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Mister Sherlock Holmes has appeared in the cultural space of Latvia at the very end of the 19th century. Arthur Conan DoyleВ’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 DoyleВ’s detective stories were regarded only as the phenomenon of the pulp fiction. It can be observed by the analysis of the translations carried ou...

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 devot...

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 th...

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”...

The paper presents the results of a synchronic interdisciplinary study, which combines the approaches pertaining to sociolinguistics (gender studies), contrastive linguistics (the data analysed have been obtained from an unconstrained colour describing experiment, the participants of which are native speakers of Latvian and English), and cognitive linguistics. The aim of the study is to find out commonalities and differences in the way respondents – native speakers of Latvian and English – describe (rather tha...

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...

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 ...

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 oppor...

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 article analyses the physical representation of national identity in BarnesВ’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 perspec...

This article aims at looking at two centres of modernity, seen in space, time and metaphorical representation, in the early twentieth century as illustrated by the Irish writer James Joyce in Ulysses (1922) and the Romanian novelist Cezar Petrescu in Calea Victoriei [“Victory Avenue”], published in 1929. The analysis is based on recent research that has entangled the representation of space in cultural and fictional texts with the geographic spaces of the respective historical periods, the reason being that, s...

London is an ambivalent space, a site of renewal and tradition, dissonance and harmony, fragmentation and unity, destruction and rebirth. This paper aims to investigate the mapping of London as a city prone to regeneration, constructed as a sum of factual and fictitious experiences and perceptions of the urban milieu in a transcendent spatial continuum. In this respect, geocriticism will be used as a theoretical point of departure in order to investigate London as a real and imaginary city, whereas psychogeography...

Although this paper acknowledges within its theoretical framework seminal ideas put forward by Dominick LaCapra and Cathy Caruth, refashioning FreudВ’s descriptions of ways of experiencing and coping with trauma, it moves in a different direction. It explores the intertextual pattern used to create unexpected, В‘artificialВ’ responses to trauma. The most common labels used to refer to such texts as FoerВ’s 2005 novel are В‘9/11 LiteratureВ’ and В‘The Literature of Terror,В’ with strong reliance on trauma theory. I...

The present study focuses on the analysis of the types of intertextual techniques as used in printed advertisements. By means of the analytical, the discourse analytical and the descriptive research methods, the printed advertisements featuring the use of intertextuality have been selected and analysed as to the stylistic patterns used to create intertextuality. Intertextuality in printed advertisements is used to attract larger and / or specific audiences, to promote specific features or advantages of a particula...

Article is written on the basis of reconsideration artily – the esthetic principles and fundamentals of philosophy in works so far, search is national – art thoughts of modern Kazakh literary criticism. Fiction, now based on new views of human nature, puts special attention discussion of a subject on personal human aspirations, in its height spiritually – a psychological phenomenon, the relations of the person with the true phenomena through criterion of philosophy. In 70 – 80 years of the XX century cause...

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 t...

The literary portrayal of physical disability and death in the book by Czech author Daniel Rusar Spring of Cripples (Paskuda books, Bratislava, 2011) combines the means of narrative and non-narrative textual strategies and at the story level uses the contrast between emotional and deemotionalised attitudes of the protagonists to difficult life situations. The resulting textual incoherence creates a receptional situation that makes the readerВ’s cooperation in relation to the plot (his temporal and emotional immers...

Migration is a process in which individuals and groups of people leave their homes for various reasons, which generally puts them to some disadvantages. The introduction of the study outlines the types of processing of the topic of external and internal migration in the original Slovak literature for children and youth from the end of the 19th century to the end of the 20th century. Migration as a disadvantageous social problem has gained new literary modifications especially after 2010. In three parts of the stud...

A comparative analysis of the European language policy of multilingualism and its analogue in the Russian Federation is carried out using a systematic approach to the study of the regulatory framework and practical implementation. As a result, common features and obvious differences inherent in these political entities were identified. In the modern world, in the context of globalization in all spheres of human activity, language policy in the state or supranational education is closely related to political and ec...

Pre-Romanticism literature is characterized by several features reflecting its approaching towards Romanticism. Karamzin’s ?Russian Traveller’s Letters? (Ienuia ?onneiai iooaoanoaaiieea / Pis?ma Russkogo Puteshestvennika,1791-92) is not a chaotic sequence of unselected impressions, it is not a descriptive enumeration of unsorted facts. In contrast, it is a collection of thoughts and ideas deliberately chosen for the book and mirroring different events of less than two years, 1789-1790, witnessed by N.M.Karamzi...

