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Sources, editing the private letters promotes establishing a strong basis for scientific The article highlights the importance of the scholarly edition of the famous personsВ’ epistolary legacy: writers, historians or public figures, emphasizes that together with the historical documents, epigraphic monuments and editions of the corpus of different other writing research: gathering-systematizing them in one edition and deeper examining is the best source for familiarizing with the private life and public work of p...

The authors of the article talk about the phenomenon of Internet poetry from the perspective of a new communication model, in which a broadcast channel of the Online Network affects the distribution of all other elements, including the sender, the destination user and the text. Poems by Stefania Danilova, the Runet star, served as material for analysis, proving that the cyber space can generate not only informational "junk", but also create highly artistic content that "stabilizes" the linguistic taste of the era ...

The study brings forward the results of analysis and interpretation of legends and social prose for youth, which deal with coexistence of majority population and Roma ethnic group in Slovakia. In the introduction, brief history of Roma people in Slovakia and the term “romipen” is described. Research of the literary material was realised on the basis of one’s own – different – alien trichotomy. Its goal was to find out: 1. what are the modifications of mental image about coexistence of Roma with non-Roma i...

The Proclamation of Independence of Latvia by the People's Council of Latvia on November 18, 1918 called Proclamation Day of the Republic of Latvia became the most important date in self-awareness of the Latvian people. In the interwar period, the 18th of November became a public holiday uniting all nations and ethnical groups inhabiting Latvia. The establishment of the independent country also caused reflection on this event – gradually increased a necessity to study historical circumstances, preconditions and ...

In the paper we focus on foreign literature for children and young adults in Slovak translations. The criterion for our choice was the presence of the character with disability. We deal with two books, which were published in Slovak translation in recent five years: A social novel Aristoteles a Dante spoznГЎvajГє svet a tajomstvГЎ vesmГ­ru (Benjamin Alire SГЎenz: Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, 2012; Slovak translation in 2016) and a novel with fairy-tale features ГљВћasnГЎ cesta Barnabyh...

Annexation of the Baltic states within the Soviet Union in 1940 affected all spheres of life, including culture. Writers and their texts were intentionally selected for being circulated outside the territory of each subject of the USSR. One of the ideological tasks of the Soviet socialist republic writers’ unions was creating an impression that peoples incorporated in the whole territory of the USSR have willingly joined the Soviet Union and agree to replacing their national languages by a single official – Rus...

Milan Kundera is widely known especially for his novels written in Czech, only much later he began to write his fiction in French. Rather paradoxically, it was only when he had become a French citizen that Kundera started to write systematically about the Central European novel as a specific phenomenon with highly original features, e. g. polythematic structure, lack of great epic stories, a tendency to essayism, and an ironical approach to the author’s homeland. His novels are very often based on playful or gro...

Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997) is along with Jaroslav HaВљek and Milan Kundera one of the greatest Czech writers of the 20th century; his works are translated into 27 foreign languages. In the period from 1989 to 1992, Hrabal wrote a series of fictional letters addressed to Dubenka (April Gifford), a visiting American student who became the muse of his later years. These half-imaginary letters were never sent to her, though their relationship was very close and even intimate. Therefore, it is necessary to ask a questi...

Numerous films, documentaries and novels including their film versions in the 21st century are evidence of interest in analysing the recent history. This article focuses on the two totalitarian systems that have again become a discussed issue in German prose after the year 2000, and examines different approaches to the history and different choice of topics of historical events by authors of both the old and new German federal states. The authors from the former West Germany have the tendency to address the follow...

Igor Hajek belongs among the personalities who played an essential role in presenting Czech literature abroad. The paper aims to illustrate his work reflecting his viewpoint of two important books by Josef Skvorecky, namely The Cowards, a novel capturing the atmosphere of the last days of the Second World War, and The End of the Nylon Age, a novella set in the world of the fading glory of the post-war Czechoslovak democracy, and shows the clash of two worlds, which is SkvoreckyВ’s favourite topic. HajekВ’s origina...

