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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 ...

Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997) is along with Jaroslav Hašek 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 ph...

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, contemporaries’ memoirs and evaluations, reviews of the literary work, the biographical information provide...

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...

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 ...

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 literature....

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 foreig...

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...

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 didn’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 Ru...