Grossman "Life and Fate"
How strikingly disappeared all the Soviet spells and formulas, enumerated above! [cm. Grossman's article “For the Right Cause” - analysis by A. Solzhenitsyn] - and no one will say that…

Continue reading →

Boyardo, Matteo Maria, and his “Roland in Love”
Matteo Maria Boyardo (1434 or 1441-1494) was descended from a noble surname, who zealously served the Este family (who owned Ferrara and Modena) and received from him in 1423 fief…

Continue reading →

"Taras Bulba" Gogol
The story of Gogol’s creation of the Taras Bulba story, the history of influences on the author of literary works by his predecessors, is very complex and has not yet…

Continue reading →

ancient culture

Leo Tolstoy “Confession”

The first of the works of Leo Tolstoy, in which he preached the moral-religious teaching (Tolstoyanism) that appeared in his mature age, was Confession (started in 1879 and completed in 1882). At one time she was not missed by Russian censorship. Printed in Geneva and in Russia distributed in lists. Confession is above all that he wrote afterwards; in purely literary terms, this is a masterpiece that is on a par with such things as the Book of Job, Ecclesiastes, and Confession of Blazh. Augustine. It is one of the greatest and forever living expressions of the human soul in the face of the eternal mystery of life and death. Continue reading

Image and theme of the war in Tolstoy’s “Sevastopol Stories”

In the military stories (“Raid”, “Forest Cutting”, “Sevastopol in December 1854, in May and August 1855”) Tolstoy dwells on the question of how legitimate war, demanding so many bloody victims, is legitimate . This idea is particularly clear in his “Sevastopol Tales” (see their analysis), which describe the famous defense of Sevastopol during the Crimean War.

Battles and wars were depicted many times in Russian and foreign literature … – Almost always, these pictures are different, “poetizatsii”, elevated tone, a kind of “militarism, glorifying the exploits of warriors and leaders … Continue reading

The value of “Hunter’s notes” in Russian literature

The artistic significance of Turgenev’s Hunter’s Notes is very great: there are many beautiful descriptions of the “endless” nature of the middle part of Russia – the nature whose beauty was first appreciated by Pushkin — a long series of types that are characteristic, purely folk, well-worn Russian life, and , at the same time, often marked by the features of “universal”. In the descriptions of nature, Turgenev was able to identify the most diverse moods, because the content of the story, usually, he responds and mood, the nature of the landscape, against which one or the other, a scene from human life. Continue reading

Bunin "Loopy ears"
Bunin's story "Petty ears" is very inferior to "The Lord from San Francisco", but written in the same powerful manner, with the same force of a full-sound and wonderfully heavy…

...

Puglia "Golden Ass"
The Roman writer Apuleius won his main glory with the novel Metamorphoses (Transformations). Subsequently, this novel, in connection with the high appreciation of its readers, received another name, the Golden…

...