The genre of travelogue is regarded as one of the most readable in the contemporary North American literature. Its popularity has grown in the latest decades due to the processes of globalization and new technological developments in the world. People travel a lot; new, exotic places become of utmost interest; new typologically various travelogues appear. The question of belonging of travel narrative to fiction or non-fiction remains disputable; the frames of each are very controversial. Thus, the aim of the prese...

Traditionally, mass media have been viewed as channels for the dissemination of public information. With effective strategies, mass media can be a platform for diverse and dynamic two-way flows of information enabling better social and individual decisions. Most papers and training courses entitled В‘Theatre and Mass MediaВ’ consider the media specificity of the theatre itself in terms of the adaptation of canonical plays for cinema or/and television. But there are other dimensions, too. First, the performative th...

Today the definition ‘Transnational Literature’ is used by some Russian philologists to determine the layer of Literature that can not be unequivocally attributed to a particular national literature. If, for example, the works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are directly connected with Russian Literature and culture, then there are still difficulties with regard to Literature created by non-Russian writers in Russian. During the Soviet period, Russian-language Literature (Russophone Literature – alternative term) wa...

Nowadays the debate on national character has become one of the central issues in the context of ever-growing globalization tendencies and the most recent expressions of nationalism. Contrary to the big nations that most often take for granted who they are, the Latvians have always dwelled upon the aspects of their identity and a range of issues associated with it. Being the “culture of a closed type”, i.e. an issue of an individual choice, Latvianness acquires also the features of the “culture of the open t...

Despite the exponential growth of transcultural/ translingual studies in recent decades, phenomenon of literary translingualism is still open to question. Specifically, it has been suggested that translingual practices in literature are equivalent to a “cultural bomb” that make minority ethnic groups forget their “names”. Translinguism is as old as the mythical Babylon itself. But if in the usual communication the translingual practices are evaluated rather positively (as the strategy of cooperation with t...

The corpus of literary texts, where the Jewish theme is stated to a greater or lesser extent (Old Testament imagery, characters-Jews, facts from Jewish history, etc.), is considered the Jewish Text. In any national literature, the Jewish theme demonstrates the attitude towards Jews in a certain national environment rather than the specifics of Jewry. In Latvian literature, because of a special historical and cultural situation, there develops an original Jewish text with the structural elements changed under the i...

Modern humanitarian knowledge has increasingly paid attention to axiological aspects of human life. In search of moral values of the present, it makes sense to address to the cultural heritage of the previous eras. Restoration Comedy, emerged as a reaction to six-year puritanical dictatorship, followed by the restoration of the monarchy, is of special interest, in this sense. The peculiar attitude towards the moral standards found the reflection in comedies of manners of the Restoration era is, certainly, related ...

Art is inter-medial, its internal borders are permeable; due to this quality of semantic “frontiers” there is a constant dialogue between such different spheres of art as painting, poetry, architecture, music, cinema, and new forms of media relevant to the modern era. This work is an attempt to interpret "visible" (but not graphic-visual) poetry on the example of lyrical story by the Kazakh poet Olzhas Suleimenov, who has been writing in Russian for many years of his creative biography. The main attention is p...

Cultural trauma appears when a group of people feels they were made some horrible event experience leading to indelible traces in their collective consciousness, leaving an imprint in their memories forever and changing their identity irreversibly. During the 20th century, first in the Western societies but soon also worldwide, people constantly were stating that they had been traumatized by some experience, event, act of violence or frightening, or just by sharp and sudden and sometimes even not very hostile expe...

The aim of the study is to perform and present the synchronic and diachronic analysis of the Russian writer’s, Anton Chekhov’s (1860 – 1904), reception in Latvia in four most significant cultural historical periods that determined the establishment and formation of the writer’s “literary reputation” (I. Rozanov) in Latvia. The material of the study is essays, dedication poetry, translations, and staged performances to trace the borrowings and direct influences that form the “outer” and “inner” rec...

