Abstract: Throughout history Stepan Razin was the hero in numerous oral and written stories, composed at different times and in different places. This wealth of material allows us to reconstruct the formation of his legend, both in literature and in folklore. The contemporary or near contemporary responses to the uprising led by Razin, and to his captivity and execution, show how “primary” historical sources were tacitly shaped and reshaped by tradition and popular imagination, which privileged certain types of narratives. Among the latter, “demonological” and “apocalyptic” models take a prominent place. Therefore we have two types of folk narratives: in the first, Razin the brigand is successful because, in fact, he is a sorcerer, and that defines his destiny in this and in the other world (Razin as a “walking dead”, his ghost still watching over hidden treasures etc.). In the second, Razin’s posthumous existence is intertwined with eschatologies either as future savior who will prevent the world’s destruction (the positive pattern), or as a great sinner who awaits Last Judgment, sometimes even as the destroyer of the world (the negative pattern). Both “demonological” and “apocalyptic” models of interpretation are absent in literary versions of Razin’s story, or evoked only as “popular beliefs” and superstitions. The authors of historical novels attempt to rationalize the hero’s “magical” abilities and attribute his power to his strong personality or even to his “magnetic” qualities. Still, these authors walk a thin line between historical “reality” and metaphor, particularly when they touch upon subjects such as “love-magic” when Razin falls under the spell of a woman, even if only in the metaphorical sense.

Abstract: The paper considers sex and gender issues underlying Mikhail Kuzmin’s longer poem ‘The Trout Breaks the Ice’. In the Russian literary canon, Kuzmin has not obtained the high status he deserves because his openly gay writings are not acceptable either under homophobic Soviet law or by today’s official anti-LGBT Russian mindset. Interestingly, despite the poet’s notorious reputation, the homosexual core of ‘The Trout’ has been consistently ignored in most critical analyses. Nor has the other side of Kuzmin’s homosexuality, his misogynism – also an important part of ‘The Trout’ – been discussed so far. Dissolved in rich intertextuality, symbols and rhetoric, it is responsible for the ambivalent portrayal of the heroine. She is a Psyche who patronizes the love between the two male protagonists but also a femme fatale who drives one of them, who becomes her lover, to death. Women were avenged later, in Anna Akhmatova’s ‘Poem without a Hero’, a tribute to her 1920s romance with Ol’ga Glebova-Sudeikina, which was inspired literarily by a rivalry with Kuzmin, especially his ‘Trout’. The poetess’ inherent Lesbian agenda led to a covert reworking of Kuzmin’s gay poetics, which was programmatically open about homosexual love being more rewarding and less tragic than heterosexual love. As the ‘Poem’s hidden real message has been ignored even by scholars for fear of diminishing Akhmatova’s reputation, ‘The Poem’ succeeded in eclipsing Kuzmin’s more genuine and artistically daring portrayal of bisexual triangular love that flourished in the Silver Age.

Abstract: This article constructs a typology of the poetic subject in the poetry of Gennadii Aigi, with a focus on address in lyric communication. It first distinguishes the poetic ego (the speaking entity) from the poetic subject and correlates the latter with the concept of the reader/addressee. While the poetic ego is verbally and poetically expressed in the text, the poetic subject is merely implied and must be reconstructed by the reader as the entity responsible for the poetically and verbally expressed text. This article suggests a fivefold typology of poetic subjects in Aigi’s poetry: 1) a referential subject that is dominated by the relation of itself to the world; 2) an “addressive” subject that is governed by its relation to the addressee; 3) a subject determined by its relation to the verbal and poetic tropes used and/or thematized in the poem; 4) a highly hybrid subject that is characterized by cross-referencing literary and cultural media; and 5) a subject that performs a religious syncretism by which a new kind of psalmody is achieved. This typology enables us to bring the variety of Aigi’s texts into a systematic relation with the concept of the poetic subject.