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...

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’...

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 f...

The theme of lecture is postcolonial novel in Slovak literature which is a new kind of novel in the Slovakia as the self-colony of Ex-Soviet Union. The lecture analyses the term postcolonial novel as it is defined by prof. Tibor Zilka from Faculty of Central European Studies Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra. Postcolonial novel is more precisely defined in the example of the novel Krajina zabudnutia (2000, The Land of Forgetting) written by Anton Balaz, who, on the basis of personal testimonies of su...

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...

The paper studies the personality of Anna Lauermannova-Mikschova, founder of the first literary salon in the Czech lands, who was also actively involved in creating Czech feminist movement. She published her work under the name Felix Tever. Her Stastny u brehu Tibery (Happy at the Banks of the Tiber River) looks back at the happiest years of her life spent in Italy (Rome) where she found a shelter from her unlucky marriage and illness. The work of Anna Lauermannova-Mikschova (aka Felix Tever) features a wide varie...

Axiological worldview reflects the most important part of the linguistic worldview, i.e. values and their antipodes – disvalues. Linguistic axiology sees fictional text as a source of information about the values of the language speakers. Comparative linguistic axiology is a promising trend of research, as it doesn’t only help to understand mentality of a language speaker but also reflects values of different communities. Studying language in an axiological aspect involves dyad method. Axiological dyad means un...

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 childrenВ’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, LatviaВ’s cultural space becomes a place of relative artistic freedom and minimization of ideological dictate. In a phenomen...

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 he...

Social responsibility can be defined as a personal investment in the well-being of others. In my opinion the social responsibility is linked with the social inclusion issue. So the social responsibility culture means the society of tolerant citizens. The paper is analyze of poems by Kholoud Charaf, who is a poet, art critic and social activist from Al-Mjemr in the south of Syria. Charaf becomes a quest writer in Krakow City of Refuge in March 2018 as part of the International Cities of Refuge Network (ICORN). Her ...

The study of metaphor dates back to the times of Aristotle when metaphor has mainly been the focal study point of literary scholars. The publication of Lakoff and Johnson’s book Metaphors We Live By (1980) challenged the traditional view on metaphor and completely changed its status. The scholars developed the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) within which they argue, “metaphor is not just a matter of language, but of thought and reason” (Lakoff, 1993: 208). Moreover, in 1996 the study of metaphor within cogni...

The present paper is dedicated to investigation of a specific pattern of memory narrative – recollecting the past by the protagonist when visiting sites of personal memories – as a framework of reconstructing personal and collective identity in Canadian writer Margaret Atwood’s novel “Cat’s Eye” (1988) and Latvian writer Anita Liepa’s memory narrative “Davana jeb Flensburgas noskanas” (A Present or Reflections of Flensburg, 2013). The methodology of the research draws on contemporary developments in...

The study is devoted to “Lilja”, Icelandic Christian drapa dated 1300 c; attempt is made to comprehend and interpret highest artistic merits of the text which persuaded Icelanders in its spiritual power and influenced Icelandic poetic tradition. The endeavor to identify the poetic moves and principles of composition which contribute to “Lilja”’s artistry and its intrinsic magnetism implies attention to the nature of interaction between local traditions (both, eddic and skaldic), and, on the other hand, Ch...

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 grandmothe...

The subject of my study is to map the literature written by Roma people in Slovakia. Slovakia is one of the European countries where Roma people represent the second largest minority. My research therefore focused on drawing attention to the literary works of authors of Roma origin and on taking stock of the literature written by Roma people in Slovakia. Textual analysis and content analysis were the chosen methods for the research. First, the study clarifies whether there exists Roma literature, or there simply a...

This paper deals with the functions of the grotesque in V.V. NabokovВ’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 purpose of the article is to find out the role, symbolic meaning, and functions of the image of the Mississippi River in “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” (1876) [4] and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” (1884) [3], the two greatest works of fiction by Mark Twain; the article also aims to explore how different aspects of American culture are revealed in the two great Mark Twain’s books and how this knowledge can contribute into studying US culture. Our research is based on text analysis and interpreta...

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 intellectua...

