In the article, the author accomplishes analyzing the poem “Dolphinarium” by Vladimir Aristov, in which the poet expresses his search for “the space of general likeness” and a common language, a common corporality. He denominated the work in that vein a concept of “idem-forma”, which means and a way of worldview and a special technique of creating poems and a method in analyzing artistic texts. Such a concept correlates with the concept of metabola, which was introduced by M.N. Epstein for analysis of the metarealism image structure and its poetic language. In V. Aristov’s poetics metabola is one of the elements of idem-forma, which expresses relationships of syncretism, synthesis, and identity at the trope level. While the poet only proposes the term “idem-forma” in the early 21st century, the image structure of the poem “The Dolphinarium” shows us that V. Aristov searches on that count all his literary way. The specific features of that technique usage in the poem are the synthesis at the chronotope and focalization levels, the subject neo-syncretism and the images-metabolas, expressing both the re-semantisation of details in the Soviet life, and the synthesis of worlds – the human and natural, the bodily and linguistic.

The “Romance” of M. Stepanova “In commemoration of Memory” is considered in the article as an attempt of non-narrative representation of the material, which traditionally becomes the basis for the epic forms, – the story of genus. The writer believes that the “translation” of such material into the language of literature, organizing the narrative intrigue, formatting of material according to traditional genres patterns makes the past lose its uniqueness, becoming “typical”. In order to preserve an authenticity of the remaining evidence of her family’s life, Stepanova invents a form of “showcase-novel”, which should make its personages “visible”, while allowing them to remain themselves. The writer transforms the discursive parameters of the narrative: her goal becomes not to structure the experience of the personal presence in the world, but not to allow the disappearance in the oblivion of those who once lived. The synthagmatic connectivity of the text is broken, and the paradigm one is strengthened. “Romance” contains “rhymes”, coincidences, associations that tie together different levels of the work.

Its formal and substantive parameters begin to be set by the objective / bodily, whereby being fragmented is read as being injured. Thus, the text about the story of the genus becomes the text about the search for different language for the presentation of that history – the language which does not address the traditional narrative and genre instrumentation.

The article considers an influence of the genre traditions and discurses on Russian drama of the late 20th and early 21st century. The influence of documentary theater and the illusion of non-fictional speech created in G. Sinkina, A. Rodinov, Yu. Klavdiev, L. Mulmenko drama is noted. Pedaling the authenticity of character’s word is manifested by the verbatim technique – and at the same time returns the drama to the strivings of the early Soviet theater. The article also considers a correlation of the verbal and written discourses, their genre diversity as well as the ratio of the monologue – and dialogic potential of the texts written by N. Kolyada, A. Slapovsky, V. Levanov, V. Zueva, Ya. Pulinovich, E. Grishkovets, I. Vyrypaev, E. Isaeva, N. Vorozhbit, S. Reshetnikov. It takes into consideration the genre forms mixing what determines the structure of the play and its perception by reader-spectator. In particular, the research focuses on the literary and stage manifestations of the diptych – play in works of A. Zenzinov and V. Zabaluev, S. Zlotnikov, D. Gumenniy . The author of the article refers to the interaction of drama with other arts, both the visual (O. Mukhina’s plays) and sounding (I. Vyrypayev “Oxygen”), as well as modern media formats that determine the genre nature of the latest works for the stage (plays by A. Vartanov, R. Malikov). Special attention is paid to “network drama”, which qualitatively changes the structural principles for works in that kind of literature and motivates to rethink the categories of “drama world”, “character”, “conflict”, “plot”.

In the final lines of “Faust” the attention of researchers was primarily attracted by the image of the Eternal Feminine (Das Ewig-Weibliche) that has given rise to a lot of interpretations. However, from the point of view of “Toposforschung” as a philological method developed by Ernst Robert Curtius, the very last line (“Draws us upward” – “Zieht uns hinan”) is no less important: it places the image of the Eternal Feminine in the historical sequence of variations of a topos which expresses the idea of a certain spiritual power that draws man upward. Various concepts can act as such a power: hope (John Chrysostom), wisdom (Hugo of Saint-Victor), right reasoning (anonymous medieval poem), eternity (Walter of Châtillon), anagogical sense in the system of polysemous interpretation of the Bible (Absalon of Springiersbach), Virgin Mary (Hildegard of Bingen), Jesus Christ (Anselm of Canterbury, Georgette de Montenay), poetry (Giovanni Boccaccio). Goethe updates the topos inserting in its scheme a new image of the Eternal Feminine. While the nominative part of the topos (designation of the force acting on man) was continually changing, the predicative part (designation of the action itself) remained unchanged: in all the analyzed examples, as in Goethe’s Faust, there is the verb “to draw” (Latin “trahere”, French “tirer”, German “ziehen”) which shows that the spiritual principle has material power.

. The article considers the reference to a real historical event in the text of a fantastic work – Stanislav Lem’s short story “Ananke” from the series “Stories about the pilot Pirx”. Based on such indication, the article attempts to understand the role of truth in fiction, the correlation degree for the “truthful” and “fantastic” in literature. As a result, it turns out that connecting the fact of reality to the world of fictional fiction in the science fiction allows one to see certain meanings of the author’s utterance, meanings that are just formed in the synthesis of the “fantastic” and “true”. And it is the science fiction that turns out to be the most appropriate type of literature for that kind of the meaning creation.