The novel about the Chechen War “Asan” (“????”, 2008), where the concept “betrayal” has a structure-forming function, is the most significant text among the ones written by V. Makanin during the past decades. Key lexemes (it is repeatedly emphasized by the author himself) explain what is happening in the society: “to turn in” – “to betray” – “to sell”. The novel “Two Sisters and Kandinsky” (“??? ?????? ? ??????????”, 2011) constructs the concept “betrayal” in the context of ...

The early 20th century was to become a significant milestone not only for the development of relations between Russia and Yakutia, but also for the convergence of Russian and Yakut people, largely through Russian literature. The beginning of the 20th century, as the time for the Russian-language literature appearance in Yakutia, was a difficult period, given the fact that the beginning of the century was a time for the political change of eras and ideals, the time to search for political, social, and spiritual val...

Autobiographicity is a peculiar form of writing based on the personal life experience of the author of a literary work reflecting its facts and events. Limits of the autobiographical character of a literary work are not easy to establish; its investigation requires deep knowledge of the biographical facts of the respective author that is drawn from the analysis of documents of extra-textual reality (letters, contemporariesВ’ memoirs and evaluations, reviews of the literary work, the biographical information provid...

The theory of social treaty is one of the basic socio-political doctrines of the Enlightenment in Europe and in Russia. Different models of relations between the authorities and society are reflected in the treatises of European and Russian thinkers of the time. However, the concept of the social treaty represents the constantly changing ideological construct, "a tacit agreement", created, sought and spoken in various texts of culture. The author intents to observe the odic poetry of the XVIII century, the field o...

Division into periods of D.H. LawrenceВ’s creative activity mainly is based on his biographical facts, but we should find a point of his departure from the apprenticeship, from the traditions of the English novel of the 19th century. In many respects the author of Sons and Lovers departs from traditions, although he does not break with them completely. Lawrence creates a synthetic genre, combining the structure of a Bildungsroman and a KГјnstlerroman, giving his protagonist some autobiographical traits. Buthe does...

During my numerous research and teaching stays at the universities in Great Britain, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria I was asked to speak about Czech independent literature which existed under the communist regime (1948-1989). As an author of a monograph about Czech literary underground (1999) and many studies on this topic, I expected that it would be easy for me. Nevertheless, I soon came to the conclusion that translation of basic terms connected with independent culture is not only a matter of linguistic ability ...

One of the important features of the contemporary literary process is an actualization of a variety of transgressive or hybrid phenomena. In this connection, the novel “Laurus” (2012) by Eugene Vodolazkin is not an exception. Expressed criticism is sometimes not satisfied with the discreteness of E. Vodolazkin’s text, its peculiar mosaic, explicit eclectic mixture of semantic, speech, structural and genre elements. It seems that these elements have a deeper meaning. The article analyzes the semantics of the b...

Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997) is along with Jaroslav HaВљek and Milan Kundera one of the greatest Czech writers of the 20th century, his works are translated to 27 foreign languages. The present paper pays attention especially to his texts written in the early 1950s when Hrabal started to use his specific narrative style that combines modernist impulses with down-to-earth tall tales inspired by the milieu of Czech pubs. In that time Hrabal was in a close and friendly contact with much younger Egon Bondy, a poet and p...

Study deals with the thematisation of visual deprivation (blindness) in the picture books, which are (in connection with its designation both as for intact as well as for handicapped reader) labeled with attributes “accessible” and “inclusive”. As illustrated in creative practice, such books are characteristic by an emphasis on its sensual-concrete realization (“artefacticity”) and subsequently by an experimental semiotic connection between verbal (literary) and visual (illustrative) component. Study a...

The article analyzes the mythological systems, that had a significant impact on the outlook of Mikhail Bulgakov as the author of the great novel В‘The Master and MargaritaВ’, the iconic literary work in Russia of XX-of XXI centuries. The article criticizes the tradition of literary studies, where the philosophical context of the novel В‘The Master and MargaritaВ’ is interpreted exclusively in the context of Russian philosophical tradition. The article identifies three semantic constructs of the novel, reveals thei...

