“Shagi / Steps” the Journal of the SASH

Abstract:

Abstract: In his manner and creative strategy Goldoni is the playwright most congenial to Ostrovsky of all those who appear in the prolific legacy of his translations. Ostrovsky aims to bring Goldoni even closer with coherent and purposeful text cuts, eliminating from his translation all that establishes a connection between the play under translation and obsolete, from his point of view, dramatic technique, obsolete cultural and stylistic сliches. He reduces the number of asides, omits extended lamentations and, what’s more important, struggles against abstract moralizing and sententiousness, the main signs of the rhetorical style. Thus, Ostrovsky adjusts his translation to the tastes and literary habits of the contemporary reader. At the same time, he desists from another way of text domestication, i. e. russifying the language, which is obvious in his translation of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. His driving ambition to bring the text closer to the reader coexists in his translation of The Coffee Shop with the idea of keeping a fair distance that shows itself not only in his refusal to russify but also in considerable language changes (use of foreign and rare words, neologisms, deliberate awkwardness and clumsiness of figures of speech). In his translation Ostrovsky implements two strategies. In following one of them (the strategy of abridgments) he brings his text nearer to his epoch; in following the other, he distances the text from his native language. Both strategies are relevant, but their colocation within a single translation represents a rare, perhaps unique case.

Abstract: This paper discusses two translations into French of the poem “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe. They were produced by great French poets, Baudelaire and Mallarmé, whose style is close enough to Poe’s; in addition, both French poets were near contemporaries of the American poet. This is also a way to compare two approaches to poetical translation, confronting them with the author’s project. Everyone agrees that works of poetry must be translated by poets, but in these two cases Baudelaire as well as Mallarmé declared it impossible to create a poetical translation of “The Raven”. The goal they both aimed for was to convey this poem in prose because this way they sought to stay closer to the source text. However, if we interpret the American poem in the way Poe himself had interpreted it in his essay, we can see that both prose translations totally destroyed the author’s project and did not present to French readers even the slightest idea about the poem. In addition, the two translators did not render exactly the strict literal sense of Raven in spite of their intention to do so. While the French poet Yves Bonnefoy finds both translations quite satisfactory, our view is shared by the French critic Alain Labau, whose analysis is based on the book Un Art en crise: essai de poétique de la traduction poetique by Efim Etkind.

Abstract: The article treats Ezra Pound’s ideas during the 1910s concerning classical Chinese poetry. Neoclassic tendencies in Anglo-American Modernism and its quest for a new type of normativity functioned as the main context for these ideas. Ezra Pound saw a source of the new normativity in classical Chinese poetry, he suggested that modernist poetry would “find a new Greece in China”. In Pound’s “The Renaissance” this type of normativity was defined by analogy with modernist painting. He employed the “pure color” metaphor while describing the poetic language of classical Chinese poetry. As Lytton Strachey did before, Pound compared classical Chinese poetry to French Symbolist poetry, but put Chinese poetry in the position of literary authority. He pronounced Ernest Fenollosa’s lecture on the Chinese written character a new Ars Poetica. This text facilitated the development of Pound’s idea of classical Chinese poetry as a sort of utopian language that he was eager to apprehend, and as a kind of paradise lost that he would like to regain. As the critical edition of Cathay (2019) makes clear, Ezra Pound’s Chinese translations of the 1910s display his intention to reproduce the way of poetic expression in classical Chinese poetry as close to the original as possible.

Abstract: The article compares different translations of Shakespeare’s Othello: The Moor of Venice done by Boris Pasternak. The article presents different variants in editions published during Pasternak’s lifetime, analyzes the nature of these discrepancies and discusses the main tendencies that led Pasternak to his continuous corrections. The author notes the contradiction between the translator’s desire to render the vivacity and spontaneity of conversational intonations and his simultaneous wish for maximum smoothness of dramatic dialogues. The differing printed versions of Othello are compared with a final draft that has never been published or analyzed. The author arrives at the conclusion about the purposeful nature of the changes Pasternak was making and how they influenced the genre of Shakespeare’s play. The article notes that, as Pasternak was correcting his previous versions, the style of speech that he was choosing for Shakespearean characters’ discourse was changing as well: from a very emotional, colloquial style with plenty of low style vocabulary and a large number of ellipses that expressed the characters’ intense state of mind towards a more rational and neutral style. As a result of this transformation, one can see a consistent replacement of tragedy with melodrama that has some elements of sentimentality like a bourgeois drama. This brought the translation closer to modernity but at the same time distanced it from the original. Based on the conclusions drawn in the article, except for some details the original, handwritten version of Boris Pasternak’s translation is seen as preferable.

