The article analyzes still life as a form of representing the visual in twentieth-century Russian poetry. The focus is on the ways in which the pictorial genre is poetically appropriated and its semantics transformed within the lyric text. Drawing on poems that include the words “still life” in the title or the body of the text, the study examines the main models of this image’s functioning: still life as a work of painting, as a composition created by nature or the world, and as a juxtaposition of objects that organizes poetic utterance. It is shown that recourse to still life activates visual imagery while simultaneously engaging other sensory modalities and fostering reflection on the relationship between the living and the non-living, the thing and the human being, art and reality. The analysis demonstrates that in poetry still life is rarely realized in the form of direct ekphrasis; rather, it structures the lyrical plot and activates the reader’s visual imagination.

The article attempts to examine the field of intermedial studies from the perspective of theoretical and historical poetics, tracing the transformation of the “intermedial character” at different stages of the development of European poetics (the era of syncretism, the era of eidetic poetics, and the era of artistic modality). The introduction of the concept of “intermedial character” into scientific discourse allows for a more precise analysis of the subjective aspect of intermediality in literary works and the description of another intracompositional form of intermediality (according to W. Wolf) at the level of the subject-object organization of the text.

Archangel Michael is an important figure in the Christian religion, an image that is reflected in art and literature, including ancient Russian lives. The article presents an analysis of a number of hagiographies in which Archangel Michael is mentioned, and examines the general prevalence of his image in this genre. One of his most famous acts the “Miracle at Chonae” had a special influence on the northern Russian hagiographic tradition; the military side of the Archangel was reflected in the “Life of St Alexander Nevsky”. Archangel Michael reveals himself most actively in the “Life of Eudokia of Heliopolis”, a well-known but unpopular translated work. Depending on the century of the creation of the life and its plot, Archangel Michael could be present in the work either as an unnamed angel, whose identity can only be revealed by the biblical parallels given in the text, or as an actor actively and not anonymously helping the saint. Without a doubt, the figure of Archangel Michael was of great importance for ancient Russian scribes, but the strict within the genre of Live did not allow authors to freely use his image in texts. Nevertheless, Archangel Michael is an important and integral part of hagiographic literature.

The article explores the complex and multifaceted nature of the image of the “world” in seventeenth-century Old Russian penitential poetry. Focusing on the verses attributed to Stefan Nechaev (Stefan the Galician Foolfor-Christ), the study examines the ontological and cosmological conceptions underpinning the text’s imagery: the “world” functions not merely as a stylistic backdrop but as a dynamic substance situated at the intersection of the temporal and the spiritual, the sacred and the mundane. Special attention is given to a dual model of world-perception: on the one hand, the world as a transient, sin-bound domain; on the other, as a universal cosmos toward which the penitent soul aspires. Through an analysis of motifs such as the coffin, nakedness, wealth, and eschatological anticipation, the article reveals the anthropocentric foundation of the “world’s” ontology in these penitential verses, where human mortality and sinfulness fundamentally shape the boundaries of existential perception.

The article analyzes the translation of Roger L’Estrange’s collection of fables (“Fables of Aesop and Other Eminent Mythologists”), which was done by Sergei Volchkov, secretary of the Academy of Sciences, and published by him in 1747 under the title “Aesop’s Fables with Moral Lessons and Notes by Roger Letrange”. The article compares the final edition of the translation of the fables with Roger L’Estrange’s original work. In a number of cases, Volchkov’s source for the translation is also cited – the German edition of the English collection «Esopi Fabeln mit Herrn Roger L’Estrange Lehren und Anmerckungen aus dem Englischen übersetzt» (1714). Some of the L’Estrange’s fables contain a number of political allusions that are directly related to his biography. For example, they mention Cromwell, The Popish Plot, an attack on the Whig party, etc. When translating, Volchkov sought to convey the general essence of the certain plot lines in order to adapt the collection for a wide readership. In this regard, a separate topic touched upon in the article is the study of the peculiarities of the Russian translator’s work with foreign text, thanks to which it is possible to trace the origin of the changes that appear in the process of preparing the publication for printing.

