RUSSIAN-WESTERN PERSPECTIVES

This text wants to pursue a somewhat different direction in the cur- rent con­versation on world literature; it seeks to ‘multiply’ world literature and demon­strate that there is no world literature per se, but rather different world literatures, because at different times different communities produce different constructs that they label as world literature. In my title, I signal that here we are dealing with answers to the questions what world literature is and how to write its his­tory that come from Soviet Russia, encompassing a period of some seventy years. My emphasis is on the lessons one could learn from the Soviet atten­tion to world literature; foremost amongst these is the compelling determina­tion of Soviet intellectuals to conceive of world literature in a systematically non-Occidentocentric manner. With this, the Soviets were pioneer- ing an approach to world literature that foreshadows our current concerns, as I will try to demonstrate. But there is also another lesson emerging from the Soviet preoccupation with world literature: the conversation on world literature does not proceed in a vacuum, it is constantly interacting with, impacting on, and being impacted by, the conversation societies have about national literatures and literary theory. I begin by briefly adumbrating four historically attest- able meanings of ‘world literature’ that are still at work in the Soviet debates; I then identify three different cultural and ideological horizons (or frameworks) of thinking about world literature in the Soviet Union and, significantly, locate their common ground, the glue that bound them together, in the master approach of de-Westernizing the very notion of world literature, an attitude consistently enacted by Soviet intellectuals engaging with the history of world literature.

The paper is concerned with the nature of fact, as a part of the struc- ture of genre-hybrid fiction biographies. It is assumed that any fact created by author‘s imagination is implicitly literary unless it is a specific document. This argument is being supported by theoretical justifications by J. Tynyanov. The examples of the peripeteia of real facts about the personality and work of F. Dostoevsky in the genre of fictional biography are from the novel The Master of Petersburg by J. M. Coetzee. In this work, the author‘s interpreta- tion is achieved through an original intertextual play that reproduces Dostoev- sky‘s literary personality and the complex construction of his creative world.

The article belongs to a series of publications presenting the results of the author’s research of the XX–XXI centuries’ Russian and foreign fantasy from the viewpoint of the Afterlife Universe artistic image embodiment as a special locus of human being (soul) postmortem existence. The article highlights charac- teristic features and functions of one of the basic leitmotifs in the artistic structure of the narrative of the afterlife – the motif of memory. It has been revealed that the given leitmotif is interpreted by writers in several semantic aspects and includes a number of subordinate motives: “self-memory” as the basis of a person’s posthumous self-identification, the memory of close family members and years past, the memory of the alive about the dead, and, finally, the memory of the humanity as a whole about its own history. Based on the results of the analysis, one can draw certain conclusions on the general meaning of the leitmotif: memory is a unique trace in history left by a person, it is also a great debt owed by the living to the dead, and it is the total collective experience that shapes humanity. Besides, in a number of texts, it is a steady basis of the Afterlife Universe existence.

The study examines Russian poetry of the 20th century, falling into the field of the avant-garde, and presents the features of cultural processes, the development of avant-garde trends, changes in the functions of art and language, vectors, and concepts. The boundaries of the literary phenomenon are made meaningful. The rebellion against aesthetic norms requires searching for new proportions and aspects of perception. Both the early and the second half of the century avant-garde set themselves the goal of shaking the perceiver, breaking the automatism of reading, and causing active rejection or misunderstanding. Hence, techniques related to difficult reading include “memorized” creations, “cut-off” words, a multitude of neologisms, broken syntactic constructions, and the fusion of incompatible aesthetic or thematic phenomena. The avant-garde versions of twentieth-century art emphasize resistance to the label manifestations of culture, opposing as an alternative the reduced, careless form, affirming through negation the breakthrough to the sacred and the true, the search for new positive meanings.

The article is part of a larger study on Russian/Soviet dystopia in literature, and partly in cinema. Here, the subject of reading is Vladimir Sorokin‘s “Ice Trilogy”, containing the novels Ice (2002), The Path of Bro (2004) and 23000 (2005).

The article examines the means of artistic embodiment of a person in a transitional period – the period of the 1990s, based on the material of Bulgarian and Russian literature (the collection of stories Heads or Tails (1999) by D. Enev, the collection of stories and novellas The Nineties (2024) by R. Senchin). The key role in the prose of both writers is played by the “little man” who finds himself in a marginal position. Many characters have an emphatically asocial character. The interest of both authors in marginal heroes, the appeal to transit, border spaces and situations are due to the specifics of the extra-literary context – the philosophy of the transition time of the 1990s, a period of loss of the previous system of axiological coordinates, abrupt socio-political transformations. The analysis revealed that the writers gravitate toward different strategies for creating the image of a person of transition time: Enev often resorts to modeling heterogeneous space and describes the dual position of a modern person through spatial oppositions, while Senchin focuses on the inner world of the hero, conveying his psychological state through internal monologues and indirect speech. In his works, several types of marginal heroes and models of their behavior can also be identified (from the disintegration of personality to attempts to find new life guidelines).