To date, there is a large number of works considering the figure of unreliable narrator in texts of epic prose, while we have not found a single work in Russian on the specifics of unreliable narrative in drama. The article focuses on staged narratives, i.e., the intra–textual narratives of the characters in dramatic texts. In addition to informing the reader about off-stage events, such narrative cues implicitly and explicitly express the speaker’s point of view and personality traits, including a distorted perception of reality, a tendency to deceitful writing, or an inability to adequately report events. The article offers the detailed typology of the category of unreliable narrator in drama. Differentiation is based on correlation of the nature of unreliability with one of three possible instances in a communicative act: the subject (narrator), the object (story) and the addressee. Within the types, special modifications are distinguished, each illustrated with episodes from the works of classical and modern Russian drama.

The article considers Versilov’s “confession” and the topics of “superfluous men”, labor (this notion can conflate peasant toil and Christian endeavor), the Russian people as the keeper of the true image of Christ, Russia’s historical mission, omni-humanity and pan-humanity, and Russian-European relations. In accordance with the principles of apatetic poetics (outward formal similarity that disguises profound substantive differences), Versilov’s statements may appear to reflect Dostoevsky’s real ideas as opposed to the writer’s opinions put forward in other artistic, and particularly journalistic texts. However, a closer investigation of Versilov’s words as a distortion of Dostoevsky’s thought lays bare substantive differences between the writer’s claims and his character’s pronouncements. Versilov’s “confession”, therefore, emerges as an epistemological mistery of sorts, and finding the correct solution prevents readers from subscribing to beliefs fraught with the risk of adopting extreme forms of ethnic or cultural nationalism, and leads instead to the notion of the omnihuman unity in the Mystical Body of Christ where “there is neither Greek nor Jew, …Barbarian, Scythian, …but Christ is all, and in all,” and “there shall be one Christ loving Himself.”

This article considers certain features of the semiotic system in the novels “Anna Karenina” by L. Tolstoy and “Petersburg” by A. Bely, particularly the symbolism of bodily gestures, facial expressions, and visual details. The analysis is based on episodes involving the characters Karenin and the elder Ableukhov, where recurring motifs (carriage, paper, top hat) acquire a metapoetic status. It is shown how Bely, building on Tolstoy’s technique, constructs a unique semiotics in which the corporeal transforms into a verbal sign. Special attention is paid to intertextual echoes of the heroes’ images, which undergo transformation. Some intersections, noted in criticism, are consolidated into a unified system. Thus, “Petersburg” appears as an experimental work in which sound images form an independent level of the text’s supra-narrative organization.

This article deals with the review, systematization and scientific criticism of publications on the author’s issue in the “Solitary” and two boxes of “Fallen Leaves” by V.V. Rozanov. It shows that the issue in question is twofold and consists in studying a biographical author in the Russian-language Rozanov studies, the older “culturology” line of association for authorial behavior, in particular: an antinomy in his style, the carnival variety of author’s masks in the text, with the Russian cultural concept of “iurodstvo” (Foolishness for Christ), and the new “historical-philosophical” line, in which V.V. Rozanov’s behaviour is placed within the cultural-philosophical context of the symbolist period in literature and the Russian religious-philosophical renaissance. In the latter case, scientists indicate that the style of the trilogy incarnates the philosophical program of the author and is subordinated to the purpose of finding a religious style for writing and reflection. In those studies, the aesthetic structure of the trilogy is not considered. However, it is extremely important in addressing the issue of the abstract author and hero in the trilogy. All literary critics who deal with the issue of the author and the hero in the trilogy recognize it as a work of fiction and face the fact that the biographical author is identical to the hero, but it contradicts the nature of the aesthetic, which requires the author’s absence and suspension of reference.

