realizing the motif of interest to us. The leitmotif of illness turns out to be the central, plot-forming motif in the novel.

The article considers the representation of Pavlovsk as a sacral locus in the poetic work by L. Aronzon. The structural-semantic analysis of the poem “Pavlovsk” (1961) as the most representative text shows that the semantic register of the representation of the “pavlovsky” space testifies to its inextricable connection with the mortal-earthly and vital-cosmic visions of the poet. It is concluded that the lyric of L. Aronzon artistically checks the ontological compatibility of the earth’s microcosm and the “sidereal” macrocosm in the space-axiological realities of Pavlovsk as the sacral center of the simulated universe.

The paper considers the poetics of the green color in two poems written around the same time “There was a house with three windows…” by Arseny Tarkovsky (1976) and “September. A holiday of green color” by Yuri Levitansky (1981). The poems are constructed around the green color, which turns out to be the representation of the unusual and miraculous. It is notable that both poems correlate visual and auditory images, with music and singing serving as a unifying element. In Tarkovsky’s poem, auditory images are represented by music and singing, whereas in Levitansky’s, they are manifested as the sounds of thunderstorms and rain. The article firstly sets forth a methodology for the analysis of color in the context of a lyric poem and secondly subjects the poem to analysis on the basis of that methodology.

The article deals with the study of the subjective structure of Sasha Sokolov’s novel “School for Fools”. Using the methodological apparatus of narratology and receptive aesthetics. An attempt is made to analyze the compositional structure of the text in order to describe the so called “subjective neosyncretism” – an aesthetic trend in the literature of the second half of the twentieth century, exacerbating the relationship between the value and narrative instances of the work. The need for such a study is motivated by the complexity of the description of the metafictional structure of the work, undertaken by us for the first time on the basis of the concept of V.B. Zuseva-Ozkan. The main hypothesis of our research is confirmed by a practical analysis in the subject structure of the novel: the fusion of the position of the hero and the author, or, more precisely, their conflict-free identical coexistence as different functions of the work, does not allow us to unambiguously attribute the “School for Fools” to any of the four invariants of the metafiction proposed by Zuseva-Ozkan. It does not create an internal conflict in the mentioned concept, derived from other metafictional material, but allows us, following M. Foucault, to propose a clarifying parameter – the authorship function.

The article aims to clarify the socio-cultural connections between the rock community (musicians, fans, journalists) and members of the literary process (poets, writers, critics) in the late USSR. Some common ground between the groups was noticeable from the very beginning of rock’s spread in the Soviet Union, and as the years went by, the common ground grew. It is also associated with the tradition to consider rock culture in the context of literature: not only in the sense of common poetics, but also some formal features. For instance, the desire to unite in informal circles and communities, as well as an interest in samizdat as the main way to express their ideas.

This article deals with the connection of the E. Letov’s song text “Universal Great Love” with G.E. Nossak’s novel “Spiral”. The poet himself spoke about that connection. The article offers a view of Letov’s text as a palimpsest. Because it is not an isolated case in Letov’s poetic practice, the article concludes that such an approach is productive. The importance of studying Letov in the context of creative and philosophical thought of the 20th century is also emphasized.

In the article, Yegor Letov’s formula “Eternity smells of oil” from the song “Russian Field of Experiments” is considered in the context of formulas related to the smell of oil from the works of Maxim Gorky and Erich Maria Remarque. A conclusion is made about the semantic enrichment of Letov’s formula through its contextual comparison with the formulas of literary predecessors, which allows us to clarify ideas of Letov the poet’s ideas about man and humanity in the past, present and future.

The paper considers the types and features of neosyncretic subject in the compositions of A. Bashlachev. Neosyncretic subject is a form of subject organisation manifested in the absence of clear boundaries between the bearer of a point of view, the subject of action and the bearer of speech. The article analyses Bashlachev’s texts in which the lyrical subject is uncertain. The same pronoun “I” or “we” can denote different subjects, as well as it can transcend time and space, alienating itself in two hypostases. That instability of the subject is the result of the non-divisibility and non- mergerability of the author and the hero.

