In Russian literature, Konstantin Leontyev is a peculiar phenomenon. It is difficult to attribute him to a specific genre. This article considers him to be an “atypical”aestheticist. The paper starts with the two development stages of aestheticism, namely “the theory of pure art” and “aestheticism of amoralism”, to show Leontyev’s thoughts in these two aspects and point out his “atypical” points.
As a unique tragedist, Ivanov has deeply studied the art of tragedy. In his exploration of Dionysian worship, he analyzed the causes of the demise of ancient Greek tragedy and put forward the essence of tragedy. In the innovative practice of dramas such as Tatanos, Niobe and Prometheus, the author explains the punishment theme of tragedy and the use of symbolic artistic techniques. Under the art and cultural background, the concept of Sobornost’s drama was proposed. Ivanov is keen on reviving the tragic art guided by the ancient Greek tradition. His tragic creation uses his favorite Greek mythology as the carrier to integrate with modern thought, expressing his desire to overcome individualism. Ivanov hopes to save the world with art and find a way out of the cultural crisis.
As an outstanding representative of Russian cultural spirit and the last thinker in the Silver Age, A.F. Losev had constructed his huge system of phylosophy and aestetics. Being in line with their musical philosophy and aesthetics, the musical spirit of narrative works created by him during exile in the 1930s contains deep thinking about ancient Greek ideas. In the typical and representative of his works——Tchaikovsky Trio, music and eros became the main philosophical concepts and poetic categories in exploring the consciousness of life, the meaning of life and the nature of existence, and fully reflects the unique genre characteristics and aesthetic value of Loshev’s musical philosophy prose.
The Russian symbolism is a literary school born under the influence of the world’s literary and artistic experience. They have enlisted many foreign writers as mentors, and the representative of British aestheticism — Oscar Wilde, is one of them.Since its inception, the Russian Symbolists have had fierce disputes about Wilde. The symbolists’ understanding of Wilde has a strong mythological meaning. Their admiration and translation have promoted Wilde’s great reputation in Russia, and Wilde’s literary creation also influenced the symbolist writers Bryusov, Sologub and Annensky to varying degrees. While accepting Wilde’s aestheticism, they formed a dialogic relationship with it, which embodies the aesthetic exploration of symbolism.
As an Acmeist poet, Mandelshtam’s poems reflects the creative idea of “feeling nostalgic about the world culture”, and the use of color words is one means of the poet’s fulfilling the idea. In Mandelshtam’s poems, color words are frequently used and of multiple functions. This paper extracts data of color words in Mandelshtam’s poems from the national corpus of Russia, analyzes the linguistic data, and reveals the main characteristics of the color words:（1） the world in Mandelshtam’s poems is blazing with color;（2） the real world is depicted mainly with color words like white, red, black,etc.;（3） black, blue, and yellow not only reflect the poet’s subjective and emotional world but are also endowed with the symbolic meaning of world culture. Such color words reflect not only the poet’s superb technique of using color words and aesthetic pursuit of poems, but also the poet’s personal subjective emotions and understanding of world culture and fulfill the Acmeist creative idea.
Osip Mandelshtam visited the Caucasus four times in his life. He saw Armenia as a bridge between Russia and “world culture” and a window to the ancient Greco-Roman culture. Several trips to the Caucasus were no longer a mere trip, but a heartfelt pilgrimage. In Armenia, Mandelshtam once again felt the stirrings of poetic talent and burst into creative inspiration. In Armenia（a group of poems） and Journey to Armenian, through a series of imageries such as stones, churches, six-winged bulls, and Mount of Ararat, the poet created the ideal poetic dwelling place – Armenia; he continued the theme of death through the frozen grapes, the dying terra cotta plain, the young grave,the deadly mask lifted from the body, and the snowy roses blooming in winter, etc., and linked the theme of death with the poet’s own fate, creating a place of “sympathy and compassion” — Armenia. The trip to Armenia had a clear influence on the poet’s style,and his longing for Armenia lasted until the end of his life.
The element of “play” performs a fundamental role in Vladimir Nabokov’s works. The “play” in Nabokov’s works is a concept in a broad sense, which takes on meanings of multiple levels, including the free play with no purpose, the competitive game with rules, the movements and acts of all things in the world, and which also contains the dimension of art. This paper analyzes the “play” elements in Nabokov’s works with Johan Huizinga’s theory of “play” and argues that Nabokov’s concept of “play” is much influenced by Nietzsche’s philosophical concept of “aesthetic play”. Nabokov’s concept of “play” has the features of order, creativity and performativity which gives “play” a power of subversion. His concept of “play” is closely related to his idea of “aesthetic autonomy”, which at the same time shows his reflections on the limit of freedom.