The article deals with identifying the specifics of applying the category of reader’s literacy in Sergei Tret’yakov’s theory “literature of fact” and its role in deconstructing traditional notions of artistic creation and authorship. It shows how an expanded understanding of literacy becomes an instrument for the functionalization of literature as a means of recording and transforming social reality, particularly in overcoming the boundaries between author and reader. To this end, the evolution of the concept of literacy is analyzed. The main focus is on Tret’yakov’s important theoretical theses, and it is revealed that a key role in his theory is played by the idea of involving the reading masses in active writing as a condition for recording facts. The role of technological tools, including photography, as instruments for simplifying the writing of non-professionals is also considered. Beside it sees into the connection between practical literacy and the rejection of fiction, as well as the blurring of boundaries between writer and reader. Following Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas, the author analyzes the consequences of Tret’yakov’s reinterpretation of the concept of literacy, which turn out to be destructive moments in the effacement of the boundaries of aesthetics. The article emphasizes the importance of problematizing the “literature of fact” for literary theory in the context of the “crisis of authorship” in the 20th century and the search for new literary practices.

The article considers G. Ivanov’s lyrics in the light of references to other types of art: painting and music. It is presented as modernist, open to the combination of the verbal component with the pictorial/musical one. The concept of intermediality (based on O. Hansen-Leve) in relation to Ivanov’s work is offered for consideration. The author problematizes Ivanov’s place in the literary tradition and comprehends: the existing research views on the poet’s work. The historical-cultural and biographical context in which Ivanov’s lyrics exist is given: the poet’s interest in the fine arts is analysed; the facts of Ivanov’s reference to music in egodocuments and artistic texts are considered. The painting and musical elements in poetic texts are seen in the present study from the point of view of their typological correspondence to modernist trends: acmeism and symbolism. A distinction is made between the texts corpus of Ivanov’s early and late lyrics in terms of the use of painting / musical elements in them. As a result, a new view of Ivanov’s lyrics is proposed, which takes into account, on the one hand, the frequency of painting and musical motifs, and, on the other hand, their presence within individual poetic texts.

This article analyzes the dystopian and apocalyptic elements of Vs. Ivanov and V.B. Shklovsky’s novel “Iprit”. The primary objective of the study is to identify the book’s components of technical anti-utopies and local apocalypses, characterize their nature and specifics, outline their interrelations, and evaluate the quality of the writers’ artistic prognostications. The paper demonstrates the imaginary nature of the oppositions between the specific dystopias and the utopia of “Iprit” – Western and Soviet – and identifies the cause, nature, and consequences of the wars organized by the West against the USSR and the East liberating itself from colonialism, wars that lead to a series of localized global apocalypses, and documents the characteristics of post-apocalyptic reality. It is also established that the novel’s intertextual layer, in addition to numerous serious and parodic references to world and Soviet literature, the authors’ own works, and the socio-political situation contemporary to the writers, also contains a dialogue with V.S. Solovyov’s essay “A Short Tale of the Antichrist” from “Three Conversations on War, Progress, and the End of World History”. The images, motifs, and individual plots of that Solovyov work are subjected to a travesty-like modernization in “Iprit”, adjusted up to changing technical and economic realities, while retaining their warning potential.

The article analyzes the phenomenon of “authorial deafness”, articulated by Maxim Gorky as a specific insensitivity of writers to living oral speech and linguistic nuances in the era dominated by newspaper media. It studies parallels between that phenomenon and the aesthetic concepts of shiftology (sdvigologia) developed by Kruchyonykh, while discussing the musical-sound and theatrical dimensions of literary text in relation to the media aesthetics of Symbolism, Futurism, and avant-garde theater. Special attention is paid to the influence of Nietzsche and Maeterlinck’s ideas on the notion of deafness as both a stage position and a cultural phenomenon conditioned by modern communication means. The role of Gorky’s theater as a space for overcoming deafness through sound and bodily-gestural sensitivity is analyzed, alongside the place of intermediality and media in renewing artistic perception.

The article focuses on the literary context of V. Grossman’s last story – “Everything Flows”. The researcher comments on quotes from classical Russian literature cited by Grossman, as well as on unobvious references to certain artistic works of the 19th and 20th centuries. The analysis allows the author of the article to trace the connection between literary and biographical contexts, as well as to more fully describe the features of the ideology of “Everything Flows...”.