Abstract: Beside the famous Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes also wrote interludes which were published in 1615 in the anthology Eight comedies and eight interludes. The article considers the translation of these one-act plays into the Russian language by A. N. Ostrovsky, who, while translating leading European playwrights, was going through Spanish literature looking for plays that reflected not national Castilian life but rather universal works that reflected the everyday life of representatives of any people. The article analyzes the translation of interludes in prose and verse, focuses on elements of Spanish folklore (dance, music, folk songs) and their adaptation by the translator for the Russian reader and spectator. Ostrovsky, who was a founder of the Russian national theater, worked on interludes not only as a translator, but also as a director, trying not to miss those nuances that, while not essential to the text, could be crucial to the plays’ production on the Russian stage. Thus, the stage directions often contain explanations of certain concepts specific to Spanish life, society, legislation and so on. Special attention is paid to metatheatricality — the fact of speaking about the theater in the theater, when the dramatic text exists within itself. It is with the help of metatheatrical elements that Cervantes’ characters express the author’s thoughts about the world of the stage, and Ostrovsky in his translations managed to find and show us that fine line between the fictional and the real, on which theatrical action artfully balances.

Abstract: The fate of A. N. Ostrovsky’s prosimetric translation of The Taming of the Shrew, which appeared in the mid-1860s under the title “Usmireniie svoenravnoi”, was contradictory. Regularly republished up to the end of the 19th century, it deservedly attracted the attention of Shakespeare and Ostrovsky scholars during the subsequent decades. In spite of this, the translation has not been staged, and the high regard in which it is held by historians of literature did not prevented its displacement by later Russian-language versions.
In surveying the history of the study of “Usmireniie svoenravnoi”, the author of the article emphasizes the significance of studies by М. M. Morozov, who deeply analyzed the creative principles of Ostrovsky the translator; at the same time, she notes the necessity of supplementing and clarifying some of Morozov’s propositions. She also argues that the fairy-tale element is as important for the genre structure of the translation as the “realistic” one and notes that the characters are slightly transformed. The author compares the translation with Ostrovsky’s creative use of Shakespearean motifs in his comedy Money to Burn, stresses the importance of the two “taming” plots in the Russian writer’s works, and outlines the prospects for further study of the translation.

Abstract: The article discusses the purposes and the criteria of modern translations / re-translations of ancient texts. Currently the most urgent task is to fill in the gaps in our vision of other people’s culture (untranslated due to either ideological restraints, or to a lack of familiarity with the original texts) and, therefore, to create a maximally adequate translation that conveys the substance — the poetics and the specific features of the “foreign text”, taking into account time, space, and cultural stadialism. The article deals with medieval texts: primarily texts possessing one common feature or communicative task — they were written for public consumption in the 12th–13th century in either vulgar Latin or in one of the Romance languages. The insights of B. I. Yarkho and S. S. Averintsev into translation of ancient literary monuments make it possible to regard the special “simplicity” of these texts as one of the markers of their peculiarity, provided this “simplicity” is understood as an attribute of poetics rather than an evaluative epithet. The material for its study and demonstration includes fragments of translations of El cantar de mio Cid made by B. I. Yarkho and Yu. B. Korneev, as well as the translations from the Legenda Aurea by Jacob of Voragine made by I. I. Anik’ev, I. V. Kuvshinskaia and M. L. Gasparov.

Abstract: At the end of the 18th — beginning of the 19th century Russian men of letters often provided their own creations, both prose and poetry, with footnotes. Peter Ivanovich Shalikov (1768 or 1767 — 1852) was no exception; he enthusiastically commented both on his original works and on the texts that he translated. Among the latter were two books by François-René de Chateaubriand, Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem (1815–1816) and Recollections of Italy, England and America (1817), that Shalikov not only rendered into Russian but provided with numerous commentaries. Many of them were encyclopedic, metalinguistic notes that included references to the original, translations of foreign words or reflections on the passages from other authors quoted by Chateaubriand; others presented Shalikov’s literary position and purely Russian point of view on Chateaubriand. Finally, in a number of cases, Shalikov puts his comments next to the author’s, which is ironic because Chateaubriand himself liked to provide his own texts with footnotes. By following this practice Shalikov seems to equate himself with the translated author. He comments on someone else’s text as his own, because he commented on his own texts as if they were someone else’s.