In Stepanova’s novel, the questioning of the authenticity of memory is the central theme running through the novel, the essence of which is a question of narratological truth-telling, and when this question is discussed in the text, the novel becomes a meta-fiction. An important reason for the author’s choice of the metafictional narrative mode is the self-referential nature of both memory and metafiction. In the process of expressing traumatic memories and historical scars, the specificity and self-reflexivity of memory expose the creative process. The literalized visual images constantly expand and express the boundaries, and the materials and words full of reflective nature make the novel In Memory of Memory a mixture of criticalness and self-awareness. This paper examines the relationship between memory theory and the structure of fictional texts in Stepanova’s novels, analyzes the cross-media narrative and cross-layered narratives characteristics of the texts, dissects the informational characteristics of the visual image medium under post-memory theory, and tries to demonstrate the relationship between questioning of the possibility of memory construction and the birth of a metafiction.
In academic circles, it is generally believed that the plot of Chekhov’s works is desalinated as a lyric narrative structure, but a certain moment appears repeatedly in the structure of his works, which leads to the sudden turn of the plot of the novel. From the perspective of the difference of the protagonist’s experience before and after the sudden turn, this moment has the characteristics of events, and the appearance characteristics of “sudden” and “somehow” embody the absurdity of existence, which lies in the existence of “I”. After the sudden turn of the moment, in the face of the freedom of existence, the characters neither fight nor choose religious beliefs, but fall into the nothingness of existence, which endows the text with the style of despair. The study of this structure can explain the generating mechanism of Chekhov’s classics and the fundamental reasons for dialogue with different times from the point of view of the relationship between the form and content of the text.
At the turn of the 20th century Russia witnessed a religious and mystical trend in philosophy. Under the influence of futuristic aesthetics and formalist literary theory, avant-gardist Daniil Kharms reveals his perception of time in his anti-traditional writing. By constructing the time of vertical dimension, Kharms breaks the horizontal linear model and draws a mosaic picture of secular life and religious scenes in the grotesque and sacred text. The extension of time in the vertical direction becomes the inner logic of non-linear narrative on the one hand, and opens up the dimension of faith to cope with the myth of modernity and progress on the other, which reflects the writer’s paradoxical time experience in the age of religious disenchantment.
Bryusov’s attention to the morbid soul and his particular feeling for the double world make him consciously conduct a dialogue with Dostoevsky. In the dialogue, Bryusov not only continues Dostoevsky’s creative theme, but also strives to present a new literary exploration and artistic expression corresponding to the times in the cultural context of the “Silver Age”. Bryusov’s poetic revolution is mainly reflected in the following three aspects: he strengthens the absolute subject status of ego in the two faces of “the double”, creates a new survival philosophy of “the underground man” by linking passion with human instinct and the concept of freedom, and reiterates the new era proposition brought by modern scientific and technological civilization using the disillusionment of Utopian “future city”.
Lokhvitskaya was the most outstanding female poet in Russia from the end of the 1880s to the beginning of the 20th century. She entered the literary world with “Sapphic-style” lyric poetry, and made innovations from the theme to the lyrical subject of Russian female poetry. Lokhvitskaya’s study and imitation of Sappho is exactly the same as that of the Silver Age’s active absorption of ancient Greek and Roman cultural ideas. The renaissance of human beings is represented in Lokhvitskaya’s poetry as the lyrical subject of women and their bodily desires. Lokhvitskaya was the first sappho of Russian silver age poetry.
The dispute of Lermontov’s works in the 1840s marked the starting stage of Lemontov Studies. Literary critics such as Belinsky and Shevyrev engaged in a fierce debate over Lermontov’s works, and the ideas of their criticism are regarded as the two major sources of traditional Lemontov Studies. On the basis of combining the main contents of Lermontov’s works dispute and analyzing the position between two sides,this paper, from the perspective of the interaction and dialogue between literary creation and literary criticism, that the dispute of Lemontov’s works guides the way for the transformation of Berlinsky’s aesthetic thought and the development of Russian literature and literary criticism. On the other, according to Shevyrev’s historical philosophy system,this paper reveals the positive significance of the Lemontov’s comments of negative conservative critics in the history of literature.