Abstract: The essay discusses the changeable ways in which the subject is indicated by means of the pronoun “we” (“мы”) in contemporary Russian poetry. Although “we” is much less frequently dispensed with as a strategy than “I”, the use of the conventional poetic “we”, which expresses so-called universal thoughts, has greatly diminished. Rather, poets tend to use the first person plural with caution and consciously to avoid it. Embodying the opposition of the public to the private, “we” remains a certain marker of ideology in poetry, especially when it deals with the subjective past. The beginning of the twenty-first century is characterized by persistent introduction of scientific discursive practices into the poetic text, which leads to an increase in use of the author’s scholarly “we”. Contemporary poetry reveals an explicit increase in a motile “we” that does not establish manifest boundaries of the self: the “we” of fear, the “we” of dream, the “we” of flight, etc., which can be united under the term “cognitive we”. This motile “we” accommodates an indefinitely multiple subject and is ultimately expressed as a feminine “we”. This “we” transcends the oppositions of subjectivity vs. non-subjectivity and wholeness vs. disintegration.

Abstract: This article juxtaposes the concepts of myth and discourse as in-principle alternative cultural strategies, which, however, in most cases in cultural practice are combined as hybrids with each other. Neo-myths differ from the so-called “primitive” myths, which do not imply their discursive background, by the fact, that they do imply or show opposition to discourse at the same time asdiscourses imply or show their opposition to (neo-)myths. Neo-myths also imply processes of de-mythologisation and re-mythologisation. How (neo-) myths and discourses work is analyzed using the examples of (1) the topical myth of the World-Egg, which is at the same time the (discursive) state of zero in a drawing of Daniil Kharms, (2) the “chronical” neo-myth of Khlebnikov’s Tables of Destiny, and (3) Rozanov’s personal neo-myth of Ancient Egypt Reborn with its negation of hieroglyphic texts, in the first half of the 20th century and (4) Kabakov’s recent neo-myth of the Concerto for Fly with its new relation between human (as part of culture) and animal (as part of nature) and (5) of the neo-myth The Love for Three Zuckerbrins in Pelevin’s recent eponymous anti-utopian novel. The article reconstructs the development of the correlation between neo-myth and discourse in recent Russian culture in the context of the use of different, in most cases verbal and pictorial, media.

Abstract: Suicide has become an important factor in the mythologization of biographies of twentieth-century writers and poets: it was often interpreted in the context of authors’ literary vocation, which meant that in the rough conditions of twentieth-century Russian history the link between the two frequently resulted in the interpretation of the author’s suicide as his ultimate literary or creative act. The multiple suicides of (mostly modernist) poets in the first half of the century, therefore, had an immense mythogenic potential. This potential resonates in the interpretations of literary suicides in modern popular culture as well as in the interpretations of suicides by other writers. In the texts of historian, literary critic and writer Grigorii Chkhartishvili/Boris Akunin, an interesting new aspect of this tradition emerges. Chkhartishvili/Akunin tries to combine the demythologization of the scientific (rational) definition of the writer’s suicide with writing strategies that can be interpreted as the result of an almost superstitious fear of suicide as an imminent danger of real writing. This intricate combination of re- and demythologization offers an interpretative tool for analyzing Chkhartishvili’s/Akunin’s model of “structuring his creative writing” as well as his creation of multiple creative personalities and the meaning of their interrelations.

Abstract: Analyzing biographical narratives shows that, in addition to commemorative functions related to individual achievements, biography is involved in the continuous production of values – contributing not only to the preservation of the existing order but to its ongoing modification. This article explores the concept of the “great man” through two main components: as a heroic person (with a history of military and other exploits, demonstrations of courage) and as a genius (a person endowed with exceptional abilities). At the turn from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, the concept of genius in particular reflected new ideas about the scale and significance of the historical person. On the one hand, genius could be understood as a soaring creative spirit (the genius-creator), an individualistic concept; and on the other, as a manifestation of a collective identity, the people (national genius). Lomonosov’s biographies demonstrate such changes in the concept of genius: a transition from French to German cultural influences, from creative individualism to the unity of the nation. Secularization and returns to religion contribute to the ongoing story: in the Soviet era, Lomonosov embodied the creative potential of the people and the nation, but as the status of Orthodoxy changes in the search for a new ideology in twenty-first-century Russia, the great Russian scientist and poet regains a religious aura, reinforced by national and even nationalistic pathos.