Abstract: Although the Russian reception of George Eliot’s novels has already been the subject of research, one aspect of this reception, translation, has hardly been studied. On the one hand, this is not surprising, because there is very little data on translators of specific works by this writer; on the other hand, this should not be an obstacle to the analysis of translation as an aspect of the formation of the Russian image of George Eliot. The article discusses three translations of the novel Daniel Deronda. First, a translation-retelling published in the magazine Vestnik Evropy (1877) which was subjected to abridgments dictated by the magazine format: the result is not a philosophical novel of upbringing but a tearfully romantic story about good people. Second, there are two complete translations of the novel, one of which was done by E. G. Beketova. Beketova’s translation (1877) follows the original as closely as possible, preserving the author’s irony, and reflection, and the ambiguity of characters. The other translation, published in the journal Jewish Family Library (1902), demonstrates such techniques as replacement of neutral vocabulary with emotionally colored vocabulary, avoidance of authorial irony, abridgments, frequent simplifications of the characters in the novel; all this ultimately leads to a text that is stylistically smooth but quite distant from the original. Probably, in the latter case the translator perceived George Eliot’s novel primarily as female prose written by a follower of George Sand. As a result, the text of the novel partially lost its originality and became yet another example of “georges-sandism”; in contrast, Beketova’s literal translation, despite all the rough spots typical of a beginner, turns out to be closer to Eliot’s poetics, which is not reducible to any ideological or artistic paradigm.

Abstract: This paper deals with the challenges of translating proverbs in Solzhenitsyn’s literary work into English and French. It discusses various strategies in translating proverbs. In some cases, translators choose literal, word-for-word translation. For example, the Russian proverb Seem rozh’, a vyrastaet lebeda has been rendered literally both in English and French (We plant rye, and what comes up is goosegrass and on sème du seigle, il vous sort du chiendent, respectively). In other cases it turns out that the translator has found a saying that approximates the intended message of the original proverb and conveys the same or similar thought (e. g., Harry Willets used the proverb charity begins at home as the counterpart for Tetushka Fedosevna do chuzhikh miloserda, a doma ne evshi sidiat ‘Aunt Fedosevna is charitable towards others while her own family members are starving at home’; note that the rhyme is lost). Sometimes one can see a reference to a proverb rather than a statement of the proverb in the original text, and translators do not always recognize the allusions. E. g., Willets has translated the proverb radi krasnogo slovtsa ne pozhaleet rodnogo ottsa (used with reference to Rubin) as would sacrifice his own father for the sake of a funny remark. However, he did not make the allusion clear in translating Pered krasnym slovtsom u nego ne ustaivala ni odna sviatynia (with reference to Rubin again) as If he saw a chance to make a joke, nothing was sacred.

Acknowledgements: I am most grateful to Vladimir Belikov who read the draft version of this article and made a lot of insightful remarks. Although I did not accept all his suggestions, all of them are thought-provoking and stimulate further research.

Abstract: What is “yearning/longing” (toska in Russian)? Inspired by this question, which Rainer Maria Rilke posed in a letter to A. N. Benois (1901), the author examines different aspects of “longing” in Russian history and culture, drawing out the national specificity of this concept. The focus is not on “yearning/longing” as a state of mind or specific psychophysiological state variously reflected in European and Russian poetry, but rather on Russian “yearning/longing” and its entanglements with traditional characteristics of Russian life (abject poverty, wistful folk songs, endless roads, space and, finally, specific notion of the motherland). A series of examples borrowed primarily from Russian poetry of the 19th and 20th centuries helps shed light on the deep “metaphysical” meaning of “yearning/longing” (described earlier by N. Berdiaev). “Russian longing” is considered as a characteristic feature of the national “soul”, and the author argues that it is impossible to replicate this unique “substrate” in any other language.
The article concludes with an excursion into the present time — a reflection on Russian toska (‘yearning/longing’) in new historical circumstances.

