This story evokes great historic events of the USSR in the 1950s (the death of Stalin and the last respects for him, the detention and dislodgement of Beria) through the lens of various episodes of a little Muscovite’s life. Showing the everyday life of a family and its neighborhood seen by the child’s eyes, the story plunges us into the Soviet life under totalitarian regime and makes us feel the authentic atmosphere of the times.
Поскольку интерес личности к самой себе является феноменом относительно новым в истории культуры, кажется почти немыслимымнайти элементы рефлексивности в русской средневековой литературе. Тем не менее нам представляется возможным найти признаки осознанного усилия по самоанализу в целом ряде произведений: «Поучении Владимира Мономаха», «Молении Даниила Заточника», переписке Ивана Грозного с Андреем Курбским, «Житии протопопа Аввакума, им самим написанном». Мы постараемся показать, что именно в рамках взаимоотношений с властью (государственной или церковной) проблемы самоописания и самоанализа начинают вырисовываться на этом самом раннем этапе развития русской литературы.
Yuri Vella (1948-2013) was a Forest Nenets reindeer herder, poet and activist in Western Siberia. Several times, he has spoken about himself and written, at some key moments in his life, is autobiography. In this article, I intend to analyse these texts, not only the explicit autobiographies, but also his literary texts, in which autobiographic elements appear: the closest we get to his last texts, the more autobiographic they are. I interpret these texts in order to emphasize the message Yuri Vella intends to transmit through them.
This article deals with the new forms of autobiographical writing mediated by information and communication technologies (ICT). We would like to make readers discover the dark side of postmodern Russia through the eyes of a cast of colorful characters who are currently haunting the Runet – the Russian internet – following the example of simulacra taken from science-fiction novels of cyberpunk genre. These characters construct, deconstruct and reconstruct their identities in real time in the virtual world with the aim of expressing their cyber “I” in a new political and philosophical way. In order to do this we needed to investigate the profiles, comments, posts, pictures and links published by several actors of Russian-speaking cyberspace: some unknown or well-known bloggers, a punk, a Donbass militiaman,or an agent of influence in the service of the Vladimir Putin regime.
Red Cavalry is an ambiguous and unstable literary text, an oneiric and mystifying reconstruction in which reality as it was lived by the author/narrator goes through several distorting prisms. The reader has to experience the same feeling of disorientation as Isaac Babel experienced during the Polish campaign in 1920. The War experience is translated into an experience of otherness. Lioutov, the narrator of Red Cavalry and Babel’s alter ego, is the “absolute stranger”: he is a Jew among Cossacks, an Intellectual among Soldiers, and a Bolshevik among Hasids. He looks at the world with external eyes, which prevents him from recognition and from subjection to identitarianism. The outsider’s look is a way of renewing perception, which is, according to Viktor Shklovsky, one of the main principles of the “defamiliarization” as a narrative technique that achieves singularity. Here we are talking about the irreducible singularity of the subject who is thinking of himself as an outsider and, consequently, resists all kinds of social determinism and normative forms of power and knowledge.
