The review discusses reminiscences of Irina Shostakovich, recorded by Elena Yakovich. The reviewer considers the book’s structure and analyzes the parallel biographic descriptions (belonging to two distinct periods, before meeting Shostakovich and the years spent together). The love story of the composer and his last wife is shown as a series of “uncanny coincidences” — common experiences, both the ghastly everyday with its repressions, arrests, the Siege of Leningrad, etc. and metaphysical, that inevitably defined a spiritual affinity of two people caught between the millstones of the 20th century. A philologist by training, I. Shostakovich lists her husband’s musical and literary acquaintances and preferences with ease. She names A. Akhmatova, A. Solzhenitsyn, Y. Yevtushenko, M. Yudina, B. Britten, M. Rostropovich, and many others. In her testimony, life and death walk hand in hand, partly because the couple, reluctant witnesses of a tragic period in the country’s history, lived a “truly torturous life.”
Journalist and literary critic D. Efremova examines the writing of the ‘new thirty-year-olds,’ or millennial prose, as a thematic and stylistic phenomenon. Analyzing the generation’s landmark novels of the 2020s (V. Bogdanova’s The Season of Poisoned Fruit [Sezon otravlennykh plodov] and Seven Methods of Soul-Pickling [Sem sposobov zasolki dush], M. Lebedeva’s It’s Dark There [Tam temno], and S. Pavlova’s Hunger [Golod], among others), Efremova identifies their common characteristics and defining features. The article also takes a close look at the critical reception of millennial prose and discusses the genre’s marketing component: the latter aspect is justified in the eyes of the critics who argue that millennials “are ushering in a new world of open and approachable literature, where each text gets its special reader” (K. Gritsenko). In her study of the ‘new thirty-year-olds,’ Efremova discovers that the new millennial novel, preoccupied with gender, generations, and a social and psychological agenda, is searching for the voice of the generation in a dialogue between the author and the reader.
A. Kulagin’s book is resolutely postmodernist. The author applies methods of historic-literary description to the modern writer: literary criticism may be oblivious of the distance between subject and object, but the history of literature recognizes it without fail. Kulagin both shortens the distance and engages in a direct conversation with the author (A. Kushner), which defines the entire book. In terms of genre attribution, Kulagin’s book resembles a zine — a collection of articles on historicliterary and didactic-methodological topics, cultural studies and memoirs. This, too, goes against the historic-literary canon. The fact that it is a second book with the identical title suggests that this study should be viewed as an aperiodic chronicle by the same author. Kulagin’s work demonstrates the validity of the postmodernist presumption of text as a collage of other people’s words, while attempts to identify the source of a quote often reveal the method to be hopeless and redundant.
The article is devoted to Genrikh V. Baranovich (1860–1912), a turnof-the-century writer who remained in obscurity for over a hundred years despite the popularity of his collection Near Gold on the Amur [Okolo zolota na Amure] with Siberian readers. By reintroducing his name into contemporary scholarly discourse, A. Urmanov is adding a missing fragment that allows for better appreciation of the wealth and diversity of early 20th-century Russian literature. The study explores the system of motifs that reveals direct descendance of Baranovich’s book from the Russian classics in terms of its themes and poetics. Comparative analysis facilitates the conclusion that a combination of local content and national artistic codes enhances the ideological and conceptual significance of the cycle and charges it with a universal meaning. Creative use of Gogolian and Chekhovian motifs in depictions of the exotic Amur region ensures the book’s spot in the global cultural dialogue and provokes interest among the writer’s contemporaries and modern-day readers alike.
The article discusses two stories by V. Shukshin, An Invitation for Two / The Sunday Blues [Priglashenie na dva litsa / Voskresnaya toska] (1962) and The Dogged One [Uporny] (1973), in their contemporary context of the polemic between the ‘physicists’ and the ‘lyricists’ [lyric poets]. The earlier story exists in two versions: while the conflict resolves itself in the first draft, the 1973 story clearly shows that the ‘physicists’ and the ‘lyricists’ can never reconcile. Monya Kvasov, a naïve and excentric inventor of a perpetual motion machine, triumphs over the pragmatic but narrow-minded ‘physicists.’ The conflict appears to have intensified in Shukshin’s later works: philologist Stepanov, a character from the film script of Happy Go Lucky [Pechki-lavochki], bemoans the proliferation of the “almighty fizmat [a department of, or a qualification in, physics and mathematics].” Shukshin felt he lived in a “mechanized era,” when “remembering your soul” becomes especially important.
