Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin in the story "The Overcoat"
The Gogol story “The Overcoat” (see its full text, summary and analysis) depicts a petty, downtrodden and pathetic official Akaky Akakiyevich Bashmachkin (see his description in the text of the…

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strip tease
Homeric epic
Epic means nothing more than a word about exploits (in Greek “epic” - “word”), songs that were performed by wandering singers. To the accompaniment of the lyre, they were sung…

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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…

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is not surprising

“The Brothers Karamazov”

Dostoevsky writes not a philosophical treatise or a theological system, he writes a novel. Religious-philosophical material is introduced into the framework of the romantic genre and is developed according to its laws. A tense-dramatic plot is being built, in the center of which stands a mysterious crime; ideological masses are involved in a whirlwind of action and, colliding, cause spectacular explosions. In The Brothers Karamazov, the religious mystery is paradoxically combined with a criminal novel. For all its philosophical depth, it is one of the most fascinating and popular works of Russian literature. Continue reading

Watch books, read pictures

“The boundaries of my language represent the boundaries of my world.” This is what Wittgenstein said. And then, of course, you can not argue. Man is a creature: he likes to give names to everything. Even things that obviously do not need names. For us, a thing exists only if it has a name / title.

And most of us, if we ask what literature is, will say something like: “this is a story told through words.”

We are so used to it. So we were taught in school. Well, in general, all these old libraries, manuscripts, archives – because there are solid words, right? We grew up in an environment where text is primary. Continue reading

Books about the art market

Several years ago I bought almost all books on the art market almost in a row and gradually created my own library of this literature. I have it all in English, because, firstly, I see no reason to read translations of what can be read in the original language (I have this snobbery in relation to both Steinbeck and Financial Times), and secondly, I don’t I heard that someone from compatriots wrote some impressive folio on the topic, like in Russia they built and built (yes they never built) the art market.

So let’s get started. Continue reading

“Woe from Wit” - analysis, briefly
“Woe from Wit” is the main work of Griboyedov’s entire life and is one of the best works of Russian dramatic literature. Despite the fact that Griboyedov describes Russian society…

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Heroes "Minor" Fonvizin
The most famous comedy of Fonvizin, “The Minor,” is one of the first-class works of Russian literature. The playwright portrayed in it, firstly, the ignorant, ancient education of noble children;…

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