The article considers the lyrical subject in the poetry of Anna Gorenko. The author’s poetics presents a complex construction of the subjective structure, not suitable for one particular typology. Following the analysis of a number of texts from the poetic collection «Feast of uneaten bread» by A. Gorenko we will define strategies of the subject’s assembly. Splitting into several speaking instances (including the figure of the Other, the pronominal form «we» and role-playing subjects), discursive “flickering” within the narrator’s speech, bodily dissociation are considered as key practices of modeling the subject. The article will demonstrates how the listed strategies relate to each other and influence the problematics of A. Gorenko’s poetry. Through the subject structure in the texts, the decentralization of identity is represented, which is due to the traumatic nature of experience and the problematic individual expression in discursive conditions.

The author of the article analyzes the ecopoetry of Anna Rodionova, winner of the Arkadii Dragomoshchenko Prize (2020). Ecopoetry is a particular poetic optic in which nature is seen as a self-valued system and problematization involves both contemporary ecological theories and the transformation of text structure. The analysis itself will be built on the consideration of various aspects of the poetics of Rodionova’s poems from the book “Climate”: identification of the conceptualization logic; analysis of the media-specifics of the text, language, objects; consideration of the mirage image, which is key to the organization of the book. In other words, the author considers the correlation between the mediological and ecological issues of her poetry.

The article deals with the analysis of the subject organization in the poetry of V. Borodin using the example of poems from the collections “Losinyi Ostrov”, “Pes” and “Cloud nine”. The lyrical subject in Borodin’s poetry is constructed in two main ways. The first of them is aimed at transcending its own subjectivity through the mode of “nobody speaks”: the lyrical subject takes the position of a narrator in the text and, at the same time, is an observer included in the world being described. That creates a space for utterance, which is intended to remove binary oppositions by appealing to an interpenetrating experience in which the hierarchical order of interactions between things is cancelled. The second method aims at including the lyrical “I” in the text, when the subject is in close connection with the described world, against the background of which he becomes only an insignificant part of the universe, coexisting on an equal footing with other parts of it.

The paper considers figures of teachers (called personae doctoris by Servius) in Virgil’s “Georgics”. We believe that in Virgil’s poem, for the first time in the genre of didactic epic, not only the didactic poet himself, but also the gods and cultural heroes act as teachers: first of all, Jupiter and Aristeas. Juppiter acts as a teacher of mankind when he ends the Golden age so that people “do not become idle”. Aristaeus shows people the art of bugonia, which in turn was revealed to him by the gods. The fact that gods and men act as teachers is important not only as the Virgil’s genre innovation per se. It also brings us closer to interpreting the poem as a poem about knowledge and teaching. It also proves our previous conclusions that in the Georgics, labor and human existence, despite all obstacles, are not in vain, provided there is the favor of the patron and the instructions of the gods.

The article attempts to consider J.R.R. Tolkien’s story “Leaf by Niggle” through an intermediate optics, since the figure of the artist Niggle and created by him Creations created by him turns out to be in the center of the narrative, and to outline methodological principles for identifying the type of an intermediate character in the structure of a literary text. First, the paper briefly outlines the methodological vector of research and problematizes the situation of verbal “depiction” in the literature of works of other arts, preliminarily defines the category of an intermediate character and describes a consistent scheme for its identification in the text, and then analyzes the selected work from the proposed point of view.

