The classification of epic plots proposed by the Pudoga bylina narrator F.A. Konashkov still remains largely undefined in scholarly literature, though its analysis is important for historical functional appreciation of the Russian epic folklore. According to A.M. Linevskii, F.A. Konashkov selected his bylinas taking into account the gender-and-age, family, professional, and social status of his listeners (i.e., there are bylinas for young people, married couples, the military, the Heads, the merchants, etc.) and that principle, however plain in some aspects, implies a special understanding by the bylina narrator of his repertoire. Since it is inconceivable that the bylinas being intended for one class of listeners turned out to be – in terms of their language or composition – difficult for another, it seems only logical to conclude that the division in question is based on a certain extra-aesthetic principle. As shown by a comparative axiological analysis of each bylina group, all epic songs here are united by a similar didactic moral intent, an affirmation of comparable spiritual values and, consequently, a denial of categories and notions opposed to them. Therefore, F.A. Konashkov’s classification indicates those spiritual therapeutic tasks that could challenge Russian bylina narrators in a situation of the oral text’s “natural” existence – and, accordingly, can be applied to the whole corpus of national epic folklore.

The article considers the genre of tragedy in the works of L. Tieck, one of the key figures of German Romanticism. It is known that the tragedy genre among the German romantics is represented mainly by two varieties: the “tragedy of fate” (Schicksalsdrama) and the drama on a religious-historical theme (in literature most often referred to as Universaldrama, “universal drama”). L. Tieck stands at the origins of both genres, while the tragedy “The Life and Death of Saint Genoveva” (1801), to which other religious and historical dramas of German romanticism go back, turned out to be especially influential. Having created examples of those two genres, Tieck rethinks tragic structures, relativizing them in different ways – firstly, by transforming the tragic genre itself, and, secondly, by including tragic elements into the complex genre constructs, mainly into fairy-tale dramas. That rethinking, however, takes place mostly in the mainstream of the parody typical of Tieck’s work – whether it is a parody of the “main” tragedy with a comedy counterpart or the inclusion of parodies of the tragedy, including his own tragedies, in comedy texts. At the same time, however, Tieck’s last dramatic work, “Fortunat”, which has much in common with his fairy-tale dramas and, like them, is a complex genre construct, ends in tragedy in its purest form, the triumph of the tragic substance. In our opinion that testifies to the impossibility of complete relativization of tragedy and to the crisis of romantic drama.

The author of the article proves that by means of poetics (at the spatio-temporal, motivic, subject-object, plot-compositional, speech and other levels), the deliberate involvement of physiological (the cry of an infant as a strong stimulus, the lack of description and concretization of the child) and medical data (receptive and cognitive disorders in humans with insufficient sleep) Chekhov “justifies” his heroine. Forcing the severity of the heroine’s emotional state, coupled with a change in the chronotope (night, the owners’ room; day, the owners’ apartment, front door, shop; night, the owners’ room), as a result, demonstrates an affective state (madness) that makes Var’ka insane at the time of the crime. Chronologically, Chekhov pushes the murder event to the very end of the work, gradually arousing in the reader empathy for Var’ka, for example, through a narrator who can see events through her eyes, and the specifics of the speech addressed to the heroine (orders, threats, insults) and of that coming from her (automatic purring lullaby). Within the work, in the course of the plot, the space of the heroine’s dream and reality dwindles the author thickens her emotional state; half-reality stratifies into the reality and dream, takes up more and more space and time and gradually turns into madness. The real, albeit indirect, murderers of the child are his parents.

The article makes an attempt to evaluate the role that an artistic detail plays in the formation of meaning related to the concept of time in The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov. The episode where Yermolai Lopakhin represents the contents of his plan is taken as a material for the analysis. The examination of the plan becomes very important if one uses it for interpretation of a vision of the future that the character suggests. The close analysis of the details included into the plan allows finding that Lopakhin’s image of future life contains some elements of the past or the recurrence of what already existed in the past. The linguistic and semantic repetitions and intersections for the sense bearing components of out-of-stage artistic details related to imaginary future and the details that exist in the stage and out-of-stage space of the present lead to the formation of certain motifs. The examination of the system of details in the context of the episode where Lopakhin describes his plan and in the context of the literary text of the play as a whole gives an opportunity to look from a new angle at the semantics of the time flow and at the ontological layer in the last Chekhov’s play.

The article’s topic is formation of the artistic world of S. Beckett. Along with such factors of the “education” of the Irish writer as the world of the ideas and novels of D. Joyce, as a close acquaintance with traditions of the French drama and poetics of the “absurd” that he himself formed, the influence of the German culture and literature was an important aspect of his becoming a writer.

