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Biopolitics is an interdisciplinary field combining biology and politics. It is a study of politics whose subject is life administration according to the residence of citizens in order to “secure and sustain the manifold manifestations of human life and order them” and “to study the strategies and mechanisms by which human life processes are managed according to the knowledge of authoritarian regimes, power and process of subjectivizing” [1]. This term was created by Rudolf Kjellen in his work “The Great Powers”. ...

In English speaking countries, several literary monographs and dictionaries about cult fiction were published in the last decades. In our postmodern times, this seems to be quite an inspiring topic because it deals with constant tension between “high brow” literary values usually recommended by state education systems on the one hand, and spontaneous need to overcome these somewhat petrified systems of thinking about artistic values on the other hand. This effort is usually supported by independent intellectuals a...

Mister Sherlock Holmes has appeared in the cultural space of Latvia at the very end of the 19th century. Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective stories were published both in the Latvian periodicals and in the books by different publishers. Unfortunately, the attitude towards the fictional character Sherlock Holmes was not serious; during the first half of the 20th century Doyle’s detective stories were regarded only as the phenomenon of the pulp fiction. It can be observed by the analysis of the translations carried out ...

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 aim of this paper is to evaluate the connection between existential philosophy and the literary work of particular authors. In the first part, it will focus on the work of Egon Hostovsky, who belongs to the typical representatives of existential prose. Due to his Jewish origin, Hostovsky was forced to stay in exile at the time of the occupation of Czechoslovakia, but he felt very dissatisfied and never came to terms with his destiny of the emigrant. His feelings became the basis for his existentially oriented ...

This paper aims at illustrating and analyzing the elements of the sacred in the symbolic structure of early twentienth-century Croatian Futurist literary texts and works of art, as well as semantic and stylistic range thereby implied within such corpora. Methodological attention is drawn to their significant reception and socio-cultural resonance, including interconnections with other aspects of artistic expression (in the interdisciplinary fields of visuality), and concomitantly with analogous manifestations in I...

Shirley Jackson is an author of many fictional and semi-fictional texts and had a great interest in the supernatural. Her novel “The Haunting of Hill House” (1959) is praised by many horror fiction writers, such as Stephen King, as one of the great novels of supernatural in the last hundred years. The notion of the literary genre of horror is based on the effect it produces on the reader: it provokes the reader’s emotional and/or physical response, such as fear, anxiety, revulsion, etc., by exposing him or her to ...

The present study focuses on two interrelated issues: specifics of Russian literature in Latvia in the period after the World War II and peculiarity of children’s literature of this period. The post-war period is dramatic in the history of Latvia; it is a period of lost independence and occupation, which directly affects the literary process (presence of ideological doctrine). Nevertheless, Latvia’s cultural space becomes a place of relative artistic freedom and minimization of ideological dictate. In a phenomenal...

The article analyses the physical representation of national identity in Barnes’s England, England (1999). In his novel, Barnes constructs a two-dimensional model of English national identity comprising history and landscape. The significance of these two concepts in the system of national English symbolism is acknowledged by both the English and the outsiders. In the three parts of the novel, the author successively depicts three landscapes with various degrees of symbolic meaning. In the first part, the perspect...

In this article we use modern approaches from machine learning, data analysis and natural language processing, text mining algorithms and methods to analyze the text of the novel “The Master and Margarita” by M. A. Bulgakov. The paper has the network of the main characters of the novel, based on their interactions with each other and distribution in the text. The links in the network selects the groups of characters with their connectedness in a plot. We also analyzed the changes in the sentiment dynamic of the pl...

The active perception and assimilation of a wide Western European, Eastern European and American cultural context is one of the most important developmental trends in Latvian literary process. Translations of Russian literature into Latvian are not very demanded, though they are rather significant. Yevgeny Vodolazkin (b. 1964), Doctor of Philology, expert in Old Russian culture, author of several novels, collections of essays and literary travelogues, is among the most popular and widely read writers. “Laurus” (20...