The article сonsiders the key individual characteristics of the versification system of the renowned traditionalist poet Varlam Shalamov, demonstrating the mechanisms of his hidden innovation and the influence of the lyricist Boris Pasternak on his poetic style. It provides an overview of Shalamov’s metrics, strophes, sound organization of verse, and rhyme. It shows how, despite the obvious predominance of iambic tetrameter and quatrain stanzas in his poetry, the poet also demonstrates an interest in rare forms of metrics and sound organization of verse, which, in some poems, bring him closer to the innovative forms of 20th-century Russian poetry.

This article studies two poems in which the poet becomes the model for a painter: “The painter is painting my portrait...” by B. Slutsky and “The painter works quickly, faster than I do...” by A. Kushner. By analyzing the similarities and differences in the lyric situations and plots, the author shows the ways in which the lyrical “I” is represented through the act of painting. Special attention is paid to the subject structure, the spatiotemporal organization, and the role of visual perception in the poetics of both texts. In Slutsky’s poem, conflict and alienation between the poet and the painter predominate; in Kushner’s, the central experience is one of collaboration and dialogue. A comparative analysis enables revealing different models of interaction between poetry and painting, and shows how the figure of the painter becomes a form of the poet’s metareflection on the nature of artistic creation.

The article considers the features of literature as a media of memory by the example of the novel “Voices from Chernobyl” by S.A. Alexievich, which is based on the memories of witnesses to the Chernobyl disaster. The features of the poetics of memory in the novel 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 us to talk about features of the historical memory poetics in the novel by S.A. Alexievich and about features of the poetics of memory in a literary work as a whole. The article also highlights the features of the reception of the novel by S.A. Alexievich and its influence on the remediation of the memory of the Chernobyl disaster by analyzing reader reviews on various platforms and identifying media products that appeared thanks to the novel.

The article deals with the analysis of the lyrics of the modern poet Inna Alexandrovna Kabysh. It notes the role of idyllic pathos, the importance of the love motif, and the originality of the development of the “feminine principle” in poetry. Particular attention is given to the poetics of the poems: linguistic techniques, the specifics of the subject organization, ways of mastering “someone else’s” speech. The analysis of different levels of literary and artistic form allows concluding that the neo-mythological consciousness is fruitful in the poet’s work. The main feature of I. Kabysh’s artistic world is participation, which has its origin in the poet’s mythological (or rather, neo-mythological) consciousness. Kabysh’s poetry is characterized by a kind of “shapeshifting” (A.F. Losev’s term), where everything is connected to everything else and reflected in everything. Along with such fundamental attribute, I. Kabysh’s texts are also distinguished by other features characteristic of mythological consciousness. Particularly, as the analysis of the texts has shown, the author tends to reduce the most important binary oppositions, particularly those between life and death, and between reality and illusion. Taking that property into account provides a key to understanding the poet’s artistic world as a whole. Without such a holistic perspective, the meanings of the works become less expressive, and their pathos becomes schematic and one-sided.

The article studies the crisis of personal identity in Elena Isaeva’s plays “I’m Afraid of Love” (2008) and “The Prison Psychologist” (2017). The theme of both plays is “eternal love”. However, the “Russian man at a rendezvous” in the 21st century differs from its predecessor not simply by weakness and inadequacy, but by demonstrating a complete lack of humanity qualities. The plays also differ greatly in their imagery focus. The first drama focuses on the conflict that arises between characters appearing successively on stage consequently. As a result, the issue of shared “fear” draws increasing attention, reaching the level of collective love trauma. In the second play, the author focuses on the love drama that arises between people of the same profession, psychologists, who not only fail to help themselves but also turn their relationship into endless torture, ultimately leading to dire consequences when executioner and victim find themselves “chained together”. Both plays reflect the author’s concern about the increasing destructive changes in society.