In the literature on Dostoevsky influenced by the ideas ofMikhail Bakhtin the beliefis were dominant that the Dostoevsky’s philosophical ideas don’t form an integrated system. In contrast, this article argues that Dostoevsky in his creativity was trying to express a coherent philosophy of man. Based on the analysis of literary works and journalism of the writer the hypothesis suggests that the main principle of Dostoevsky’s worldview is the idea that there exist people who have “mystical” ability to directly affect other people and the world around; Dostoevsky calls these people “supreme types”, and they determine the course of history. Their superiority is not related to the strength or power; on the contrary, they are abnormal in the general opinion and victimized. It is shown that this principle by Dostoevsky is related to his representation of the world as a dream. And the heroes-dreamers of Dostoevsky’s early works demonstrate the first stage of the proper development of the individual, and the result of this development is the turning of a dreamer into a mystic., i.e. into “supreme type”. It is proved that the hero of the story The Dream of a Ridiculous Man belongs to such a type,who visited the “other world” and learned that life goes on after death in a form similar to life on earth. The subsequent influence of these ideas of Dostoevsky’s is analyzed and it is shown that his idea of immortality may be associated with the idea of eternal return in Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s philosophy.
“Cat” is one of the typical animal images in Russian literature. In the ancient Russia the cat was magical. Beginning with the fantastic cat Bayun in the ancient Slavic fairy tales, its erudite and well informed characteristics have been continued to today and the image of “scholar cat” was formed in Russian literature. In magic realism and post-modernism the fantastic cat presents the image of a demon, who can perform magic, among which the black cat occupies a special position in the Russian fantastic cats because of its color. After World War II the Soviet Union’s concept of technological power and technological achievements stimulated the local sci-fi creation. In science fiction the cat was first alienated, becoming a sci-fi cat with supernatural biological characteristics and physical powers. Contemporary Russian sci-fi writers are more interested in giving cats the great mission of saving human and the universe, and deifying them. The evolution of fantastic cat from magic to sci-fi reflects people’s fantasies and yearnings for supernatural forces, as well as Russian writers’ humanistic thinking about human existence, human present and future.
The rhythm view of Bely permeates all aspects of his writing and life.An accurate understanding and interpretation of the rhythm view of Bely will help to clarify his creative characteristics and overcome the difficulties in understanding his works. This paper will focus on the connotation of the rhythm view of Bely and its related literary theories to explain the reasons why he analyzes poetry mathematically.In addition, his exposition of different rhythm figures and rhythm proportions in poetry will be interpreted, and the characteristics of rhythm as a dialectic method will also be revealed.
Almost all countries in the world have a literary tradition of modeling images based on animals, but the early animal images appear in a few genres, such as fables. As time goes on, the animal images are gradually enriched, and the themes are increasingly broad, reflecting a distinctive national consciousness and becoming a symbol. A series of characteristics of animal narrative in Russian literature have already appeared in The Tale of Igor’s Campaign. Russian writers either use the eyes of animals to examine human nature, observe the world, experience human emotions, or highlight some characteristics of animals to show the identity or difference between the animal world and the human world. Animals never leave the field of Russian literature.
The event of Prishvin’s childhood journey to the “Unnamed kingdom”serves as a meta-plot extending in his literary space the desire and search for an ideal state and a new social order, while the “Unnamed kingdom” also serves as a meta-space for the ideal world that prefigures the Prishvin’s utopia. In his early works, Prishvin continued to explore his spiritual space, hoping to find a blessed land that holds balance and unity. In the works of the Soviet period, the symbol of the “Unnamed kingdom”gradually evolved into the construction of an ideal social order, culminating in the reconciliation of individual and national truths guided by an ethical communist vision.The writer’s series of explorations not only continue his childhood venture into the ideal land, but also create the grand myth of the poet’s vocation.
Auditory narrative has been in the forefront of literary research in recent years. The special study of auditory narrative is not only a theoretical counterpoint to the imbalance of audiovisuality in today’s society, but also a logical necessity of the “auditory turn” in the humanities. “Re-listening” to the classics has become a new task for narrative studies since the concept of auditory narrative was proposed. Gogol’s classic work The Overcoat contains a rich soundscape, and its aural narrative is related to the portrayal of characters on the one hand, and refers to the deeper moral meaning of the text on the other. The reinterpretation of the classic work from the perspective of auditory narrative is helpful to address the chronic problem of “deafness” in previous studies and to auscultize carefully to the aural fragrance embedded in the work.
Sergey Aksakov is one of the classic writers of Russian literature in the 19th century. His natural descriptions not only break through the barriers of traditional natural aesthetics that highlight the aesthete rather than the aesthetic object, but also show the true, objective, and original ecological beauty of nature in an almost sketched manner. It also reflects the writer’s strong sense of vigilance against potential dangers in ecology and the budding idea of ecological protection. In the text, the three generations of Bagrov blended with nature, showing a positive, healthy and harmonious spiritual ecology of “natural persons”. From the perspective of ecological aesthetics, this article intends to take Aksakov’s fishing and hunting prose and family chronicle novels as the object, and use such research methods as close reading, vertical and horizontal contrast to explain the embodiment of his natural writing on the three principles of ecological aesthetics, naturalness, integrity and integration, and explore the ecological value and literary charm of his works.
