Vol 82, No 5 (2023)

The poem “Erected on a wet stone …” was sent in the Autumn of 1909 first to Max Voloshin and them to Vyacheslav Ivanov and is part of “poems in letters” which were only published in the second half of 20^th century. The central theme of the poem is the juxtaposition of love and death. Cupid finds himself standing on a tombstone (“green moss and wet stone”) and being surprised by what he discovers tries to avenge on death through love (“illegal flame of the heart”). The poetics of the poem represents another step in the development of Mandelstam’s inherent technique of subtexts and contexts. The “mentioning keys&8j1; here are combinations of nouns with uncommon adjectives (“illegal flame&8j1;, “naive valleys&8j1;, etc.), as well as pairs of rhymes: “nagoi – nogoi” (naked – foot), “kamen – plamen” (stone – flame), “grubiy – gubi” (rough – lips). The subtexts of the poem might be read on two levels, so that the motifs of classical poetry shine through the symbolist associations, linking together the poetry of the Russian Golden and Silver Ages. The key image of Cupid for the poem (the only context in the author's poetry) has, apparently, a literary origin. 

The goal of this work is to look at the opposition of empirical terms – theoretical terms from a linguistic point of view, identifying attributes of the theoretical and empirical in terminology. It is proposed to be guided by the following principles.Theoricity is a graded (scaled) property. The term can be more or less theoretical, and even the minimum degree of its theoricity (provided, for example, by its definition, the understanding of which does not require special knowledge) means it is not entirely empirical. Empiricism of the term implies its perception and assimilation through any non-verbal (verbal) assimilation and explanation of it.These provisions cover terminology of various sciences and fields of knowledge, including humanities.

The article examines Sergei Durylin’s writings in the 1930s–1950s as a theater critic (in particular, writing about Shakespeare in the Russian theater), interpreted as a marginal hypostasis of this author’s work. The methodological basis for the study is the method of context-hermeneutic approach applied by E.A. Korshunova to the work of Durylin the writer. Theater criticism became one of the main areas of Sergei Durylin’s work after his two exiles. Durylin’s historical research on Shakespeare on the Russian stage was never published (with the exception of actor’s biographies, where Shakespeare’s roles were touched upon), but his newspaper texts were published quite actively. In radical early Soviet rhetoric, he develops the most important provisions of the contemporary interpretation of Shakespeare: the opposition of the ‘active’ Soviet and decadent, ‘passive’ pre-revolutionary interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays; democratism of the ‘best’ examples of pre-revolutionary Shakespeare and Soviet interpretations of roles; correct understanding of Shakespeare exclusively in the Soviet theater. The rhetorical mask of a theater critic of a vulgar sociological nature developed by Durylin became his personal way of putting into print important ideas and topics: covering the history of Shakespeare on the Russian and Soviet stage.

The neo-Victorian novels of our time (by A.S. Byatt, Maggie Power, Laura Fish, et.al) reverberate with echoes from English poetry of the 19^th century, and not in the least, from famous dramatic monologues (the genre, which came into existence thanks to Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson). According to the present-day scholarship, the term "dramatic monologue" denotes the versified speech of a character, who suffers from a mental disorder and tries to combine the frankness of confession with the art of argument and seduction. This monologue is usually addressed to another character – a silent interlocutor, in front of whom the speaker, in a burst of eloquence, reveals the unsightly sides of his perverted doings or his character. In Victorian England, dramatic monologues featured the same marginal characters, which figured in sensation fiction. The article dwells on the ways dramatic monologues are employed in “Possession” (1990) by A.S. Byatt and “Strange Music” (2008) by Laura Fish. The writers not only include extensive quotes from R. Browning and E. Barret-Browning, but also create their own variations of dramatic monologues in verse and prose. Of particular interest are Victorian and neo-Victorian artistic approaches to the criteria of ‘normality’, to the rhetoric of justification, to the methods of argumentation.

The article is devoted to the review of the main historical sources for A.N. Tolstoy’s novel Peter the Great. Textual comparison of the text of the novel with the corresponding documentary materials might solve one of the most important problems of commenting on the novel, which is how and to what extent a documentary source could influence the writer, how he used a specific source and how he changed it. A.V. Alpatov wrote that Tolstoy borrowed the outline of events and factual material from the works of historians I.I. Golikov, N.G. Ustryalov, S.M. Solovyov. The most challenging thing to establish is to what extent these works were reflected in the novel. For instance, the sixth chapter (the First Azov Campaign) makes evident the use of works by Golikov and Solovyov, but not those by Ustryalov (contrary to what Alpatov believed). This judgement might be supported by the comparison of the texts of the novel and historical sources, as well as marginalia on the publications of Golikov and Solovyov from Tolstoy’s personal library.