The representation of various geographical places and topographical peculiarities is a typical feature of the travelogue genre. However, the reception of one and the same space could be depicted in travel literature in a variety of ways. Such a diversity of images appears due to existing stereotypes opposing each authorВ’s reception and interpretation of the places visited. Besides, the same place can also acquire various representations in different centuries and due to different historical events and paradigms. ...

The fantastic is the evolution and the reincarnation of the characters and heroes in Mythology and fairy tales, which are the evolution of real legends, and myths as well. The fantastic reveals the hesitation В‘Is it real or not?В’ in receiverВ’s mind. The fantastic transgresses the border between the imagery and the reality, the true and false. The true and false, the imagery and the real are all intermingled. The receiver does not come up with the answer in the fantastic; on the contrary, it pushes the reader in...

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. Esp...

The main claim of the Cognitive Metaphor Theory (CMT), proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), is that we not only speak and write, but also think in terms of metaphors. In his turn, the Dutch scholar Charles Forceville argues, if this is correct, alongside the verbal manifestations of the conceptual metaphors, other modes must exist to communicate these metaphors. In addition, Forceville has derived the importance of context when analysing metaphors; this has led to a considerable research into pictorial or visual...

In the paper we focus on three literary works for children and youth in Slovak translations. Cecil Bodker (Silas and the Black Mare, 1977; Slovak translation in 1979 [1]) represents Danish literature in this particular selection, Ivona Brezinova (Boy and the Dog, 2011; Slovak translation in 2011 [2]) represents Czech literature and Alan Marshall (I Can Jump Puddles, 1956; Slovak translation in 1978 [4]) is the sample of Australian literature. In addition to their artistic persuasion and belonging to the literature...

The fluctuation of aesthetic and artistic values in contemporary art implies the need to shape the aesthetic sensitivity of children from an early age. The authoress focused on the analysis of the way, how Slovak non-fiction for children with the theme of visual arts contributes to this task. The reason for choosing the topic was the fact about visualization of contemporary culture as well as the fact that illustration is an integral part of childrenВ’s books and a dominant component of picture books, which are be...

In the introductory part of the study, Down syndrome is briefly described as innate genetic disorder, where intellect is usually within the level of mild and moderate intellectual disability. The second part of the study offers brief overview of a person with Down syndrome as an object of literary portrayal in the production for children and youth in Slovakia since the 19th century to the present time. In the third part there are analysed and interpreted characteristic features of such a literary text, which was c...

The problem of Dostoevsky and antiquity was raised at the beginning of the 20th century in the works of V. Ivanov and L. Pumpyanskiy, but has not yet received consistent study. The authors of the works on Dostoevsky usually deal with particular aspects of this problem. Dostoevsky knew and highly appreciated ancient literature and often addressed it in his works. The article deals with the development of the principles of the ancient tragedy in Dostoevsky's work on the example of "The Diary of a Writer" and the nov...

The study "Art of Confession in В«The Art of ConversationВ» by Ileana Vulpescu" is an application in Literature & Poetry, Romanian Literary Portraits field and women`s psychology in particular. For a writer, reality is important as a source of inspiration, but the most important aspect is the human investment the writer does in his work. Sanziana Hangan is a hypostasis of the writer who protests by writing against the communist obsessive decade. It analyses female feminine psychology during the existent communist ...

The given study covers an actual interdisciplinary issue – Russian language, post-Soviet Russian literature in particular, that includes the "otherness" of multiple ethnic cultures and creates unique images of the world. In the modern conventional sense, culture is replaced by transculture – a space of interaction and mutual repulsion, intertwinement, constellation, overlapping, flowing of cultures into one another. These processes have no and can't have any solidified, final forms that would be determined onc...

The main character of Jaroslav HasekВ’s The Good Soldier Svejk and His Fortunes during the World War has become one of the Czech legendary heroes. The article deals with the reception of the book abroad in connection to the English translation of the novel. At the beginning, it presents various opinions in the literary criticsВ’ dispute whether Svejk is a suitable representative of the Czech nation abroad. This section culminates by looking for answers to the question who Josef Svejk really is and how to character...

V.MakaninВ’s artistic world is analysed as an ontological model of correlation between social and personal universes, which is disharmonious in its essence. One of the reasons that makes this situation possible is a gap formed between the masculine and the feminine sides of the contemporary world. The suggested study provides an analysis of V.MakaninВ’s evaluation given to the model of contemporary civilization created by men and for men: this evaluation is related to crisis and hopelessness. In turn, a woman is m...