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The aim of this study is to offer some psychological reflections on the work of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, physician and renowned writer, one of the leading figures in European theatre at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Our work will, which draws on the Fusco method, focus in particular on the short story Fat and Thin, first published in 1883 and followed by a second version published in 1886, analysing how the themes of loneliness and alienation, recurrent throughout Chekhov’s work, reflect the human and...

The aim of this paper is to conduct a psychological analysis on Franz Kafka (1883-1924), an eminent figure of the 20th century, known for his disturbing and dreamlike works. This study takes its place in the current landscape of Kafka studies, which often focus on philosophical or sociological interpretations, by proposing a novel psychological perspective on his creativity. The Bohemian writer’s creative and literary thinking will be analysed and the short story Absent-minded Window-gazing from Contemplation (1...

The title of the following essay was inspired by the first English written monograph about the personality of Milan Kundera which has the same subtitle “A Voice from Central Europe”. ?1? Critical vision of Europe in the second half of the last century in Kundera’s novels and essays is generally known. Ivan Wernisch (born 1942) is internationally less famous than Kundera, because he did not emigrate after the Soviet invasion to Czechoslovakia in 1968, he published mostly in samizdat and began to be highly app...

This article focuses on the analysis of situational and linguistic satire in Josef Škvorecký’s work The Life of Czech Society. Škvorecký, known for his sharp wit and critical perspective on Czech society, utilises satire as a tool to depict the absurdities and shortcomings of everyday life. The article examines how Škvorecký effectively combines situational humour and linguistic play to create incisive social commentary. Emphasis is placed on how characters and dialogues reflect and parody the Czech cultur...

Being interested in the idea of ascension, the focus of the present article is to shed light on the topic regarded from an interdisciplinary perspective: literature, arts, religion, mathematics. Therefore, the elements which are truly essential (from a subjective perspective) are: the ladder, the spiral, Fibonacci and the golden ratio. We have briefly touched upon the motif of the spiral in Dante’s Divina Comedia. Furthermore, we have also shed light on the same motif found in Matya Ghyka’s book The Geometry o...

The purpose of the present article is to offer an in-depth analysis of the narrative techniques that Г‰ric-Emmanuel Schmitt used in order to underline the deep transformations through which the main character, Oscar, a ten-year-old boy who suffers from leukemia, has to face on his journey towards his own death, also making comparisons with another literary work that has cancer as an essential element of the narrative composition: "The Fault in Our Stars" by John Green. Moreover, we believe that a major part of thi...

Petr Hruska (born 1964) is a poet and literary historian from Ostrava. This post-industrial city used to be famous for its black coal mines and steel factories. At the time of the industrial boom, Ostrava started to be a “melting pot” of nations living in this part of Central Europe – the Czechs, Poles, Germans from Silesia, Austrians, Jews, and Slovaks. No wonder, then, that the cultural life of this region differs from that in traditional centres of Czech culture like Prague or Brno. Nevertheless, HruskaвЂ...

The presentation aims to focus from an ecdotic perspective, and from unexplored hermeneutic angles, on potentially prominent features of the annotated editions in which are brought together those genologically varied literary-type writings that are correlated with the analogous artistic fields, such as the visual arts, architecture or music, starting from relevant concrete examples in the Italian cultural landscape. Furthermore, attention will be drawn to how to make an edition of a philological character, scienti...

Latvian exile literature was formed when a part of Latvian society left homeland, when the country was reoccupied by the Soviet army at the end of the Second World War. Exile society and, accordingly, literature maintained both the dream of restoring independence and returning to the homeland as the goal of the exiles. The independence was regained after 45 years and this makes the concept of return problematic. This motif is one of the essential ones in post-exile literature. This research examines the representa...

This work aims to present one of the most original and complex characters of the 20th century, the writer James Joyce (1882-1941). The study consists of a careful research and psychological investigation of the Irish writer’s thought through the analysis of one of his best-known works, Dubliners. In particular, the last story of Joyce’s extensive work, The Dead, will be examined. In the course of the work, particular emphasis will be placed on the themes and concepts present and recurring in Joyce’s works an...