Gothic fiction of the 18th and the early 19th centuries has caused a significant influence not only on the mass literature but also on the works of many forthcoming generations of writers and poets. These authors created an atmosphere of anxiety, fear and uncertainty in their works by adopting a range of Gothic romance novel creative methods and techniques. The present article attempts to give an overview of the Gothic romance novel tradition in the 19th century American literature. Charles Brockden Brown, one of ...

Presented study synthetises the research focused on the portrayal of a man in the literature for children and youth in Slovakia. Material basis for the research is both original as well as translated prosaic production published in Slovakia since mid- 19th century until 1989 (fall of the communist regime). The research findings are about to answer the following questions: 1. what is the mutual proportional representation of different types of handicap (social disadvantage and medical handicap; i.e. physical impair...

This article highlights the existence and importance of the historical aspect of Slovaks' national existence in Lowland, having specific regard to their first historical cultural and literary impulses in Nadlak. It stresses the self identifying and mediatory function of written word and its historical connection in the aspect of minority existence of (for the most part) their own development context. On the background of beneficial bibliographical attributes and theorems it mainly displays concrete interpretive an...

The purpose of this analysis is to critically examine an experience of perceiving a literary text and to provide a special approach to make the perception deeper. To raise awareness intended to introduce the reader to Isaak Babel’s “Red Cavalry” artistic text a new way of receiving the text has been proposed. A bike by night event of the educational project “Velonotte International” in Sergiyev Posad, Russia, highlights the importance of facilitation of the receiver entering into a relationship with the a...

The given research is focused on the study of the book by a contemporary Latvian writer and journalist Inese Zandere titled “The Ship’s Log Book” (Ku?a žurn?ls), which was published in 2016. The author of the research views it from the perspective of hybrid texts and analyses the shift of genre boundaries between poetic texts and journalism. The subtitle of the book is “Notes, essays, excerpts, letters, conversations”. In the title of the book a lexeme denoting a familiar document is used – a log book,...

In this paper I am going to focus on the work of the Czech writer Karel Capek, who lived in the first half of the 20th century, as it was perceived by the Czech exile literary critics and Western scholars specialized in Czech studies. This author enjoyed great popularity in Britain in the period between the two world wars, but his works had gradually fallen into oblivion over time, perhaps except for his play RUR, which enriched the English language with the word robot, and the novel War with the Newts. I am going...

The article deals with one of the eternal issues of the theory and practice of literary translation: “What happens to a literary original after it has been translated?” The answer to this question could be probably found through interdisciplinary approach which takes into consideration not only exclusively translation categories and literary translation traditions but also broad literary, cultural and political contexts of the target text. The subject of the present research is the experience and results of fo...

The article deals with the scholarly edition of 19th-20th cc. Georgian writersВ’ epistolary legacy (thirty-volume set), initiated by our scientific team from 2010, the modern research methods for textual and editorial studies, we guide with in preparing the volumes, our editorial strategy, based on which traditional attitudes and modern technologies have been combined with each other in research process, it became possible, by using computational technologies, to read several indecipherable texts of the writers, u...

In the history of Russian literature names of F.M. Dostoevsky and M.Y. Saltykov-Shchedrin stand side by side and at the same time opposing each other. One of the painful issues, points of attraction and repulsion, points of consolidation and confrontation between the artistic worlds of the writers is their understanding of the phenomenon of power. They got their first impressions about the type of power relations predominating in Russian society at about the same time, in their youth, when they both took first ste...

In modern criticism, V. Nabokov is revered as one of postmodernism “godfathers”. In the texts of a number of iconic contemporary writers (from A. Bitov up to O. Slavnikova and L. Ulitskaya) the influence of “Lolita” author’s creative works is highly significant. L. Ulitskaya never attributed herself to the postmodernist trend; on the contrary, she insisted that aesthetics under the sign “post” is becoming obsolete. Such experience of the author's self-identification beyond the post-modernism's aesthet...

The article is devoted to the philosophical interpretation of the specifics of creativity of A.S. Pushkin, the famous poet and writer, one of the geniuses of the world culture. Pushkin didnВ’t leave his own philosophical legacy. However, his works inspired many philosophers, who understood its philosophical depths. This article examines the works of A. S. Pushkin through the prism of analysis of the creative heritage by the Russian philosophers abroad G. P. Fedotov, N.A.Berdyaev and I.A. Ilyin, as well as modern R...