The article examines the image of Scotland in Mikhail Lermontov’s poetry as a special poetic space that combines personal ancestral memory, cultural and historical associations, and a romantic myth. The poems “The Coffin of Ossian” and “Desire” are analyzed, where Scotland is not only the land of the poet’s ancestors but also a symbol of spiritual freedom, a lost ideal, and a sacred inspiration. The focus on Scottish themes is interpreted as a form of self-identification and a search for inner kinship with the heroic and poetic past. Through the motifs of fog, hills, ancestral castles, the harp, and the sword, the romantic theme of the “imaginary homeland” is revealed, contrasting with the cold and indifferent Russia. Lermontov perceives Scotland not in an ethnographic sense, but in an existential one – as a lost spiritual center, the homeland of the soul, a place where harmony and rebirth are possible. In the poet’s imagination, Scotland becomes a symbol of a “different world” and an ideal that the lyrical hero strives for but remains unattainable. Thus, the image of Scotland serves as a cultural and mythological construct, as well as a personal archetype that reflects the poet’s tragic duality between reality and dreams, between “native” and “alien”.

The article examines the pragmatic strategies of the characters in Anton Chekhov’s play “Uncle Vanya” through the prism of their psychotypes. The study shows that the analysis of the pragmatic strategies of the characters of Chekhov’s plays in the context of their psychotypes remains poorly understood both in China and in Russia. The work is devoted to the analysis of the pragmatic strategies of the characters in Anton Chekhov’s play “Uncle Vanya”, taking into account three main psychotypes: dominance and non-dominance; mobility and rigidity; extraversion and introversion. The study demonstrates that the characters of the play use different pragmatic strategies depending on their psychotypes. A dominant and non-dominant character applies a language code switching strategy. The mobile character chooses a strategy of consolation, while the rigid character chooses strategies of persuasion. An extrovert uses subtext strategies, while an introvert tends to use denial strategies. The dramatic characters of the first psychotype of the three oppositions use pragmatic strategies to achieve the perlocutionary act of the effect of action, and the second psychotype – to achieve the perlocutionary act of the effect of action and emotions. In addition, the dramatic characters of the third psychotype of the three oppositions strive to achieve a perlocutionary act of emotion. The novelty of the research lies in an integrated approach to the analysis of the play “Uncle Vanya” by Anton Chekhov, combining the methods of pragmatics, psychology and deductive analysis.

This article investigates the reception of Anna Akhmatova’s poetics in the work of Maria Vega, a poet of the “first wave” of emigration. The study of Maria Vega’s poetry from this proposed perspective has not been previously undertaken in either Russian or foreign literary scholarship. Through a sequential analysis of poems by Vega and Akhmatova, the author aims to substantiate the influence of the latter, which is not reducible to mere imitation by Vega but rather constitutes a conscious creative dialogue. Key aspects of this influence, discernible in the examined poems and Vega’s epistolary legacy, include: organoleptic imagery, the nontrivial role and significance of the objective/material world, narrative strategies, and the application of the principle of psychological understatement in the literary work. Particular analytical attention is paid to intertextual connections, which demonstrate the forms and methods of Maria Vega’s creative refraction of Akhmatovan motifs such as love, memory, and connection to the Homeland. The main conclusion of the study is that, having assimilated Akhmatova’s model of depicting a self-sufficient female soul, Maria Vega develops it in the direction of greater subjectivity and even an inversion of traditional gender roles, which speaks to her innovative contribution to the development of the “female line” in Russian poetry.

This article examines the problem of meaning augmentation through intertextual interactions and the problem of the boundaries of the intertextuality category using the example of two works: the novel “School for Fools” by Sasha Sokolov and the novel “The Geographer Drank the Globe” by Alexey Ivanov. Sasha Sokolov’s text is considered in the article as an intertext to Alexey Ivanov’s text. The interaction between these two texts occurs on several levels, but considering each level independently may seem unconvincing. In Ivanov’s novel, references to Sokolov’s novel are scattered throughout, giving the reader a sense of interaction only when considering the full picture. At the level of subject organization, this is the main character, Sluzhkyn, who, like Norvegov in Sokolov’s novel, is a geography teacher. The characters also share similarities: both geographers appear strange, if not downright foolish, to those around them, and most people find them unappealing.