The process of displacement and the large numbers of Baltic refugees due to the return of Soviet occupation at the end of World War II is important theme in literature. In the literatures of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia after war a new and long-lasting phenomenon appeared – literature of exile. This paper will turn to three texts that are from different decades and are written in different styles about displacement. The research focus will be on the novel “After Doomesday” (1968, English translation 2017) [...

Josef Skvorecky, the eminent Czech writer and literary theorist, occupies a key place in the context of Czech literature, not only thanks to his extensive work, but also through his work as a publisher and promoter of Czech literature in exile. This paper focuses on the personality of Josef Skvorecky, who, as an author, forms the first link in the communication process in which the message is transmitted from the author to the perceiver. The analysis works with two different perspectives. The first one is the psyc...

Author of almost one hundred libretti for opera composers of the first half of the 18th century, Felice Romani has perfected a poetry technique that allows a successful combination of music and verse, thus becoming the favourite librettist of the belcanto authors Donizetti and Bellini. His stories are not original, but he masters the ability to adapt his sources in a light yet potent poetry with a strong impact upon the audience. Anna Bolena, put into music by Gaetano Donizetti, presents the tragic story of Henry ...

The paper deals with the exile view of Czech literary criticism in the past decades, reflected in two essays: one by Igor Hajek, and the other one by Kvetoslav Chvatik. Igor Hajek (1931–1995), a Czech literary critic, who went to exile in 1969, played a significant role in presenting Czech literature abroad. Kvetoslav Chvatik (1930–2012) was a Czech philosopher, aesthetician, art historian, and literary theorist. Hajek taught at universities in the English-speaking world, while Chvatik worked in a German-speak...

The contemporary Czech poet using the pseudonym Ewald Murrer (born in 1964 in Prague) used to be a representative of Czech underground literature before 1989. Then he became one of the most specific and original artists of his generation. The present essay deals with his very successful collection of poetry called The Diary of Mr. Pinke (1991, English translation published in 2022). Between the world wars, the most Eastern part of Czechoslovakia was so-called Subcarpathian Ruthenia (or Karpatenukraine in German). ...

The present paper is part of a broader research project, which aims at investigating the interviews given by Ana Blandiana, who is one of the most influential contemporary Romanian poets and a well-known dissident of the dictatorial regime of the 1970s and 1980s. These interviews were collected between 2019 and 2020 and subsequently grouped into three main categories, related to poetry, prose and essays. The resulting material was published in a volume entitled “Cartea cu delfini” (The book with dolphins) in 2...

The purpose of this study is to conduct a careful psychological investigation into the thought of one of the most important 20th century Irish writers, James Joyce (1882- 1941). The main focus of the analysis consists of some of the short stories contained in one of Joyce’s most famous works, Dubliners, with particular reference to Evelyne and at the same time examining some of the themes present and recurring in the Irish writer’s books. This work aims to demonstrate how in Joyce there is a strong interest in...

The present work aims to address the role that psychology plays within literary works starting from a "critical" reading aimed at understanding and recognizing the psychological and in some works also psychopathological traits present within the texts. Our goal will be to present the conscious and unconscious aspects of the various characters and identify the reasons that prompted the author to create and analyze certain psychological issues and certain environmental situations. The methodology that will be used w...

In my paper, the version of Urizen’s creation and existence particularly refers to/concerns the contrast/conflict between energy and reason. In Blake’s mythological system, Urizen is a false God which represents the distortion of truth and concerns the pragmatic, unspiritual apprehension, and appreciation of the mundane world as a creation of falsity which must be accepted by humans in order to survive, to secure life and multiply. Urizen creates and lives in an alienated and enslaving realm, a distorted menta...

Years and writing signatures apart, it would seem that Charles Dickens’s Hard Times has very little to do, if anything, with Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and/ or with Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let me Go for that matter. And yet, all of these three novels operate, in various degrees, with what seems to have always been a common life principle for many, regardless of the temporal or geographic co(n)text at hand. Dicken’s Hard Times portrays characters who prioritize facts, figures, and material ...