German literature inspired Beckett by phenomena of the everyday culture, language, and the works and philosophical ideas of such thinkers as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Hölderlin. From them S. Beckett perceived and artistically reflected in his work an idea of a tragic solitude of an artist, his being misunderstood in love, an ironic distance in regard to the very idea of tragedy and the idea of a “superman” as the final stage in the formation of a “true” person. In the German language, Beckett often borrowed both the colloquial racy vocabulary and the structural organization of his works. The author believes that Beckett’s interest in intellectually close Schopenhauer and Nietzsche lead him to the theme of antiquity, inseparable from German culture. That is why one can see their common views on such fundamental concepts of existence as the cyclicality and inanition, death of God, solitude.

The purpose of the work is to reveal the principles of the functioning of the absurdity, where it is characterized as a category of text, which is based on the reduction to absurdity (reductio ad absurdum). The article studies the methods of creating the absurd in poems for children by Y. Moritz (“Bouquet of cats”, “Bureau of burnt things”, “Lemon Malinovich Compress”, “Laughing confusion”, «Wonderful deeds») and A. Givargizov (“Notes of a hunter’s dog”, “No unauthorized entry”, “Uncustomarily”). It also distinguishes between the levels of text organization, at which absurdity is created by two poets. For Y. Moritz, a play is going at the basic level of the object organization of the text (subsystem of episodes), for A. Givargizov, it goes at the external level of the object organization (subsystem of internal vision frames) and at that of compositional speech forms. The article also analyzes the figurative system of poems, which makes it possible to determine the materiality and visuality of Y. Moritz’ and A. Givargizov’ poems as the key features of their poetry. One of the main features of the poetics of the absurd in Y. Moritz’s poems is the activation of materialized phenomena and objects, as a result of what the poems acquire a rich plot and cinematic quality.

The article examines the issue of internal dialogue possibility as a way to oneself in the form of literary self-reflection on the material of V. Tsoi’s and I. Kormil’tsev’s works. For that purpose, a comparative analysis of the songs’ texts “Ya – asfal’t” by V. Tsoi and “Nikomunikabelnost” by I. Kormil’tsev is carried out. The lyrical subjects of both authors use such “auxiliary means” as letter (Tsoi) and telephone (Kormil’tsev) in order to reach internal dialog. It is revealed that those means of communication and contact with oneself create an effect of maximal defamiliarization, the ability to look at oneself as at different subject and thus enter the space of self-reflection which is a characteristic feature of Russian rock poetry’s authors worldview. Both poets somehow raise the issue of loneliness. The lyrical subject of Tsoi is closed in his own world where he plays various life roles but at the same time he thinks about the possibility of access to other people. Kormil’tsev’s text, on the contrary, presents excessive communication with other individuals which ultimately hampers the internal dialogue of the lyrical subject. Hence the hero gets into a tragic situation: he has no time and opportunity to communicate with himself but also no desire to open his soul to abstract interlocutors. The self-reflection attempt in the work of Tsoi can be considered largely successful, while the lyrical subject of Kormil’tsev despite repeated efforts can not establish contact with himself.

Contemporary literature is being formed in a difficult situation of polyphony of the modern consumer culture. Mainstream discourses are mixed with subcultural ones, the authors are influenced not only by the literary tradition itself, but also, for example, by rock culture. Thus, the countercultural, subcultural experience, which until recently was considered as peripheral, is actively being introduced into the socio-cultural discourse of modern Russia through the assimilation by authors claiming a place in the center of the country’s literary life.

The novel by I. Malyshev “Nomakh” may be considered as an example of such influence. It became a finalist of the literary prize contest “Big Book” in 2017. The novel is clearly influenced by countercultural ideology, in particular by E. Letov, one of the most popular and reputable representatives of the West Siberian counterculture. At the same time, there are no direct references or quotations from the poetry of the Omsk musician in the novel. Rather, one can see some stylistic likenesses, similar figurative complexes. The reception of a historical character from the civil war era is based on the learned principles of poetics and Letov’s worldview.

In addition, adopting the intellectual experience of the counterculture, I. Malyshev’s novel not only relays a certain ideology, but also, with the help of artistic means, recreates or completes the images of its hero, historical character, and cultural heroes, which he focuses on.