The article deals with the remake as a defining phenomenon in modern Russian drama, facilitating a dialogue between modern literature and the classical canon. It is noted that such a concept, representing a special form of interaction with the canon, does not have a stable terminological status or a generally accepted definition, despite the accumulated factual material, and its genre nature remains a subject of debate. The paper attempts to define the essence of a remake by systematically differentiating it from related forms – parody, stylization, and an intertextual approach. By employing the theories of Yu.N. Tynyanov and M.M. Bakhtin it explicates the dialogic relationship between a remake and its pretext. A critical distinction is made between a remake and a mere staging depending on the degree of originality and andautonomy of the final work.

As with ‘parodic selection’, the concept of ‘remake selection’ is introduced, explaining the principle of choosing texts for ‘reworking’. In conclusion, a connection is drawn between the remake and the mythopoetic strategy of contemporary authors: playwrights who turn to that form are united by a desire to comprehend changes in the world order at a historical turning point.

The article considers the division of the word in Varro’s linguistic doctrine into two constituent parts, referred to as principia (“primary elements”). Those components (material and figura), being inextricably linked, cannot exist separately. Varro comes to such a conclusion while studying the process of word modification (declinatio). The principia of the word identified by Varro allow him to derive his own conditions for the correctness of analogy. An examination of the concepts material and figura reveals their similarity to the opposition ὕλη – σχῆμα in the Stoic theory of πάθος. In theory, πάθος primary matter (ὕλη) under the influence of an active principle – namely, the λόγος inherent in matter – acquires a definite form (σχῆμα). In Varro, the original categories of the word (materia), under the influence of the universal law of language (ratio), through changing components (casus, exitus eius) acquire the form (figura) necessary to reflect the interconnection of things and phenomena. A comparative analysis demonstrates that the similarity is not coincidental but stems from the tradition of studying the linguistic phenomena in that period, as well as from Varro’s own purposes and objectives who sought to establish a comprehensive doctrine of the Latin language.

The article studies allegorical bestiary imagery in the works of Bernard Werber, tracing its roots in classical and medieval literature and its adaptation to reflect contemporary concerns regarding identity, power, and the relationship between humanity and nature. The study investigates the deconstruction of traditional symbolism and its impact on the author’s narrative style. The research aims to analyze animalistic imagery and lexicon in the novel “Prophecy of the Bees” (2022), defining their role in shaping the work’s artistic world, a study is undertaken for the first time in Russia. Its relevance of this investigation stems from the insufficient coverage of the novel in literary studies. The research objectives include the identification, classification, and analysis of the functions, allegories, and intertextual references of animalistic images.

In the article, the cover of a literary work is considered as an intermedial phenomenon that combines verbal and visual components. The purpose of the article is to clarify the features of the semanticization of the cover for the novel “The Endless Story” (“Die Unendliche Geschichte”) by the German writer M. Ende. The theoretical basis of the article is the idea that goes back to M.M. Bakhtin of a literary work as a complex communication event. The article sees into how the combination of visual and verbal elements on the cover of M. Ende’s book is interpreted in three communicative and semantic continuums: external-vital, internal-vital and aesthetic. The design of the dust jacket and binding is linked to the world of M. Ende’s characters. As a result of the analysis of the cover semantics, we come to a number of conclusions: 1) in the outer-life semantic continuum, the dust jacket is semanticized first of all, forming a certain horizon of reader’s expectations; 2) the binding, on the contrary, is firmly connected with the inner-life semantic context; 3) in the aesthetic communicative-semantic continuum, the cover, combining verbal and visual elements, represents the semantics of the artistic whole: first of all, artistically updates the significant for the “Infinite stories” semantics of the interrelation of the artistic and life worlds.

The article deals with the category of the author in graphic narrative through the case study of Satoshi Kon’s manga “Opus”. The purpose of the study is to analyze the ways of expressing the author’s point of view, taking into account the hybrid – material-semiotic – specifics of media. The study’s methodological framework synthesizes a literary approach (M.M. Bakhtin, B.A. Uspensky) with the tools of material semiotics and actor-network theory (B. Latour). It facilitates overcoming the limitations of a purely semiotic analysis and considering the role of the material construction of the work (paper quality, paratext placement, drawing technique) as a full-fledged actor in shaping the authorial position. The analysis demonstrates that the authorial intention in “Opus” is distributed not hierarchically, but in a network-like manner, through the interaction of strategies at the narrative, visual, and material levels.

