The article considers the poetics of the grotesque and the absurd in the literature for children, in particular, the stories of T. Sobakin (“The Bald Monster”, “Motya”, “Then I Thought”), N. Nosov (“Dreamers”), M. Yessenovsky (“Ur-Yur-vyr”), as well as poems by A. Givargizov (“Unusual”), A. Orlova (“I am growing...”) and A. Usachev (“Vobla and the magazine”). Ideas about the wholeness of images and their harmony towards the created artistic reality are considered key characteristics for both concepts. So, absurd images are created by multiple points of view and contradictions between them, they clearly express the border between the ordinary and the implausible. The elements there are not completely combined and can be separated from each other by the means of imagination. Grotesque images in literature for children, created by objectifying individual elements or combining plans that do not contradict each other, are more natural and can also be visualized, and that is what distinguishes grotesque and absurdity from nonsense. The physicality and the variability of the image remain the most common ways of creating the grotesque in children’s literature. The grotesque and absurd does not depend on the fantastic assumption, which allows such images to exist both inside and outside the category of the fantastic.

The article discusses an issue of poetics of musicality in a novel in verses by A.S. Pushkin “Eugene Onegin”. Musicality is organized by the sound elements of artistic reality, which are structure-forming principles of architectonics and belong to the deep level of the work. The article revealed levels of musicality and analyzed the parameters of the audio-musical structure. In the process of research, the main categories of musicality and ways of depicting reality in a novel based on the interaction of visual-semantic and musical components were identified.

Abstract. Julio Jurenito – a 1924 Modernist novel by Ilya Ehrenburg, written hot on the heels of the 1917 Revolution and is distinguished by both a wide intertextual spectrum and an acute satirical orientation in relation to all ideological trends and factions. The article focuses on references of the novel by Ilya Ehrenburg to the legacy of Dostoevsky – primarily – The Brothers Karamazov. Ilya Ehrenburg resets Dostoevsky’s features – his protagonists and some elements of plot – into the reality of European history of the First World War, Russian Revolution and Civil War. But also, Ehrenburg goes beyond Dostoevsky’s semantic continuum, replacing the author’s sense of History as a process striving for its endpoint with a History in which an end is fundamentally impossible, and there is always at least the potential to put the flow of event on pause and rewrite their mistakes. As well, the idea important for Dostoevsky that of the moral damage of the modern atheist-minded person is transformed into a demonstration of the people’s inclination to create idols and devoutly worship the latter. Ilya Ehrenburg’s novel is grounded on an interpretation of Dostoevsky, perfected through the prism of the traditions of the Jewish Enlightenment.

In the article the poem by N.A. Zabolotsky “Bolero” (1957) is considered from the point of view of the visual and musical imagery representation in it. The main purpose of the paper is to determine how the title image of the dance affects the sound and imaginative structure of the poem. To that end the author defines possible ways of interaction of various arts with each other considers the specifics of dance, gives a brief history of Spanish folk dance and the ballet “Bolero” by M. Ravel (1928), had been given, and, finally, at various levels analyzes N.A. Zabolotsky’s poem. As a result, a conclusion is made that the poet created his own, verbal, variation of the musical theme of “Bolero”. On the one hand, he repeated part of its rhythmic features in poetic speech, on the other, he filled it with his own imaginative content, not associated with either folk dance, nor with Ravel’s ballet.

The article continues studying the successive relationship of the genres of the police novel and parable, primarily the relationship of the narrated parables and the positions of characters. (The issue of parable as a genre source of the police novel was raised by the author in the report earlier.) After analyzing “The Era of Mercy” by br. Wainer as a canonical Russian ethic variation of the police novel the author comes to the following conclusions. The text is full of parables as well as episodes of a parable kind. The characters (primarily heroes-sleuths and criminals) tell parables in the situation of the ethical choice or thus justify the previously made choice, it is characteristic of the police novel. Specific and universal description plans in parable are “substantive and equitable” (N.D. Tamarchenko), the same is true for the police novel while there in the course of the narrative, a specific plan is transformed into a universal one. In the final the universal and specific plans are balanced what is necessary for the implementation of its edifying sense. The findings help to take a fresh look not only at the police novel but at parable as well.