The article examines the influence of digital technologies on Russian literature. The author explores new poetic formations caused by Web impact. Transformation of the author’s and reader’s competencies, ideas about a literary work and its language are discussed. Web as a literary start-up determines the further creative path of the writers. Network “navigators” that help the reader look around the current literary situation are named. The opposition “literature – network literature” leads to the literary phenomena, which are functioning only on Internet. The most significant of such projects, features of text generating and reception on Web are noted. The researcher points to the implementation of different sub-paradigms of modern literature (postmodern, neo-naturalist, avant-garde, neo-sentimentalist, post-romantic, etc.) using the principles of Internet communication. The most representative phenomena of Internet creative work are characterized: blog literature in its various incarnations, both the invariant features of the blog discourse – and the searches of modern authors using that form. Modernization of genre strategies, the precedent of network drama, influence of computer games on the literary poetics are considered. Language renovations, attempts to generate texts by neural networks and other experiments that form the “digital poetics” of the newer literature are discussed.

The article examines the Hebrew names of precious stones that are mentioned in the Bible in the books of Exodus (28:17-20 and 39:10-13), Ezekiel (27:16; 18:13), partly in Job (28:2-19) and in other passages of the Bible. Those names are characterized by the fact that they do not have an exact meaning in the biblical language and today they differ from the original language and do not mean the same realities as in the Biblical era. The purpose of the article is to explore the names of precious stones in Biblical, postBiblical, medieval, and modern Hebrew. The study of precious stones in different epochs of the development of the Hebrew language is a significant issue for Semitic philology, since many of them still do not have a clear gemological identification. That study was carried out on the material of text corpora in Hebrew of different epochs of the language development in the contextual, semantic, philological (word origin) and comparative (comparisons between translations of different epochs) aspects. The study used descriptive and comparative-historical methods.

The article examines the key ontological metaphor within the London supertext of English linguistic culture – the metaphor, according to which the topos of the British capital is represented in the form of semiotic space, or a text open to reading and interpretation. The London supertext is viewed as an invariable semantic construct, the total sum of semes to be found in all the texts about the city, which have already been or will potentially be written. Along with the combinations of semes, static and dynamic, the London supertext incorporates standard algorithms of their deployment into real textual sequences. The article regards metaphor as a basic operation linking the supertextual levels. Metaphor is substantiated semantically, i.e. the article explains the possibility of predicating unobvious semantic components. The article views the metaphoric realizations of the London supertext from the perspective of possible worlds in semantics. Proceeding from an analysis of belles-lettres texts from the English literary canon, the article concludes that reading London as a text implies the scenarios of its intra- and intertextual interpretation (with the involvement of other cultural codes and information from previous eras) of topographical and notional wandering, and of acquiring space as perceiving textual meaning. Such scenario-type groups of semes coupled with the standard strategies of their realization constitute the dynamic component of the London supertext.

The article aims at presenting a complex model of the nature documentary AVT (audiovisual translation) analysis. Lambert – van Gorp’s scheme and V. Komissarov’s complex model are widely used and applied to analyzing translation. Those two models make up the basis of AVT analysis. In accordance with Lambert – van Gorp’s scheme, the preliminary data, macro-level, micro-level and systemic context of the nature documentary AVT are studied. V. Komissarov’s five-level equivalence model is also implemented in a complex model of the nature documentary AVT analysis, that model analyzes the equivalence of translation of an audiovisual work at every level and suggests translation strategies to achieve it. The article focuses on the fact that when analyzing the linguistic component of the AVT of a documentary film, it is impossible to negate the audiovisual component. In that regard, audiovisual components and how to translate them into the language of the host country are considered. The audiovisual component implies four codes: music, sound, iconographic and mobility, which are meticulously studied in the article. Following the research the author undertakes the complex model of the wild nature documentary AVT analysis.

The article considers some of the song performances presented as a part of two theatrical productions on Moscow stage: Moscow’s Ermolova Theater musical performance of Dream Orchestra. Brass and stage production Boris hosted by Museum of Moscow. As it is illustrated, some of the songs in each of the stage productions are combined in a way that forms a sort of cycles. However, it is a kind of cyclization which is essentially characterized by oxymoronic nature. Namely the elements of the cyclization find themselves in confrontation with each other. Meanwhile, the paradox is that the oxymoricity highly intensifies the cyclization, for it takes part in creating a complete unity and it even works as a necessary conjunction for the cycle forming. As to meaning forming, the characteristic of artistic creation such as the oxymoricity of cyclization may work as a bright and effective way of representation on stage the versatility of human perception of reality, the complexity of human nature in its actual manifestations; also, it may help to aesthetically comprehend the difficult time, the time of transition, the time that generates abnormal life phenomena, and the time produced by the aberrant phenomena.