Historical novel is, without any exaggeration, one of the most striking literary genres, as a retrospective of the past in the imagination of the writer makes up for the lack of imagination and imagination of a professional historian. Historical novel is, without any exaggeration, one of the most striking literary genres, as a retrospective of the past in the imagination of the writer makes up for the lack of imagination and imagination of a professional historian. The genre of historical novel has gone through a ...

The given article addresses the issue of Jewish text in the literary production of a contemporary Canadian writer of Latvian origin - David Bezmozgis – focusing on representation of Latvian segment in the collection of his short stories Natasha and Other Stories (2004). Publication of the said collection alongside with his other works (The Free World (2011), The Betrayers (2014)) has aroused great interest among common readers and literary scholars, who in their critical notes consider his works mainly through the...

Elena Katishonok is a contemporary author, who is writing in Russian. Elena was born in Riga, graduated from the Faculty of Philology of the Latvian State University. In 1991, she moved to the USA; now she lives in Boston. In the last few years, Elena Katishonok’ oeuvre has become known to a wide range of readers. The novels “Once upon the Time There Lived an Old Man with His Old Woman” (2006), “Counterclockwise” (2009), “When the Person Leaves” (2011), “Light in the Window” (2014) have not only found their reader...

The contribution focuses on literary phenomenon of bad mother in 21st century novels written by authors born in former GDR. Both selected novels deal with some kind of raven mother’s behaviour witnessed by the writer in person or conveyed by close relative of the writer showing how historical events might lead to refusal of the principal woman’s role – being mother. The long-term family as well as society disguised taboo is in the first novel “Back to Back” by Julia Franck’s composed only after grandmother’s death...

This article explores the contributions of one of the greatest Russian writers in the contemporary literature Andrei Bitov, who has written several novels and short stories that reflect the postmodernism literary works in Russia. The first post-modernist work in Russian was A. Bitov’s novel “Pushkin house” from A.S. Pushkin, the creator of the Russian literary language; the largest and most prominent figure in Russian literary life. A.G. Bitov was one of the first Russian writers in the Soviet Union who devoted to...

Jachym Topol (born 1962) is a Czech poet, novelist and rock musician whose literary works have been translated to more than ten languages up to now. He comes from a well-known Czech literary family (e. g. Karel Schulz, Josef Topol), started his career as a Czech “angry young man” and a representative of Czech underground culture in the 1980s. After 1989 he began to write novels which are rooted in the underground way of expression but at the same time are discussed as samples of typically postmodern prose. Especia...

The current study focuses on the intersection of ethnic identity in the political discourse in ethnically binary post-conflictual (post-Soviet) territories, exploring it through the postcolonial approach to performativity, Judith Butler’s theory on performativity and its certain concepts in further performativity research. Jana Egle’s book “Strangers or Milenkij Ti Moj”1 (Svesie jeb milenkij ti moj, 2018) projects a specific interpretation of Russians, i.e. as a complex concept represented through speakers’ ethnic...

The paper deals with the foreign reflection of the work of Jaroslav Seifert, a Czech poet who belongs to the so-called semi-official “grey zone” and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The analysis is based on two essays by Igor Hajek, a distinguished exile critic, included in the collection of Hajek’s literary essays, which was published in Czech translation in 2007. In the first of these articles, Hajek reminds foreign readers of the confined atmosphere of the 1950s, when many authors lost the opportunit...

This paper deals with the functions of the grotesque in V.V. Nabokov’s works as an artistic and theoretical concept in the associative-semantic aspect; the research proceeds from the perspectives of conceptual and structural-semiotic and cultural scientific methods. The scientific novelty of the paper lies in that such syncretism makes it possible to reveal a combination of grotesque imagery in the writer's texts, both in the spirit of substantive and mythological ideas, on the one less studied hand, and in terms ...

The article attempts to consider the ways the persistent perceptions of Russian literature by Latvian inhabitants have been formed and developed. Russian literature has been part of Latvian cultural landscape for a long time. Its perception in Latvian society is heterogeneous and changeable both in the temporal and in the socio-cultural aspect. First, when studying the specifics of the perception of Russian literature in Latvian society, it is necessary to take into account the stages and characteristics of the fo...