This article analyses the ways in which character is represented in I. Bergman’s autobiography “Laterna Magica”. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of the theatre image. Exactly thanks to that image a complex and multi-leveled system of the character’s self-identification emerges in I. Bergman’s autobiography. In addition to drawing a clear boundary between self-in-the-past and self-in-the-present, Bergman’s reflection on his past also highlights his inherent play with the illusion and reality, through which he easily draws the line between his chosen role, “guise” and “authentic self”. The image of theatre in Bergman’s autobiography thus cannot, on the one hand, be separated from the emotionally experienced biographical reality of the author, but at the same time the topos of European culture “the world as a theatre” refers to the existing structural components of that reflection, which does not belong to the field of subjective experience, making its position in autobiography special and important in terms of defining the specificity of the genre.

The article establishes and for the first time describes in detail the dialogue relationship of the Leningrad rock band “Auktyon” and the avantgarde poet Aleksei Khvostenko (1940–2004) with the poetic heritage of Velimir Khlebnikov (1885–1922). The author notes the closeness of the poetry of a major figure of the Russian avant-garde of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries with the poets and musicians of the underground of the second half of the 20th century. The research is based on the analysis of the reception of Velimir Khlebnikov’s poetry in the album “Zhilets vershin” (The summits dweller) (1995). The author defines the levels of the poetic dialogue of rock musicians with the work of the futurist and describes the structural and informative changes that the original texts have undergone in comparison with their existence in the musical creativity of the band “Auktyon”. The formation of the album in rock culture determines the specifics of the dialogue, mainly it is the correlation of the texts of other poets in the album and their transformation. The group of Khlebnikov’s lyrical works, which were selected and reworked by Khvostenko for the album, are considered from the point of view of their chronological sequence and the deployment of the lyrical plot. The author identifies the changes that the original texts have undergone and analyzed such cycle-forming connections of the album “Zhilets vershin” as the composition, title and chronotope.

In this article the author analyses “Ode on Visiting the Belosaraisk Spit on the Sea of Azov” by Ilia Kutik. There is a special mythopoetic in this text, reassembling the vegetative version of the mythological plot through the transformation of the monstrous fish into the Belosaraisk spit. At the same time, the image of that fish is not reduced to the usual outlines of a mythical character or monster, since it is based on a rethinking of the resurrection motive contained in the structure of the vegetative composition. The key episode of “Ode...”, the birth of the Belosaraisk spit, is represented by synthesis, where one detail is layered on another, and space is always in dynamics, which speaks of another feature of the poem, constant metamorphoses of space. The crossing of myth and technology in the language of the work creates both specific coordinates and the special functioning of the metabole. The mythopoetic basis provides the cumulative structure of the metabole. Cumulations synthesizing the semantic fields of physical phenomena and physicality, the natural and technological form the basis of the synthetic trope. Such functioning of the metabole organizes the mutual involvement of various details in the universe, characteristic of the metarealistic expressing. In that sense, “Ode...” by Kutik is built as a kind of reassembling Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” through the odic canon and the metabolic language of metarealism.

The article deals with references to the work of Boris Grebenshchikov in the “Dreams Swimmer” by Lev Naumov “The swimmer of dreams” (2021). The common denominator of the system of these references is the aesthetic character of the hero’s understanding of himself in the world and the world in relation to himself, which, if not directly leads the hero to the idea of his own chosenness, then at least is a symptom of the emergence of this idea. As a result, the system of references to the songs of “Aquarium” in Naumov’s novel makes it possible to interpret the character’s worldview as a worldview based on the aesthetic concept of understanding reality. The example of the appeal of a modern Russian novel to the “word of rock” considered in the article allows us to make sure that such an inclusion contributes to the disclosure of the specifics of the character’s worldview, and the analysis of this appeal brings one closer to a deeper understanding of the text.