The libretto of Cavalleria rusticana, the well-known opera by Pietro Mascagni, was written by Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti and Guido Menasci, who reduced to melodrama a play by Giovanni Verga, in its turn a dramatization of a short-story with the same title he had previously written. Our investigation focuses on the libretto as a literary text to be analysed in comparison with its prose sources. We propose an in-depth analysis of the similarities and differences between the libretto and the play, in an attempt to un...

In the short story Novella Greca, in her book: Fior di Passione, 1888, the author M. Serao narrates the true story of Calliope Stavro, the heroine (Calliopi Stavrou in Greek), in Leucade - Santa Maura (Lefkada - Agia Mavra in Greek), an island of the Ionian Sea, in 19th century Greece. At that time, the country was just freed from the Turkish occupation, trying to recover from more than 400 years of slavery and subjugation to the Ottoman Empire. Calliope Stavro represents the woman of her time, imprisoned in the s...

This paper innovatively analyzes cultural intersections between the literary oeuvres of modern Italian writer Cristina Campo and the topics pertaining to ecocriticism, together with concomitant digital aspects thereof. The paper explores transversally across her work the elements of eco-literature, as well as interdisciplinary convergences in the light of environmental science with a particular focus on the envisionment of diachronic examples and other external intertextual elements in the contemporary era. The in...

In 2020, the Czech Republic commemorated an anniversary of a significant humanistic thinker, writer, and theologist, whose importance has exceeded the borders of the Czech lands. Jan Amos Comenius (28 March 1592 – 15 November 1670) is a leading representative of the Czech culture of the 17th century, and he became famous, especially as an author of didactic works, which represented a breakthrough in the field of education and inspired the way to modern educational methods. These works were based on Comenius’ t...

Pavel Srut (1940-2018) was a representative of a young generation of poets in the golden 1960s. After the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops (1968), he stayed in Czechoslovakia but could only publish in samizdat and exile. During the period of strict neo-Stalinist censorship (1969-1989), Srut continued to write, more for himself and for a vaguely anticipated future readership. He followed the tradition of the Central European absurdity, which we know from the work of Franz Kafka. One of the highlights of Srut’s ...

This paper focuses on the field of literary history in order to show what approach to the historiography of Czech literature was taken by the representative of Czech exile literary criticism, Igor Hajek. The context which Hajek entered during his study stays in the USA and Great Britain, and later in exile, was the reception horizon of the late 1960s, when the events of the “Prague Spring” attracted the attention of the West and turned attention to the Czech liberalisation movement, in which literature played ...

The study focuses on the late 19th century city as an equivalent of the formation of a modern society. In fiction, especially in novels, the depiction of the 19th/20th century city has always attracted attention as a reflection of the formation of modern society through portrayals of both daily life and the development trends of the era's ideas. Writer, publicist, social activist Augusts Deglavs (1862–1922) created a unique portrait of the modernization of the city in Latvian literature with his novel “Riga”...

In this paper, William Blake’s religious system, the relationship between Natural Religion (Deism) and Art will be discussed. Blake rejected Natural Religion because Deism, which he considered Atheism and the tree of mystery, that is the dichotomy of good and evil, is false religion. ‘Natural religion’s impossible absurdity’ urged him to allege The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Catholicism and Orthodoxy, which proclaim that nature is God’s creation, follow Urizen’s cruel practices. Deism, Druidism is re...

William Blake’s aesthetic vision of the secular world is based on divine inspiration. In the myth of The Ancient Britons, he discusses the three aesthetic categories of the sublime, the beautiful and the ugly. These establish his theory of art, which is based on Jesus the Imagination. The sublime, the beautiful and the ugly are forms indicative of gradations of divine influx in every individual. In this sense, the myth explicitly describes and distinguishes the three aesthetic categories that shape the secular a...