Abstract: In his theoretical works, Yuri Tynianov described the creation of an artistic work as an almost violent deformation of the material by a semantic construction invented by the author. Nevertheless, study of literary texts written by Tynianov shows that in his own artistic practice he used to find in the material itself a kind of “clue” that made the material suitable for deformation. One of these “hints” is analyzed in this article. This is one of the initial fragments of his well known novella “The Wax Person” (published in 1931), where the author uses a famous episode from the history of Renaissance archeology — the discovery in 1485 of the corpse of a young Roman woman which astounded contemporaries with its amazing state of preservation. In the fragment, analyzed in the article, Tynianov introduced an important motive — the body was so perfect that “some thought” it was a wax statue made by Raphael, Verrocchio or Orsino Benintendi, which is clearly the prefiguration of the fantasmatic posthumous presence of the deceased Peter the Great in the form of his wax effigy — that is, the most important part of the plot structure of the novella. However, in the evidence of the 1485 find there is nothing of the kind — that is why this motive requires interpretation. My analysis shows that the story of 1485 was embedded in Tynianov’s novella due to an article published in 1883 by the famous Viennese art historian Henry Thode. In his article, Thode suggested that two portraits, a drawing of a female head from Vienna’s Albertina (attributed to Raphael) and a wax portrait from the Lille Museum of Fine Arts (also attributed to Raphael, and. in addition, associated in some way with the works of Andrea Verrocchio and Orsino Benintendi), were based on the body of the Roman woman found in 1485. It was in this study by Thode that the author of “The Wax Person” discovered the possibility of the semantic ambiguity which is most important for his novella and on which the story is based — a kind of confusion between the original and its wax image.

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Elena Glukhovskaya, George Levinton, Boris Maslov, Alexey Naumov, Nikita Okhotin and Ilona Svetlikova for their help. My special appreciation goes to Dmitry Kalugin.

Abstract: The article discusses the origin and modes of being of Voltaire’s slogan Écrasez l’infâme! and of its Russian equivalent “Crush the Reptile!”. The word l’infâme in its specific meaning appeared in the early 1750s in the Potsdam circle of philosophers. The motto Écrasez l’infâme! perhaps dates back to Spinoza’s statement, “Down with this pernicious superstition!” Voltaire used the motto in his correspondence of 1761–1768. For Voltaire and his correspondents the concept of l’infâme is often associated with the symbolism of a snake, hydra or dragon. Voltaire’s later abandonment of the militant anticlerical slogan may have been caused by two reasons: 1) the tangible results of the campaign against l’infâme; 2) a fear of too radical an interpretation of the slogan. In 19th century Europe Voltaire’s motto did not play a significant role as an actual political slogan. Its Russian form (lit. “Crush the Reptile!”) was created by Konstantin Balmont. In Russia and the USSR the slogan gained a completely independent existence; at different times it was used in the struggle against autocracy, Bolshevism, the “enemies of the people” of the 1930s, Hitlerism and the post-Soviet “red-brown” opposition. The verbal image of the “crushed reptile” was accompanied by a corresponding visual image on posters and caricatures.

Abstract: The reason for writing this article was the correspondence of the French diplomat and industrialist Denis Benoit, in his younger years — a friend of Felicité Robert de Lamennais, with the Duchess Claire de Duras, hostess of a fashionable salon frequented by “all Paris” of the Restoration period. The letters are from the period 1818–1820, when Denis Benoit, passionately in love with Duras’ daughter Clara, on the eve of her wedding is forced to leave Paris with his father. The high-society lady Claire de Duras dabbled in literature. The struggle between feeling and aristocratic duty ended with the fact that after marrying her daughter to a social “equal”, she writes a novel, Edouard, which is based on the family history. If, as both rumor and the literary critic Sainte-Beuve claimed, Denis Benoit became the prototype of Edouard in Duras’ novel, then Edouard in turn became the prototype of the famous Julien Sorel (previously Stendhal had already once “rewritten” in his novel Armance another Duras novel — Olivier, or the Secret).
This article analyzes the letters of Denis Benoit, which reveal the reality that was hidden behind the novel Edouard. The key moment was the month spent by Denis Benoit in 1819 in the chateau of La Chênaie. It can be assumed that walks in the park of La Chênaie, the landscapes of which will soon become vivid metaphors in Words of a Believer by Lamennais, were fateful for someone who was destined to become the prototype of two French novels. It was here, in the company of Lamennais, who was famous for healing “wounded souls” (for example, those of the poets Edouard Turkety and Maurice Guerain), that Denis Benoit’s tragic vision of the world was replaced by a kind of resignation.

Acknowledgements:The research was conducted with the support of the RNF grant programme no 18–18–00129 “Russian manor in literature and culture: domestic and foreign view”.
I would like to thank Eric Plouvier, the current owner of Trémigon (another Breton estate of Lamennais) and member of the Avocat au barreau de Paris, for providing me with letters from father and son Benoit to the Duchess of Duras, which are now in the collection “Eric Plouvier / Domaine de Trémigon”.

