Vol 83, No 2 (2024)

The issue of the genre nature of “Selected passages from correspondence with friends” is one of the oldest, most significant and yet actual problems of studying Gogol’s latest book. The first readers and critics faced this problem in 1847. Since then, interest in the genre of the book has been followed by special attention to its creative history. At the same time, it is well known that the book was created during Gogol’s work on the second volume of “Dead Souls” and that Gogol involved a wide range of close and distant readers in this process. This was discussed by Yu.V. Mann in his book “In search of a living soul: ‘Dead Souls’. Writer – criticism – reader” (published in 1984), where the long-lasting writer-reader dialogue is presented with factual and documentary details. In this context, Yu.V. Mann made observations, that are important for understanding the genre origins of the concept of “Selected passages ...”. Over the 40 years since that, the scholarly stockpile of studying Gogol’s work has been significantly expanded, and now we can appreciate and develop the scholarly resource of Mann’s observations about the dialogical origins of its idea.

The article for the first time publishes 6 letters by D.S. Merezhkovsky and one letter by Z.N. Gippius to the journalist E. Barfucci (1889–1966), written in 1932–1933, as well as part of the correspondence between Merezhkovsky and the publisher E. Bemporad (1868–1944) in 1933–1934. (16 letters in total).

This paper examines the primary results of the analysis of the Kartvelian data collected and processed by the author for the typological database BivalTyp. What most strikingly met the eye were the instances of entire homogeneity and entire heterogeneity of respective case-marking alignment of the core arguments in bivalent constructions, as well as those contexts that feature the potential to reanalyze non-target predicates, upon the lexical non-availability of the target ones, to express the meanings of the latter. The paper concludes with a number of explanations to the effects discussed.

Grammaticalization of optative forms and constructions remains understudied from a typological perspective. The goal of this study is to describe and investigate the grammaticalization paths of optative constructions in four Mari lects, namely in Morki-Sernur Mari, Volga Mari (< Meadow Mari) and in the Hill Mari lects of Mikryakovo and Kuznetsovo.

The following constructions are considered: 1) construction with the 3^rd person imperative (jussive) form, 2) construction with the -aš-infinitive, 3) construction with the non-past 1SG form (NPST.1SG), 4) construction with the debitive form in -šaš. The compatibility of these constructions with different subjects (namely, 1SG and 3SG) is discussed. As it turns out, the optative construction with jussive retains the restrictions of the original form: it is only possible with 3rd person subjects. The construction with the infinitive in three lects is only compatible with 1SG subjects, while in the Volga dialects it can be used with 3SG subjects as well. Paradoxically, the construction with NPST.1SG form is used with 3SG subjects. Finally, the optative use of the form in -šaš in Meadow Mari lects is restricted to 1SG subjects, whereas in Hill Mari it can be used with both 1SG and 3SG subjects.

Possible grammaticalization mechanisms for these constructions are discussed. The construction with jussive develops from the imperative form, which is “softened” by the retrospective shift particle. The optative construction with infinitive emerges from independent uses of the -aš infinitive. The most important for the diachronic typology of optative is the construction with the NPST.1SG form. I propose that it had grammaticalized from counterfactual uses of the NPST.1SG form. Finally, the fourth optative construction developed based on the debitive form in -šaš.

The article examines the story of I.S. Turgenev “Bezhin Meadow” in the context of the novel “Hero of our Time” by M.Y. Lermontov, since the issues raised in “Bezhin Meadow” and in “Fatalist” have much in common: the heroes, bearers of the Western cultural tradition, are waiting for a “common man” to answer the question, whether there is such thing as predestination – the question they don’t get answered. An analysis of the progress of Turgenev’s work on the text of “Bezhin Meadow” and of its draft versions shows that Turgenev kept reworking his text by making it closer to the “Fatalist”. In the story “Bezhin Meadow” in the pair “a simple man / a bearer of Western cultural tradition”, a redistribution of roles occurs (in comparison with the “Fatalist”): the bearer of Western cultural tradition remains in doubt, but Pavlusha is a peasant boy who has determination and is a bearer of Russian consciousness. The worldview of the “common man” combines the incongruous: both the idea of determinism and absolute freedom, illustrating the ambivalence of the Russian consciousness. The collision of the doubting hero with the bearer of national consciousness does not resolve the doubts of the hero and, rather, confirms the hopelessness of his search. The emphasized (in relation to the “Fatalist”) activity of the “common man” makes it impossible to find a hero of the time among the “heirs of Pechorin” and opens a new stage in the search for a national hero. The correlation of the narrator from “A Sportsman’s sketches” with Pechorin allows us to take a fresh look at the problem of creative ties between Turgenev and Lermontov, to clarify the way Turgenev looked at Lermontov’s hero and at the problems raised in the novel “Hero of Our Time” in the early 1850s.