The article analyzes how original meanings are transformed in literary translation. The mythological basis for the image of Autumn in John Keats’ poem is revealed as the embodiment of the image of Demeter-Persephone. The ambivalence of that ancient deity enables discussing of the genre enantiodromia between elegy and ode, allowing translators to create diverse genre configurations. Keats’s ode-etude “To Autumn”, in the analyzed translations, was transformed into an elegiac ode by Marshak, and a philosophical ode by Pasternak, while in all three texts the enantiodromic combination of elegy and ode is assumed to be invariant. Structural analysis of the text’s strong points in translations of J. Keats’s “To Autumn” served as the primary tool for identifying the originality of authorized versions. The poet’s individuality is represented in the compositional core of the work: the title programs the genre component, he beginning creates a certain lyrical intrigue, and the ending summarizes the lyrical and philosophical content of the original text and its translation. The integrated application of structural – semantic, hermeneutic, textological and mythopoetic methods of analysis enable the author to compare the titles, opening and closing lines of the works and identify significant thematic differences at the level of the considered poets’ idiolects. The authorial worlds of poet-translators are compared through the prism of the text being translated.

The relevance of the work is related to the need of creating conditions for safe cross-cultural communication by reducing conflicts, often caused by a lack of cultural understanding of the interlocutor. The object of the study is the cross-cultural asymmetry of “personal space”, which is important for understanding physical and emotional boundaries in dialogue. The article considers the features of the percepting the personal space in China and the UK. An analysis of the artwork by the Chinese-British writer Guo Xiaolu illustrates the differences. In conclusion, the importance of taking into account cultural specifics when learning languages for effective communication is emphasized.

The article considers the features of the traditional values functioning in the context of modern culture. It analyzes mechanisms of their preservation, transformation and rethinking in new socio-cultural contexts. Also it higlights key forms of representation of traditions in the media, art, family and educational environment and attention to the risks of ideologization, superficial reproduction and conflicts arising from the clash of universal and local value systems. A conclusion is made about the need for a critical approach to tradition as a living cultural resource capable of adapting to the conditions of the globalized world.

Tarkovsky is considered to be the master of poetic cinema, work on his films anyway actualizes the issue of balance between cinematic and poetic in it. But director’s own perception of the considered phenomenon set out in the article named “Captured in time” (1967) is significantly different from the opinion of most researchers: he rather polemicises with ideologists of poetic cinema than agrees. Criticizing the category of poetic cinema, he introduces his own term that allows characterizing a ratio of cinematic to poetic – “cinematic poetry”. It becomes more difficult to talk about director’s relation to the genre also because of the vagueness of the considered concepts. The boundaries between category of poetic cinema and other related (poetry in cinema, videopoetry, cinematic poetry and mediapoetry) grow increasingly less distinct the term becomes an empty signifier. The paper attempts to analyse the film “Mirror” by A. Tarkovsky, often regarded as a poetic cinema, using two theoretical frameworks: the one, developed by the director and the other, synthetic, based on formalists’ cinematic research and literary theorists’ views on the phenomenon of poetry. It turns out that both, author’s concept of cinematic poetry, which involves direct observation of life, as well as the category of poetic cinema, that we understand as a form of organisation, are applicable to the movie. Such analysis leads the article to the conclusion that considered approaches are not mutually exclusive, but it’s important to strictly differentiate the terms.

The review considers the book “Yaroslavl poet Lev Sergeevich Shcheglov (1932–1996). Selected poems, prose and memories of the poet”. The emphasis is placed on the importance of studying the “second row” authors. In addition, it talks about the specifics of the author’s biography and work.

The review considers Svetlana Petrova’s monograph “Intermedial specific features of the rock album genre in the works of Viktor Tsoi”. It demonstrates the milestone nature of that work, both in terms of studying Viktor Tsoi’s artistic world and the rock album as a distinct genre, as well as in relation to a deeper understanding and comprehension of the potential applications of existing theories of intermediality to the analysis of synthetic texts.