Abstract: The article presents a comparative analysis of a novel by F. M. Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, and Tommaso Landolfi’s short story “Maria Giuseppa”: the results demonstrate one of the main principles of Landolfi’s poetics — the creation of intertextual connections with literary predecessors and between his own works. Landolfi, an expert and translator of Russian literature into Italian, often paraphrased and played with some of its texts in his own literary works. Usually, works of writers who had a significant influence on Landolfi underwent such a recasting. Among them was Dostoevsky. Landolfi translated Notes from Underground into Italian. It can be assumed that this novel had a significant impact on the Italian author, since it contains several motives that are usual for his texts — the writer’s reflection, loneliness, mental imbalance, abnormal sexual relations. The article discusses the images of the two main characters of Landolfi`s short story: the protagonist contains many features of the “underground man”, and Maria Giuseppa combines the traits of three characters in Notes from Underground: the old servant, the servant Apollo, and the prostitute Lisa. Landolfi’s main technique in creating a paraphrase of Notes is ironic hyperbolization.

This study was funded by RFBR, project number 18-012-90034, “Dostoevsky and Italy”.

Abstract: English Renaissance poetry was among the last to join a powerful tradition of European Petrarchism with its dominant genre — the sonnet. The late advent determined the double nature of the English sonnet, justly located in the domain of ‘poetics of doubleness’ (Brooks-Davies) where Petrarchism and anti-Petrarchism were blending one into the other (Heather Dubrow). All through its century-long history English Petrarchism was engaged both in mastering the convention and in its witty estrangement, sometimes making fun of it but more often seriously undermining it (cf. the opposition of the two types of parody introduced by Yury Tynianov). The vertical axis was not rejected but turned over in a new vision opened both to the heavens and the earth related in a metaphoric analogy. In the sonnet, as nowhere else previously, this new vision was processed in the generic nature of its word, reflective and metaphoric. If Sidney was famous for his witty play with words and with convention, toppling it upside down, Shakespeare was engaged in the exploration of the inwardness of the mind, making it the keyword in his presumably later sonnets. In the literary evolution of the Renaissance genre system the function of the sonnet is in its own way similar to that of the novel, conceptualized by Bakhtin as the first literary form with the speaking man as its hero. Reflection and wit are the generic features inherent in the verbal nature of the sonnet.

Abstract: This paper focuses on the problem of combination of different generic models in Melanie Karsak’s 2018 novel Golden Braids and Dragon Blades: Steampunk Rapunzel. This retelling of the Brothers’ Grimm Rapunzel is set in the steampunk world. Steampunk, being the aestheticized, highly nostalgic quintessence of the Victorian novel, can provide the richest possibilities for constructing an alternative secondary world based fully on the steam energy. The fairy tale, being the backbone of the plot, gives the novel a sense of recognition and promises to conclude the story with an inevitable happy ending. Karsak even adds a fantasy plot to her version of the tale: Rapunzel herself is the heiress of King Arthur, and it is the heroes’ mission to unravel the mysteries of King Arthur’s Britain. Since it is the Arthurian legends that have strongly influenced the canon of modern fantasy, it may seem that Karsak’s combination of varied generic ‘ingredients’ — fairy tale plot, steampunk setting, fantasy conflict — should inevitably make a successful novel. However, most paradoxically, the mixing of such diverse material did not result in the creation of an experimental in-between-borders novel or in a genre-mixing game, but only blurred the specific nature of each genre and destroyed the plot of the novel.

Abstract: An excerpt from the treatise “Discourse on the English theatre” by Pierre-Antoine de La Place, a French playwright and translator-adapter of Shakespeare, is published in Russian for the first time. This critical text, written as a forward to translations from English drama, serves as important evidence of French interest in Shakespeare in the light of the worldwide discussion on the “drunken barbarian” and polemics with Voltaire. Engaging in an undeclared argument with Voltaire, La Place was afraid of well-founded criticism by his contemporaries. Nevertheless, he set himself the objective to show Shakespeare to his nation and to justify him in the eyes of supporters of strict rules of classicism. According to La Place, the mixture of styles in Shakespeare’s plays cannot be simply explained by his laxity and vulgar taste; the origins of his poetics lie in the character and genius of his nation. Justifying Shakespeare, La Place refers to Alexander Pope and dethrones the key rules of classicist theatre, urging contemporary critics and audience to judge plays not by the harmony of their composition but taking into consideration the feelings generated by a performance. As for Shakespeare, he is, according to La Place, beyond the rules and tastes of any century, a creative genius for whom worldly glory is but a fleeting dream.