The article analyzes the communicative structure of Eduard Limonov’s novel “It’s Me, Eddie” from the perspective of distinguishing and correlating the figures of the reader and the addressee. Drawing on the methodological framework of narratology and reception aesthetics (V.I. Tyupa, R. Ingarden, W. Iser, G. Genette, L. Hutcheon), the author treats the novel as an auto-metafictional text in which the blurring of the boundary between fictional invention and biographical reality is realized at the level of reading. It is shown that Limonov’s autofictional devices also function as metafictional ones, shaping a specific position of the addressee and provoking reflection on the status of truth, documentality, and literariness. The article concludes that the metanovelistic nature of “It’s Me, Eddie” is revealed not so much through the explicit “laying bare of the device” as through strategies of reading and textual interpretation.

The article addresses the problem of the re-actualization of the personal utterance in post-conceptualist poetry. This re-actualization occurs largely through an appeal to the notion of sincerity, which had been called into question by the artistic movement that preceded post-conceptualism – conceptualism. The author traces broader cultural shifts in the interpretation of sincerity, taking place under the influence of the structuralist tendency in the humanities. These shifts are connected to the condition of postmodernity as described by Jean-François Lyotard. It is shown how they led to a conceptualist suspicion directed toward sincerity and related notions, and how they shaped the aesthetics of this artistic movement. The author conducts an analysis of texts in which the renewed perception of conceptualist suspicion leads poets to a different way of engaging with it: D. Sukhovey’s poem “Russian Melancholy” (2001) and D. Davydov’s “A Peasant Shouts under the Window” (2022). In such poems, the subject demonstrates a tendency to employ conceptualist strategies in new ways and displays an orientation toward rethinking the overall outcomes of conceptualism as an artistic movement.

The article explores the phenomenon of the disintegrating logos, which, according to V. Feshchenko, becomes a key poetic process of the early twentieth-century avant-garde and its subsequent poetics, where the subject either fails to understand the language they speak or finds themselves bound by it. This process reflects either a striving toward the linguistic utopia of a proto-language – pre-semantic and universally comprehensible – or a critique of the totalizing logos that exposes the disintegration of the surrounding world. In poetic speech, the collapse of logos is embodied through the techniques of absurdity and grotesque, alogism and glossolalia, as well as in various forms of zaum (transrational) language.
Similar poetic techniques are employed in constructing artistic expression by the contemporary Russian-speaking rapper Vyacheslav Mashnov, who performs under numerous heteronyms such as Gnoiny, Slava KPSS, and Valentin Dyadka, among others. This article analyzes the latter’s album Zastolnye Psikhodelicheskie Pesni (Psychedelic Table Songs), which cultivates a poetics of absurdity, wherein all logical and associative links in the lyrics are disrupted, resulting in semantic collapse. Particular attention is given to the grotesque, which juxtaposes the comic and the horrific, as well as to the function of zaum language within rap composition, which enables the lyrical subject to communicate an experience of existential dread to the listener.

This article examines the formula “fatal rapture” from Kristina Mailovskaya’s novel “On Dybenko Street.” The immediate sources for this formula are Isaac Babel’s story “The Death of Dolgushov” from “Konarmiya” and Vladimir Vysotsky’s song “Fixitable Horses”. In both Babel and Vysotsky, the formula “fatal rapture” condensedly embodies a human state in which a clear premonition of imminent and swift death occurs, yet, while experiencing fear, immediately reaches the highest point of a positive state – rapture. Mailovskaya’s novel retains this meaning, but in its new context, the formula “fatal rapture” acquires new meanings, realizing the dialogic unity of opposing facets of an ambivalent world.

This article examines a popular Indo-European story about a werewolf explored in the context of the Arthurian myth. The sources include the 14th-century Latin medieval tale “Arthur and Gorlagon” along with later Irish variants (c. 18c): «An Cloidheamh Soluis agus Fios Fáth an Aon Sgeil ar na Mnáibh» (The Shining Sword and the Knowledge of the Cause of the One Story about Women) and the English-language text “Morraha” (Morrachа). The study notes that texts and the werewolf narrative have received insufficient attention within the Russian school of Arthurian and Celtic literary studies. For the first time, the study provides a comparative analysis of the werewolf myth in Irish and Welsh literature using the example of the texts of the “scél” and Pedair Cainc y Mabinogi (14c). The aim is to propose and substantiate the hypothesis that the genesis of the Gorlagon plot lies within Celtic tradition. The article also explores the onomastics and etymology of the names, though the primary focus remains on the figures of Arthur and Gorlagon and their transformation within Irish literary tradition.