The article analyzes the use of ekphrasis as a key literary device in Giovanna Pierini’s biographical novel The Lady with the Fan, which is about the life of the artist Sofonisba Anguissola. Relying on classifications proposed by Elena Yatsenko, the author is using a typologization of ekphrasis “by volume”: the “full” ekphrasis, which provides detailed descriptions of works, often emphasizing technical and stylistic details, and the “condensed” ekphrasis, where works of art are briefly mentioned, serving to advance the plot and convey the cultural context of the era. Special attention is given to indirect ekphrasis, classified by the object of description and corresponding to the classical definition of the trope, through which details of painting techniques and emotional perceptions of artworks are conveyed. The study demonstrates how biographical prose about artists broadens the discourse on the paragone of the arts through the interplay between visual and verbal forms of art, what is illustrated through examples of ekphrases of Sofonisba Anguissola’s works, as well as through the analysis of techniques, methods, and various types of perception that Pierini employs to recreate artistic imagery through descriptions of the creative process. Thus, the relevance of using ekphrasis in prose is substantiated not only from an aesthetic perspective but also for the development of narrative within an art-historical framework.

The main purpose of the research was to try to give a precise and, in our opinion, the closest definition of the concept: time, from the point of view of the translation science – translation studies. The relevance of the chosen theme is to study, compare and contrast semantic and lexical meanings of such units as: “definition”, “category”, “concept”, taking into account their linguistic/national-cultural characteristics in various languages. Areal studies of the concept time involved not only works of linguistic character, but also others (related with linguistics) sciences: cognitive linguistics, linguoculturology, linguo-philosophy, theology and etc. Thus, the results of the study helped us to construct a synchronous linguistic-hierarchical model of human thought process reproduction, according to which we established that the concept of TIME – is the distance // path from point A (signal) to end point B (idea). Language in such a case is the main interpreter of thought, thanks to which a “temporary mental image” is formed. The image is made up of words in the mind of each individual in their own way, depending on the unique (exceptional) cognitive and recessive thinking.

The article considers phraseologisms of joint appearance of antonyms, shows the internal semantic structure of antonymic components and reveals the cognitive causes for the generation and construction of such type of idioms. The content of the study is a description of three typical kinds of constructions “X and Y”, “X or Y”, “neither X nor Y” out of the form of antonymy co-occurrence idioms, and an analysis of symmetrical embodied cognitive strategy and iconic sequence as cognitive causes for the phenomenon of symmetrical embodied cognitive strategy in the Russian language.

The article reveals some unique features of the Indian version of the English language, including such linguistic phenomena as Indlish / Indglish and Hinglish – a linguistic fusion illustrating the dynamic linguistic landscape of the country, in which the official regional languages of India are represented. A specific linguistic feature of Hinglish is that it is necessary to simplify communication between the inhabitants India. The purpose of the article is to demonstrate the mutual influence of the languages belonging to the Hindi–speaking and English-speaking areas that have developed in the country. The novelty of the study is determined by extra- and intralinguistic factors indicating the isolating of the national version of Indian English. A comprehensive consideration of socio- and cultural-historical factors indicates a possible change in the status quo of a nationally oriented language as an independent national variant.

The article considers the extent to which introduction of information technologies have been introduced in the cultural and artistic field as well as provides an analysis of the changes that have occurred against the background of digitalization in the field of culture and art in recent years. The study of the pros and cons of digitalization of art spaces will allow us to assess the effectiveness of the conditions created for the formation of comfortable digital environment for people of various social groups: students, tourists, spectators (listeners), etc. The study also highlights the most popular innovations in the field of information technologies used in the cultural environment and art space at the present time, as well as the impact of artificial intelligence and neural networks on the activities and creative work of artists, musicians, writers and other artistic professionals. Today, there is an issue of qualitative changes in the introduction of digital technologies into culture and art. In practice, work in that direction is intensively underway. In theory, the issue under consideration has not been sufficiently studied and requires an integrated approach to the study and conduct of new scientific research.

The review considers the book by German researcher Wolfgang Stefan Kissel “Chekhov’s cosmos. Theatre, space and time”. The importance of this monograph is shown both for the study of Chekhov’s dramatic legacy and for the study of the dramatic genre of literature and theatrical practices.