In The Book of Thel (The Book of ????, that is The Book of the Female), Blake’s main preoccupation, in my opinion focuses on the juxtaposition between the aesthetic and the useful, their antithesis and their synthesis to produce and explain the female identity. Knowing that Blake’s thought always moves in oppositional and synthetical structures, the useful versus the aesthetic is nothing more than the restless and perpetual fight of the dualisms of innocence and experience, energy and Urizen, imagination and r...

The main issue of the study is scientific explanation of the causes, strategies and mechanisms of renovation of art as holistic aesthetic system. The objective of the study is to specify and describe the strategy and mechanisms of artistic experimentation in Russian Pre-Romanticism and explain the dialectics of interaction of two (identical equation and contraposition) aesthetic systems in Russian Literary Process of the late XVIII century period. The research design is based on complex approach, involving combina...

The scientific investigation deals with the stream of consciousness as a constituent of spontaneity poetics in the writings of British and American authors of different literary epochs. The stream of consciousness reflects the complicated and steady mental process of the detailed fixation of thoughts, senses, and unconscious movements. The purpose of our paper is to solve such problems: to explain the notion of stream of consciousness from the spontaneity poetics point of view; to characterize the types of stream ...

The article analyzes the folklore formulas of the Turkic peoples of Siberia, describing characters with images of the Sun and the Moon on their bodies. In addition to the portraits, there are similar formulas that also mention the images of the celestial bodies when describing a character in motion; thus, the author distinguishes two types of portraits, static and dynamic. At first glance, static portraits are semantically related to the well-known motif of a wonderful appearance; however, as evidenced by the mate...

The author's individual style as a multilevel and multidimensional manifestation of personality is an integral part of the study of modern linguistics and cognitive linguistics. Modern linguistics text aims to move from the study of integrated textual structure to the analysis of the text as an anthropocentric communicative system aimed at the personal linguistic qualities of each author in connection with his psychological, mental, socio-cultural, and cognitive features. We define the author's style and reflectio...

The concept of electronic, or ’born-digital‘ literature points to literary works that rely on digital media, which form an indispensable part of the aesthetic experience. The concept is only beginning to gain traction in literary studies, and as such, it still represents a relatively obscure part of it. Given that we are poised to rely more and more on digital media in the future, the concept is likely to remain relevant. Nevertheless, as it stands now, the different forms of interaction between electronic and...

According to available information, it is still true that the most translated Czech novel is The Good Soldier Schweik (1921-23) by Jaroslav Hasek. By 2013, it had been translated into 58 languages. Schweik’s journey to the world began with translations into German, initially continuing mainly in the countries of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire and further in Russia and Ukraine. This artistic vision of war absurdities became widely known, especially after WWII and inspired such famous antimilitary works like C...

This paper aims at focusing on cognitive meaning of Carlo LeviВ’s work, based on his evidentiated historiographical, socio-cultural, ethnographic and anthropological interest, with the objective of exploring how the traces of memory, suggesting nostalgic attitude, but also dualistically drawn toward the future, are aspects which substantiate his pictorial search and reflection on art matters. Concomitantly, the purpose is to elucidate compositional elements of literary derivation or those that reflect themselves o...

The present research provides a detailed textual analysis of David BezmozgisВ’ recently published short story collection Immigrant City (2019). It expands on the authorВ’s response to life in exile exercised in his fiction, namely short fiction, as projection to his thirteen years earlier released short story collection Natasha and Other Stories (2004). The main focus of the analysis is on the treatment of the perception of the past and its reflection in memory. Various modes of memory, as justified by various sch...

The aim of the research is to describe childВ’s image as one of the most important components in the structure of childhood narrative. Great significance is attributed in its depiction to charactersВ’ portrait, action and its psychological motivation, age, degree of socialization, and name. Methods of the paper: theoretical and historical analysis of prose texts by bringing together semiotic, comparative, biographical, literary historical methods of literary research. Results of the paper: depiction of the artisti...

At the beginning of the study the concept of homelessness, which has officially appeared in post-socialist countries only in the last thirty years, is briefly characterized. The authors state that this pathological social phenomenon is only slowly entering Slovak childrenВ’s literature. The core of the study is an analysis of fictional and factual modifications of this topic. The combination of fiction and factuality is present in two books by Slovak writers Zuzana Csontosova and Nina Benova (A Stray Button, 2014;...

