The article presents the information potential of fiction as a source on the history of reading in Russia. The history of reading presents a difficult research task not only because of the lack of a theoretical basis, but also due to the limited source base and the difficulty of identifying it. In Russian scientific thought, the study of the history of reading is one of the disciplines of book studies, which is part of book studies worldwide. In Western humanities in the 1980s, according to I.K. Staff, book studies “occupied one of the central places among social disciplines.” Book research addresses the role of the text in historical analysis. In his programmatic article “First Steps Towards a History of Reading” (1986), R. Darnton notes that “you can learn more about the ideals and assumptions underlying reading in the past” by studying “modern ideas about reading in fiction.” Researchers rightly point out that the author is also a reader: his judgment about books and reading “passes to a literary hero, and this hero, in turn, serves as a role model for numerous readers. There is a constant and complex process of interpenetration of literature and real activity.” By using literature as a source on the history of reading, a complete reconstruction of reading practices in the past becomes possible. Examples can be found in Reading Russia: A History of Reading in Modern Russia (Milano, 2020). From the entire creative heritage of D.N. Mamin-Sibiryak, the cycle of Ural Stories was chosen. Critics in the past and literary scholars of the 21st century consider this collection exemplary. Mamin-Sibiryak called it one of the main works in his oeuvre. Although the plot-forming stories are not directly related to reading, they contain many facts about the history of reading. Thanks to a sociological approach, this collection is analyzed. The categories of readers, their habits, what they read, how they used and understood what they read, and how reading influenced their lives are all considered. There are a total of 18 stories in the cycle. In the “Ural Stories”, characteristics are given for representatives of all categories of readers in accordance with their reading skills (the illiterate, students, graduates of gymnasiums, seminaries, and universities). The author indicates what the characters read, in what circumstances and interiors, how they store books and magazines, how they treat them, and how reading affects their lives. Periodicals and legal publications are especially popular with readers. Women and young people are the most active readers. Mamin-Sibiryak was himself a talented reader and engaged extensively in self-education, which is why his works contain a wealth of information about readers and their reading practices. Ural Stories is an informative source on the history of reading in the 1840s-1890s. The author declares no conflicts of interests.
For the first time, this article explores a group of works by Vsevolod Ivanov that the writer intended to dedicate to the construction of the Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station. These include the unfinished novel Siberian Conquest (also titled Inside the Shamanic Tambourine), the screenplay Siberians, and several essays. The writer’s work on these texts is set in the context of the historical and literary developments of the second half of the 1950s. At that time, the great construction projects of Siberia, outlined by the directives of the Sixth Five-Year Plan, were seen as a link in the competition between the economic and political systems of the world. The depiction of these projects became a major task for Soviet literature. Ivanov, who came to the construction of the hydroelectric power station, was over sixty years old. It is natural that his historical and life experience, as well as the traditions of novokrestyanskaya (New Peasant) literature, which had a significant influence on his work, left a mark on his understanding of what was happening and were reflected in his writings. According to the author’s plan, the novel and screenplay were intended to link the future - the construction of a hydroelectric power station (in the screenplay replaced by the building of Gremyashchy, the first large health resort in the region) - with the past: the traditions, way of life, and beliefs of Ivanov’s homeland, Siberia. This was shown through the story of two feuding families, the Lontsovs and the Belishevs, and their history. Based on the drafts of the novel and the screenplay, the article analyzes the vivid and strong characters created by the writer, as well as the moral choices the characters face and the plot nodes and twists. It is noted that Ivanov focuses primarily on the ecological and spiritual consequences of the great construction project, anticipating the concerns of the authors of rural prose, first and foremost V.G. Rasputin. This issue is most directly and consistently reflected in the essays “Waves of the Evergreen World”, “In the Taiga”, and “On the Angara, at the Padun Rapids” (co-authored). It is also partly reflected in the essay “Hops, or Toward the Autumn Birds”, where the author raises the issue of people’s homes on the lands of their grandfathers and greatgrandfathers, and the kilometers of majestic taiga that give both rest and creative power to people. The author argues that these homes and the taiga will either end up in a flood zone or be destroyed as a result of large-scale economic restructuring in the region. The essays on hops demonstrate how, in the early 1960s, Ivanov raised important ecological and moral issues by refusing to use the economic realities of great construction projects in his writings. Instead, he used the poetic techniques of his famous works from the 1920s to set himself the task of showing, through artistic transformation and poeticization, the beauty of a world under threat of destruction. Arguing against those builders of the country who, in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1950s, modernized the traditional way of life and historical path of Russia in every possible way, Ivanov in his work asserts the need to preserve the historical roots of the individual and his connection with his native land. The author declares no conflicts of interests.