Chinese jade culture constitutes a pivotal part of the national heritage. Cao Xueqin’s novel “Dream of the Red Chamber” serves as an encyclopedia of this culture; however, its representation in translations, particularly into Russian, remains understudied. The purpose of this article is to identify and systematize the linguocultural functions and symbolic meanings of jade through the analysis of the “Tonglingbaoyu” image. The methodology is based on literary and cultural analysis of the text. The research results reveal three interconnected aspects of the image: its mythopoetic origin and syncretic nature, its polyfunctionality as a sacred object, and its ambivalence as a symbol of social criticism. The conclusions confirm that through this image, Cao Xueqin created a complex literary interpretation of jade, integrating aesthetic, spiritual, and social meanings. The study contributes to the understanding of Chinese linguaculture and opens prospects for intercultural dialogue, particularly for the future analysis of Russian-language translations of the novel.

The article considers the features of the visual in fantastic images and in the artistic in William Shakespeare’s play “Macbeth”. The study is based on Edmund Burke’s concept about “the sublime” and “the beautiful”. His theory, presented in the treatise “A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful”, is universal and applicable to all works of art, both verbal and visual. In Shakespeare’s play “Macbeth”, the fantastic is represented by witches and ghosts and also the space surrounding them. Their description is dominated of by a dark, loud, and vibrant “miraculous”. Ugly witches, thunderclaps, dark colors, loud sounds, fear and horror wherever they appear are all part of Burke’s theory of the sublime, which is not the same as the beautiful. “The sublime” can be seen as an admiration of fear, while “the beautiful” is an affect of love. This article explores how the visual fantastic is portrayed in the play “Macbeth” and whether it is considered “the sublime” or “the beautiful” by Burke, which can be observed through paratext and replicas. 

In the historical novels « Chronicle of the Reign of Charles IX » by P. Mérimée and « Queen Margot » by A. Dumas, the motive of hunting is embodied on different levels: on the one hand, both works show the usual royal fun, which in each of the novels acquires additional significance. In the Mérimée’s novel, the episode with the killing of a deer refers to St. Bartholomew’s night, when Catholics hunt Protestants like animals. In the « Queen Margot », hunting becomes a theater of the invisible war, where the main trophy is the French crown. During the boar hunt, there is an assassination attempt, so in this scene we see the booty in the literal and figurative sense, as well as hunting on two levels: directly baiting the beast and an attempt to eliminate the king as an obstacle to the throne. The love conflict in both novels also embodies the motive of hunting, where the lover becomes a target. In Mérimée’s novel, Bernard de Mergy’s lover is named after the huntress Diana, and in Dumas’ novel, Marguerite of Navarre keeps the hearts of her dead lovers like hunting trophies.

The poetry of the High Biedermeier master A. von Droste-Hülshoff features an interesting product of genre diffusion: the elegiac idyll. Even when interacting with elegy, the High Biedermeier idyll often has a beneficial effect on it, becoming the leader in this diffusion. Such poems can appropriately be called elegiac idylls. This genre, as observations show, developed in A. von Droste-Hülshoff’s work late in her career, in the 1840s. All of the German poet’s elegiac idylls were written between 1841 and 1845. The condensation of the idyll, shrouded in elegism, is explained here both poetically and biographically. The elegiac idyll in Droste-Hülshoff’s poetry arises thanks to the genres of idyll and elegy mastered by the poetess, her ability for genre diffusion, the fading and consequent weakening of Biedermeier, and a biographical fact – a difficult spiritual relationship with the writer Levin Schücking, which ended in DrosteHülshoff’s disappointed expectations.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the poetic speech of the Beat poet Philip Whalen (1923–2002), whose work goes beyond the classical aesthetics and poetics of the Beats. The purpose of the work is to identify the unique features of his poetic tradition, which were formed at the intersection of American modernism and Buddhist philosophical thought. The main focus was on describing the facts that made Whalen’s work unique, reviewing how the concept of “poetic speech” evolved in the twentieth century, and how it relates to Whalen’s texts. Further, the analysis of specific texts identified the key factors of his poetics, namely, meditative nature, the reduction of the lyrical self, and the embodiment of the Buddhist principle of “Emptiness”. At the end of the article, a parallel is drawn with the language poets of the 1970s, and the prospects for future research on this author are outlined.