Abstract: This article outlines the projective approach to the Russian language in its distinction from “objective” and “normative” approaches (as formulated by A.A. Peshkovskii). The contemporary state of the Russian language is characterized by the abundance of borrowings (predominantly from English) and lack of verbal creativity on the basis of vernacular roots. Is it possible to revive the potential of the language and to enact new formative processes that expand the lexical and conceptual power of Russian? Referring to Velimir Khlebnikovʼs example, the author shows that neologisms are not deviations but most authentic manifestations of the language system. To produce new words means to systematize the process of word-formation, to make it more regular. As Grigory Vinokur has shown, Russian language is deficient in regular models of word derivation and has not yet employed its potential for systematicity on both lexical and morphological levels. Thus the innovative approach to language that was initiated by Russian futurists and formalists needs continuation today, not only in poetry or fiction, but on the scale of language as such. V. Khlebnikov called it “iazykovodstvo” (linguistry, cf. “forestry”), whereas G. Vinokur stressed the need for “linguistic engineering”. The article introduces the concept of “super-rows”, or “hyper-paradigms”, the lexical clusters that include both actual and potential words and thus demonstrate the creative potential of the language. The famous Explanatory Dictionary of the Live Great Russian Language by Vladimir Dalʼ in fact combines the features of a descriptive and projective dictionary as it includes in its entries both existing lexical units and those that illustrate the formative power of the morphological system. The impact of Dalʼs Dictionary on A. Belyi, V. Khlebnikov and other avant-garde writers can be explained by its constructive and imaginative approach to language which is rather unusual for lexicography. Projective linguistics is meant to become an application of linguistic theory to practical transformation of language aimed at the increasing implementation of its creative potentials.

Abstract: Anna Karenina is not only a novel about the family, but also a seismograph of its time. In particular, it shows the crisis that the institution of arranged marriage was going through in the second half of the19th century. The novel offers a new possible model for how a couple might behave, and anticipates the future bourgeois marriage that Tolstoi will depict in The Kreutzer Sonata. In a literary-centric society like that of Russia, there is no doubt that Tolstoiʼs novel, Anna Karenina, influenced readersʼ mentalities, but what emerges from an analysis of the literary criticism of that time is that the message of the novel was not immediately perceived. Critics were too engaged in liberal or conservative questions to understand the thoroughly subversive message of the novel concerning family matters. In any case, what the history of ideas shows us is that some representations do penetrate the lower levels of our consciousness only to emerge on the surface years later. In fact they surface in the 1890s when an international debate bursts out about The Kreutzer Sonata.

Abstract: This paper focuses on late-socialist interpretations of a prominent myth in Russian cultural history: the matrifocal myth of “the Russian woman” in the journal Rabotnitsa and the novels The Ladies’ Hairdresser (Damskii master, 1963) by Irina Grekova, A Week Like Any Other (Nedelia kak nedelia, 1969) by Natal’ia Baranskaia, and Night Time (Vremia noch’, 1992) by Liudmila Petrushevskaia. Following the development and articulation of the matrifocal myth through diachronic and synchronic perspectives, the article builds on the cultural history of myth; Malinowski and Blumenberg’s functionalist theory of myth; and Butler’s performative gender and its subversive dialectics. The author argues that the above-mentioned texts deconstruct the Other, the unknown of the matrifocal myth, and at the same time use it to structure the narrative identity of the protagonist: the mother-woman. The narrative identity – the image of the woman, the “I” of the represented world – is constructed with self-abnegation/absence/disappearance/death. In other words, the void is a constituent part of this image or the unavoidable centre of its existence. Central to the paper are the following questions: What is distinctive about the myth as a discursive practice, especially in its dialogue with fiction? What is the subject’s position therein? And how is the myth “transformed” into fiction?