The model of literary palimpsest originally put forward by G. Genette is of essential value now, giving an insight into the mechanism of realizing transtextual meanings. Figurative use of the notion of “palimpsest” as a hierarchy of texts shining through each other, be it different versions of the same text or texts intersecting in the common narrative space, presents a new perspective on the modern literary process, when under the influence of mass culture a literary text may consist of not only other literary texts but also those of the cinema or even music. Although the conception of palimpsest has been further developed and refined by different scholars, some of its aspects, e.g. the receptive one, have not yet been studied in detail. Indeed, the receptive aspect of palimpsest is worthy of special attention as the literary process now is inseparable from the recognition of the communicative nature of art, therefore without a reader the literary work’s meaning cannot be actualized. Making a case study of the comic fantasy series by the modern English writer Terry Pratchett, the article considers the way palimpsest functions from the receptive point of view and sums up the effects it achieves.

The article concentrates on the conceptual analysis of new lexical items representing events in modern English and German vocabulary. The material of the research is event neologisms of English and German, expressed by nouns and gerunds. Those new lexical units were mostly retrieved from online sources. The main sources of the collected material are on websites of the dictionary publishing houses, blogs containing information about new lexical units, as well as special programmes aimed at collecting neologisms online, e. g. NeoCrawler, Wortwarte, and OWID. The article provides a model of new event categorisation in English and German languages at three levels: superordinate, basic, and subordinate ones. Each of the levels is structured by a particular frame within the categorisation model. The article provides a comparative analysis of frames underlying formation of new event vocabulary in English and German languages. As a result, the analysis reveals the main differences between frame structures.

The article examines the metaphor London-as-the-World in the structure of the London text of English linguistic culture (i.e., an emic or invariant text for a group of texts related to the British capital). Such an analysis makes it possible to update the most important dimension of the London text: its objects turns out to be a key component of Englishness, being conceptualized as a model of all-English and world processes, as an analogy of the civilized world and the universe. The metaphorical realizations of the London text are seen as the result of conceptual fusion. The research cited in the article is carried out at the junction of the cognitive and semiotic approaches, according to which socially significant mental entities are examined via a semantic analysis of corresponding supertexts. The integration of the cognitive and the semiotic is effected within the framework of unified semantics. Thereby a semiotic analysis of text consists in singling out propositions of diverse degrees of similarity in it, in the selection and classification of predicates with which characters and “things” are endowed in the text, and in the inclusion of individual entities from the text in the general categories, what reveals the picture of the world deep structure from the standpoint of that text. The article draws on the literary canon of New English, and a study into that material educes a continuity in the metaphors and the means of their linguistic expression that were used by the English-speaking community to structure the reality. The article thus postulates the relative stability of London text as a supertextual entity.

The life and work of the modern Belgian writer Amélie Nothomb are directly connected with Japan and Japanese culture, so her works can be considered as important sources of knowledge about the country, which remained closed to foreigners for several centuries and does not often come into the focus of attention of modern French-speaking authors. In particular, the autobiographical novel “Tokyo Fiancée” (“Ni d’Ève ni d’Adam”, 2007) is an example of a detailed description of cross-cultural Japanese-Belgian contacts, as well as the behavior of representatives of Japanese linguoculture in everyday life, which the author had the opportunity to observe during her life in Japan. The purpose of the article is to analyze the main linguistic means of representing cultural otherness and, as a consequence of that otherness, ethno-cultural dissonance in the above-mentioned novel. The paper also clarifies the key concepts of ethno-cultural dissonance and otherness. The main research methods are linguistic-stylistic and linguistic-cultural analysis of an authentic literary text. Based on the results of the research, conclusions will be formulated about the specifics in the linguistic representation of ethno-cultural dissonance and cultural otherness in the novel under analysis.

The paper is an attempt to analyze the methods of representing specific features of the language of the Old English poem Beowulf in the Russian literary translation of Vladimir Tikhomirov: alliterative collocations, synonymic groups, compounds and epic variations. These specific features of Old English poetic language are rendered in the translation through the diction of different stylistic coloring – both the high-style, even archaic words as well as the everyday words close to colloquialisms. Following the Old English poet, the translator uses the oral-epic manner of narration, neither reducing it to a limited stylization, nor turning it into an innovative experiment. The translator manages to convey the ability of the Old English poetic language to coin new compounds through creating ‘potential’ words that reveal the ‘open’ character of the Old English synonymic systems. The Russian translation of Beowulf is considered in the context of the history of English translations of the poem as well as studies of Old English and Old Scandinavian literature in Russia.

The article considers a genre of the documentary that is nature documentaries, dedicated to wildlife of our Planet, covering the ornithology, oceanology and botany sciences. Certain specific cinematographic, linguistic codes and area affiliation are the key prerequisites for nature documentary to be considered as a sub-genre. The article highlights the lexical and syntactic components in the text of a popular science documentary along with some expressive elements (intonation, face expression and gestures). The manifestation of the above mentioned features of a nature documentary is associated with the type of audiovisual text. The author of the article proposes a typology of audiovisual texts of popular science documentaries, which is based on various methods of narration and presentation of material to the recipient.

She distinguishes three types of nature documentary texts: 1) off-screen narration text; 2) a combination of the off-screen narration and on-screen commentator’s text; 3) off-screen narration, on-screen commentator’s text and on-screen interview text.