This article identifies key “points of interaction” between history and memory based on theoretical works by M. Halbwachs, J. Le Goff and P. Nora. At the same time, it highlights the functioning of historical memory in literature. The article shows features of the poetics of historical memory by the example of the novel “A Bag of Marbles” by J. Joffo, which is based on his childhood memories during the Second World War. 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 poetics of historical memory in the novel by J. Joffo and about features of the poetics of memory in a literary work in general. In addition, the article considers the peculiarities of the functioning of “A Bag of Marbles” in the social field and its influence on the memory of the Second World War.

This article is devoted to the problem of the representation of smell in horror manga “Gyo” by J. Ito (2002). In the course of the research, several tasks are being solved, the first of which is to determine the place occupied by the tradition of depicting smell and specifically its varieties (stench) in a number of works of horror poetics of the 20th – 21st centuries and in the works of Ito in particular. The study also raises the question of ways to understand and portray smell in culture and the evolution that they have undergone over the past two centuries. It is worth noting that the source of the disgusting smell in the manga are decomposing bodies: firstly fish, and then people. This not only brings us to the problem of physicality and the smell of corpses as a metonymy of death, but also illustrates the way in which “Lovecraft horror” transformed into body horror. The way the smell spreads is also symbolically linked to the theory of miasma, infection, and disease. The second task of the study is related to the consideration of ways to depict odors in a graphic narrative and the problem of interpreting olfaction signs.

The article is devoted to the theme of memory and the relationship between the categories of imagination and forgetting, using Swedish author Andreas Gedin’s 2023 book, “Happy is he who can forget,” as an example. This book continues the tradition of immigrant culture in Sweden by exploring the theme of post-Holocaust trauma. The article examines memory, forgetting and imagination as structural elements of the work. The imagination of the narrator plays a key role in representing memory. Unaware of his grandfather’s past, he turns to the imaginary, thereby completing lost or hidden memories and filling in the gaps of memory, drawing on his feelings and emotions, as well as the historical context. The article demonstrates how the loss of the past, rather than hindering, encourages the narrator to recreate its image, facilitating the recovery of lost memories. Through an analysis of the subjective organization of the text and its figurative structure, the specific representation of historical memory in Andreas Gedin’s work is examined.

The article attempts to theoretically substantiate exophony as an object of the cultural translation paradigm. Translation exophony is a phenomenon in which a translator translates into a language other than their native one. For the first time, the role of this phenomenon is substantiated in the context of interdisciplinary research, and a theoretical justification is presented. The article aims to expand the theoretical foundation of translation studies and develop new methods for analyzing intercultural phenomena.

The study is devoted to the analysis of Farsi translations of romances and opera arias from Chekhov’s “The Seagull”, as well as the evaluation of scientific commentary. The main issue of the study: how was the musical intertext from “The Seagull” translated into Farsi and to what extent was its original meaning and emotional impact on the foreign-speaking reader/viewer preserved? The leading research method is a comparative analysis of the original Russian text with its translation into Farsi. The translation analyzes the meanings of words and metaphors, intonation and musicality of the poetic form, rhythm and rhyme (if possible), footnotes with which the translator provided his text, stylistic accuracy (choosing the right style in Persian: spoken or written). The conclusion highlights the most successful translations by K. Fani and S. Stepanyan and provides recommendations for future translators.

This review examines Elizaveta Lochemelis’s monograph, “Russian rock and classical literature of the 19th century: Traditions and interpretations”. The importance of this work is demonstrated, both as a summary of the study of the interaction between Russian rock and Russian literary classics and as a avenue for further research on this topic.