The study deals with the topic of otherness in literary work for children and youth in Slovakia. The gradual incorporation of otherness into the literature for children and youth is one of the possible ways to strengthen the inclusion of people with disabilities in society. The literature for children and youth on the topic of human otherness shows the way, in which it is possible to acquaint children with this important issue, and accordingly prevent the social exclusion of handicapped individuals. By offering a ...

The popularity of travel literature should not be underestimated. Travelogue is one of the most readable literary genres in the world literature, including the major literatures of the USA and Canada with their rich literary heritage, as well as such less popular or minor literatures, as the Latvian. The popularity of travel writing does not stop growing despite any world cataclysms; travelogue gains particular expansion in the 21st century due to the processes of globalization and rapid technological progress. Th...

Josef Skvorecky is one of the most significant representatives of the Czech writers who published their works in the exile. Josef SkvoreckyВ’s constant interest in the development of Czech society in recent decades is, among other things, the source of his work The Life of Czech Society, which is the subject of interest in this article. The book is a living testimony to a relatively recent period that was very difficult for the Czech nation. The analysis of the work makes it possible to follow SkvoreckyВ’s mastery...

The present study considers the interrelations between the personality of a socially and politically active writer and literary and cultural processes in the country. To analyse literary processes in a wider historical and cultural context the cultural-historical view on literature was applied; in its turn, to examine the writerВ’s place within the overall cultural milieu and to determine the interaction of the authorВ’s writings and his era the elements of the biographical method were used. In Latvia, the Russian...

The paper focuses on humour, the phenomenon that has many forms of manifestation and whose level of comicality depends on a particular culture. Czech culture is quite well-known for its sound representation in this area, and this will form a certain background allowing a better understanding of the target text. The main objective of the paper dwells in the application of actual theories of humour, especially S. Attardo's and V. Raskin's, into its identification and explanation in the contemporary Czech novel serie...

The Little Prince, a symbolic fairy tale by A. de Saint Exupery, is one of the pillars of modern European literature; since the first edition (1943) this literary work has been translated into over 200 languages, it has been processed in adaptations for film musicals, operas, animated series, and it still inspires dancers, musicians and writers. At the beginning of the study we briefly outline the reception of the Little Prince and selected creative updates of this story in Slovakia. The core of the study consists...

In contemporary creation for children and young people there is an increasing production of works with intermedia characteristics. Interdisciplinary cooperation of experts in the field of individual types of art is required in order to analyze, interpret and evaluate it. Monika Kompanikova, an experienced and awarded author for children and adults, created a multimedia project for children called Toddler Punk: TulinoВ’s Musical Stories (Monokel Publishing House) in 2019. The project includes a collection of fairy ...

The idea of creating a story or a short novel, in which the hero-artist would have appeared as the modern Faust, occupied the mind of T. Mann at the beginning of his literary career. The realization of this bold plan was postponed for almost half a century, but the novel “Doctor Faustus” (1947) with all its genre ambiguity is primarily Kunstlerroman, revealing three main typological signs of the works of this kind: its plot-composition center is the life story of the hero-artist, the novel contains a lot of re...

People, who are not achieving common standards in their physical appearance or in their mentality, do not lead simple lives despite the declarations about their integration and inclusion in the current society systems. It is important to talk about their specific life situation, life feelings, self-reflection and the way of experiencing their world, especially with the children and youth by the means of literary art. This issue is elaborated into literary works with an intention to mediate life situation of people...

The given article is devoted to describing main lines and particular features of epigrammatic art development in European literature, beginning from Ancient Greek-Roman period (VII-VI cc.) up to XX century. In this connection the authors try to give a general review of epigrams specific features and diverse manifestations in the works of world known writers and poets, such as: Martial, N. Boileau, C. Marot, F. Villon, J.G. Byron, I.W. Goethe, A.S. Pushkin and others. They come to a conclusion that modern epigramma...