This article is devoted to a comparative analysis of the images of the painter Strauch, the character in the novel by Th. Bernhard “Frost”, and the Jesuit Naphta, the character of Th. Mann’s “The Magic Mountain”. Such a research perspective is due to the fact that in the work of the Austrian and German classics many characteristic leitmotifs like the crisis of the subject and the search for the Self, the ambivalent being of the artist, the theme of rejection of a career, the theme of illness and death, all go back to those figures. A comparative analysis of the images of Strauch and Naphta allows shedding additional light on the specificity of Th. Bernhard’s reception of Th. Mann’s work, as well as expanding the idea of the artistic originality of the сharacter-“anti-educator” requested by the novel of the 20th century. While the differences between an artist and Jesuit are predominantly formal, their similarities reveal a conceptual systemic basis. Strauch and Naphta are related by Ungrund (groundlessness): both willingly appeal to the “prelogical”, both are prone to introversion, misanthropy and nihilism. It is emphasized that the internal conflict experienced by Strauch and Naphta allows them to feel much more subtly the drama of the “spiritual situation of time”. Without denying the self-destructive intellectual and ideological orientation of Strauch and Naphta, the author of the article comes to the conclusion that it is necessary to underline the cognitively constructive potential of their problematizing “pedagogy”.

The paper examines two key novels by Sandro Veronesi, the modern Italian writer, Calm Chaos (2006) and Colibri (2020). Both novels were awarded Italy’s main literary prize, the Premio Strega, which is a unique precedent. The relevance of the article comes from the high demand for research on contemporary Italian literature on the one hand and from the novelty of the proposed interpretation for the novel Calm Chaos on the other hand. For the first time, the protagonist of Calm Chaos, Pietro Palladini, is presented not as a preacher of eternal values, returning the reader to the theme of knowing oneself and the surrounding world, but as a mad visionary with clear signs of psychopathy and schizophrenia. The analysis of Veronesi’s latest novel Colibri reveals the character’s evolution and the writer’s narrative manner. The theme of psychiatry in the life of a modern person appears to be one of the key ones in Veronesi’s work.

The article studies an issue of the film adaptation of a literary work. The issue posed is considered on the example of N.V. Gogol work. In particular, on the example of his drama. These are such works as “The Inspector General”, “The Marriage”, “The Players”. In their time those works were translated by the authors from literary into cinematic language: the screen version of “The Inspector General” by V.M. Petrov (1952), “Incognito from Petersburg” by L.I. Gaidai (1977), “The Marriage” by V.V. Melnikov (1977), “The Inspector General” by S.I. Gazarov (1996), “The Case of the ‘Dead Souls’ ” by P.S. Lungin (2005), “The Russian Game” by P.G. Chukhrai (2007). As a result it was found that when translated into the cinema language, Gogol’s interpretations reveal new meanings that are expressed at the level of genre (the elements of a western in “The Russian Game” or a detective genre in Lungin’s film), plot (referring to the plots of several works at once), images (character replacement), details (garlands on the windows in Petrov’s “The Inspector General”), as well as stylistics, symbols, metaphors (apples and red in “Marriage”, for example). The above is emphasized by the authors through the use of specific film-language techniques. These are eccentrics, shooting at an angle, subjectivity, panoramas, etc. Postmodern techniques, used by interpreters to recreate the space of grotesque, intertextuality, and absurdity, also become interesting.

The article analyzes the verbal representation of the sound subtext from the London supertext of English linguistic culture. The study proceeds from the assumption that London supertext is constructed on the intersemiotic principle and is a product of several codes or, modi, rather than of language alone. London supertext is viewed as an invariable semantic cоnstruct, the total sum оf features be fоund in all the texts abоut this city, which have already been оr will potentially be written. Along with the combinations оf features, static and dynamic, the Lоndоn supertext incоrpоrates standard algorithms оf their deployment intо real textual sequences. The subtexts of London supertext are viewed as narrower thematic entities bound by a common propositional and modus-related attitude. The theoretical and methodical basis of the research cited in the article is determined by its оrientatiоn tоwards integrating the cоgnitive and semiоtic approaches, according tо which the mental culturallyspecific entity London is analyzed via a semantic study оf its supertext. The integration of the cognitive and the semiotic is effected within the framework of unified semantics. Semiotic analysis of the text in that case 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 including the individual entities from the text into common categories, what uncovers the profoundest world-view from the perspective of the given text. The article proves that the analysis of mental entities carried out via examining their respective supertexts integration of cognitive and semiotic approaches permits tallying linguistics with literary studies and with secondary modelling semiotic systems under a general semiotic approach.