The article presents an overview of the development of theoretical models for the automatic generation of literary texts and their practical applications. It demonstrates how advances in theoretical linguistics and literary studies contribute to the development of models for the automatic synthesis of literary works, and how the progress of artificial intelligence technologies is gradually bringing researchers closer to creating texts that exhibit features of literariness. The article discusses the first approaches to automatic text generation, identifying the factors behind their success and their limitations. Special attention is given to the influence of structuralist narratological theories on the formation of concepts for automated literary text generation. The article provides an overview of key projects in the field of generating fairy tales, stories, and other narrative forms. The advantages and limitations of structuralist models and their corresponding algorithmic implementations are analyzed. It is shown that overcoming the constraints of early approaches became possible thanks to advances in computational technologies, while the new stage of development is associated with the emergence and widespread adoption of neural network models. A separate focus is placed on the issue of creativity. The article examines studies aimed at addressing the challenges of textuality and literariness in automatic generation, as well as works demonstrating the potential of artificial intelligence in creating texts that display features of computational creativity. Brief descriptions are provided of the most discussed systems, such as MEXICA and developments in the field of narrative planning. Particular attention is given to the problem of evaluating the quality of generated literary texts. The article identifies two main approaches: the use of formal metrics and expert evaluation. Formal metrics enable quantitative analysis of texts based on objective parameters (syntactic complexity, lexical diversity, readability) but are applicable primarily to technical or functional texts. For literary works, they prove insufficient, as they ignore aesthetic and emotional dimensions. Expert evaluation, in contrast, involves specialists - literary critics, writers, or educators - allowing for the inclusion of subjective aspects of text perception. However, this method is characterized by a dual nature: on the one hand, its strength lies in the ability to account for the artistic value of a work; on the other hand, it faces challenges related to defining the status of an expert and the inevitable subjectivity of interpretation. In conclusion, the article provides an overall assessment of the current state of this interdisciplinary field at the intersection of the humanities and artificial intelligence research. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.
The series of articles examines a number of works of French poetry from the second half of the 15th to the early 16th centuries in connection with the concepts of “posthumous narrative” (i.e. narration by the dead) and “autothanatography” (i.e. the story of one’s own death). In the first article, these two concepts are compared, and the semantic scope of each is revealed. It is shown that in France during this period, the speech of a subject presented as a dead person became a kind of poetic tradition. This concerns above all such genres as the epitaph and the epistle, while epitaphs were often incorporated into large and complex works that became points of “meeting” for a number of genres, primarily vision, allegorical poem, “pilgrimage”, “catalogue”, and some others. Both the famous “L’Epitaphe Villon” and the little-studied works of the grands rhetoriqueurs (as a rule, very extensive and including first-person epitaphs as an integral part) are considered. It is established that if the epitaphs created by the grands rhetoriqueurs closely follow the ancient first-person epitaph with its genre conventions, then in “L’Epitaphe Villon” (“Ballad of the Hanged”, before 1463) these conventions are either absent or modified. The works of the grands rhetoriqueurs are designated as less daring in the autothanatographic sense: in them, the dead narrator is usually far removed from the autobiographical authorial “I” and often belongs to the gallery of “great men” of the past, which increases the degree of conventionality. Such texts as La Complainte de I’amant trespasse de deuil (c. 1447) by Pierre de Hauteville, the poem L ’Oultre d’Amour (before 1450) by Georges Chastellain, the prosimetric book by Rene d’Anjou Le Livre du caur d’amour epris (1457), the dramas by Georges Chastellain La Complainte d’Hector (before 1454) and La Mort du roy Charles VII (1461), Epitaphe de Charles VII (1461) by Simon Greban are considered. It is established that ego-epitaphs in 15th-century French literature were perceived by literary actors themselves as a convention and did not require audiences to attempt an “ontological” reading from the perspective of the dead. In the examined autothanatographic poetry of the grands rhetoriqueurs, the narrative of the dead turns out to be a genre cliche, devoid of internal dramatic content; it departs very far from the ancient ontological, “resurrectionary” “poetry of the dead” about which Olga Freidenberg wrote. In the examined texts themselves, clear indications are revealed that “mortality” should be understood as a kind of “role” or “mask”. The author declares no conflicts of interests.
The study focuses on the role of advertising criticism in the Armenian press of Tiflis at the end of the 19th century as a tool of imagology - the science that examines national and cultural images in textual discourse. The chronological scope covers the last two decades of the 19th century, a period marked by the development of a competitive Armenian press market and growing interest in advertising as a sociocultural phenomenon. The analysis is based on materials from the liberal newspaper Mshak (“The Toiler”), the conservative publications Ardzagank (“Echo”) and Nor-Dar (“New Age”), which include informational and analytical texts as well as translated materials. The aim of the study is to explore how advertising criticism and translated advertising texts shaped perceptions of various countries and societies within the Armenian media space. The relevance of the work stems from the increasing interest in the mechanisms of constructing national and cultural images through media, while its novelty lies in examining advertising criticism as a tool of imagological discourse - an aspect previously unexplored in this context. The findings reveal that the earliest mentions of advertising in the Tiflis Armenian press appeared in the 1860s, with competition for advertisers intensifying by the 1880s. Analyzing 54 texts, the authors determined that informational and analytical materials about advertising practices in different countries, borrowed from Western and Russian newspapers, not only reflected but also shaped perceptions of sociocultural differences across nations, while heightening interest in Western standards. The United States is portrayed as the birthplace of pragmatic and eccentric advertising; Europe as a region of multifaceted traditions, sophistication, commerce, and deception; and Japan and China as countries with distinctive worldviews. Despite the contrasts between traditions and global challenges, Armenian newspapers increasingly emphasized publicity as a key factor in financial success, while upholding the ideal of incorruptible and independent journalism. This ideal influenced the perspective through which the images of “Others” were structured, distinguishing their advertising strategies as either acceptable or unacceptable. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.