Abstract: This publication presents the translation into Russian of fragments from a 15th century Spanish didactic work, Corbacho, o Reprobacíon del amor mundano [Condemnation of human love] (1438) by A. Martínez de Toledo, Archpriest of Talavera (1398–1468?). The author attacks ‘courtly love’ and debates with the defenders of Castilian court literature, which reached its apogee in the 15th century. The work consists of four parts where the author condemns mad (earthly) love and criticizes women’s viciousness; there is also a treatise concerning human nature and the influence on it of “stars, planets, fate, destiny, fortune”. Because woman is the main object of criticism, this work may viewed as an example of medieval literature of misogyny. Martínez de Toledo demonstrates his brilliant rhetorical training, he is a master of “ecclesiastical eloquence”, but what really makes this work unique is the combination of scholastic language and the vernacular, colloquial speech with its specific vocabulary. Skilled use of these two stylistic keys enables the author to reproduce a ‘living’ language, on that is understandable to a very wide audience. In the translated fragments below one can trace these language features. In many cases the use of “popular” language is associated with the introduction of short stories modelled on the medieval ‘exempla’. Martínez de Toledo may be considered as a precursor of the splendid Spanish prose of the end of the 15th (“Celestina” by F. de Rojas) — 16th (including Cervantes’ Don Quijote).

Abstract: First Nemean Ode is dedicated to Chromios, guardian of Deinomenes (son of Hieron I, tyrant of Syracuse in 478–467/466 BC) and de facto ruler of Aetna, a new colony founded by Hieron. In the First Nemean, Chromios entertains the poet on the island of Ortygia, the most ancient part of Syracuse. Pindar suggests that toilsome effort on part of a mortal (when the gods endorse this effort) leads to lasting glory. The poet’s task resembles that of a sculptor: both cement the glory of the winner and perpetuate the memory of his victory. Pindar parallels and enhances the athletic triumph of Chromios by introducing the myth of the newly-born Heracles, who strangles the snakes sent by Hera. Through the prophecy of Tiresias we learn that Heracles, like Chromios, will be amply rewarded for his toils: the hero will be granted immortality and the goddess of youth as his wife. In the epinician, the poet projects himself as an intermediary between Syracuse and the rest of the Greek world; the array of mythical and topographic references goes beyond the Peloponnesian river god Alpheus and nymph Arethusa (both associated with Ortygia) to Delos, Thebes and the Phlegrean Fields. The new translation presented here is an attempt to convey scrupulously the poem’s lexical components and its striking imagery, as well as to trace Pindar’s convoluted lyrical thought.

Abstract: The “Moyen de Parvenir” (The Way to Attain) is one of the most unusual and at the same time characteristic late Renaissance works in France. The book is built as a universal dialogue, which involves about 400 adherents of wisdom from different eras, but their chaotic remarks, reasoning and funny stories have nothing to do with the figure of the speaker, and sometimes even with any subject of discussion, appearing as if from nowhere. The conversation develops on the principle of coq-à-l’âne, breaking all the rules of logic, rhetoric and grammar. Béroalde reproduces the ancient model of philosophical table dialogue (talk) in a version which became widespread in France at the end of the 16th century under the influence of the norms of “civile conversation” formulated in Stefano Guazzo’s treatise of the same name (1574), and the result of which was a peculiar phenomenon of “bigarrés stories and speeches” (works by Noël du Fail, Nicolas de Cholières, Guillaume Bouchet). The book, likened to fragments of the “philosopher’s stone”, emerges literally from nowhere and therefore cannot have an author, publisher or other attributes that fix it in a certain time and space. It overcomes parodically and ridicules at the level of poetics any possibility to draw from it a single doctrine and denies itself as a bearer of higher wisdom, scholarship and practical usefulness.

Abstract: A review of: Dostoevskij, F. M. (2016). Scritti dal sottosuolo (T. A. Kasatkina, E. Mazzola, Eds.) [Brescia]: Editrice La Scuola. (Orso blu; 84). 332 p. (In Italian).

Acknowledgements: The review was written with the support of RFBR grant no. 18-012-90044 “Notes from Underground by F. M. Dostoevsky and the problem of ‘underground man’ in the culture of Europe and America of late 19th — early 21st centuries”.

Abstract: A review of: Bagno, V. E. et al. (Eds.) (2017). Iz istorii russkoi perevodnoi khudozhestvennoi literatury pervoi chetverti XIX veka: Sbornik statei i materialov [From the history of Russian translated fiction in the first quarter of the 19th century: collection of articles and materials]. St. Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriia. 456 p. (In Russian).