"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…

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strip tease
"Drone", Novikov magazine
Of the Russian prints of the beginning of the reign of Catherine II, the most serious was Novikov’s journal “The Drone”, which was published in the capital from May 1769…

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Gogol "Wii"
When analyzing the novel “Viy”, it immediately catches the eye that it is a work in which, like in Gogol’s other early stories, romanticism is inextricably mixed with realism: genre…

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wanders alone in the desert

Bogdanovich “Darling”

The content of “Darling” is taken from La Fontaine’s prose work “The Love of Psyche and Cupid” (“Les amours de Psyché et de Cupidon”). The content of this work, in turn, was borrowed by the author from Apuleius’s novel The Golden Ass.

In the work of Apuleius, the main idea is that the soul, immersed in sensuality, matter afterwards, thanks to the initiation into the sacraments, is purified and transformed. The soul of a woman (Psyche), having lost its original purity, should as a slave of Love (Venus) undergo a series of severe tests in order to ascend to the divine bridegroom – Eros (Cupid, Cupid). Continue reading

Afanasy Nikitin "Going beyond three seas"
“Going beyond the three seas of Afanasy Nikitin” (see its full text) - a description by a 15th century Russian man of his journey to far India.Afanasy Nikitin was a…

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Bulgakov "Crimson Island"
But - yet, how much more I read in the house of E.S. [Elena Sergeevna Bulgakova]. At first I reached for the “Crimson Island” (1927) - a brilliant satire, to…

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