In the history of Sakha literature the names «Yksykylekh Ylyksyj» - A.Y. Kulakovsky, «Alampa» – A.I. Sofronov, «Bilatian Oiuunuskay» – P.A. Oyunsky have a great meaning. The most important thing in their heritage is the distinctive vision of the world, reflected in the unique symbolic systems of their poetry, which confirm eastern sources in the national artistic culture of a northern Turkish branch – the Sakha nation. In poetic works of the early literary traditions we have the presence of folk beginn...

The article is dedicated to the problem of the creative act, specifics of creativity in interpretation of the Russian philosopher I. A. Ilyin (1883-1954). I. A. Ilyin brings new ideas in the esthetics, developing regulations on specifics of the creative act, considering a problem from the perspective of the creating artist and the perceiving recipient. Each artist possesses his own vision of the outside world and of the inner world of soul and has to deepen his creative act and keep within plots and subjects ident...

The literal translation of “queer theory” might be considered as a “theory of oddity”, or “theory of strangeness”. Initially negatively perceived designation became the official theory name in the second half of the 20th century, which deals dominantly with a marginal – in order to analyse the mainstream cultural construct. Although the “queer reading” in the Western-European society plays a significant role still not only within the area of literature theory, but also in politics, culture, econo...

The research is significant because although N.A. ZabolotskyВ’s creative work has always been the focus of scrupulous attention, it would not be exactly correct to state that all aspects of his creative output were comprehensively studied due to the exclusive unfathomable versatility of masterpieces produced by such a great literary artist. So there are a great number of uninvestigated questions, demanding an in-depth study and thorough analysis. The theme of music in N.A. ZabolotskyВ’s poetry, the question about ...

Aspazija (Elza Rozenberga, 1965–1943) is a founder of Latvian women’s writing. She had an essential role in the formation of Latvian contemporary literature in the late 19th – early 20th centuries. At that time, it was modernity that determined social and economic processes in the world. That time was characterized by the deconstruction of the patriarchal model of life and the stratification of the society. Industrialization and urbanization determined the overlap, transformation and hybridization of ethnic a...

The issue of relations among national and regional literatures is closely bound with the concept of national literary canon. National literary canon is a system for studying and segmenting authors who belong to a national literature. National literary canon is formed by writers and their literary works. A canon has a marked nucleus. In Latvia “Latvian Cultural Canon” was compiled in 2007 as a treasure trove that contains the most important cultural achievements of all times including also the branch of literat...

The Revolution of 1905 and its successive events had an essential impact on the development of literature – both themes and form. In Latvia, the Revolution started with demonstration on 13 January 1905 protesting against „Bloody Sunday” in Saint Petersburg (January 9, 1905). In both events a significant role was played by intellectuals. In Russia, the attitude of intellectuals towards the events of 1905 mostly caused the dissidence that would lead to the tragic events of the October 1917 and the Civil War. Th...

R?dolfs BlaumanisВ’ personality as well as literary works created by him lay a firm foundation for the Latvian classical literature. WriterВ’s views and texts reflect the rural and urban environment of the end of the 19th c. and the beginning of the 20th century, focusing on the juxtaposition of townspeople and countrymen, the patriarchal and industrial life rhythms, addressing family and marriage problems, as well as exploring the relationships between the Latvians, Baltic Germans, Russians, and Jews. Folklore is...

Short stories and novels by Waclaw Sieroszewski were periodically reviewed in critical and bibliographic sections of the leading Russian magazines and journals of the time: “??????? ?????” (Russkaja mysl’) (Moscow), “??????? ?????????” (Russkoe bogatstvo), “??? ?????” (Mir Bozhij), “?????” (Zhizn'), “????? ?????” (Novoe slovo), “??????? ??????” (Vestnik znanija) (all - St.Petersburg) and others. The most intensively the works of the Polish writer were published and reviewed in the period f...