No 2 (2024)

The article deals with an understudied period in the history of Pushkin scholarship. The publication of the first two volumes of the six-volume collection of Pushkin’s works in 1930 marked the beginning of a violent controversy concerning the composition of Pushkin’s editions. Championing the chronological principle, M. A. Tsyavlovsky strived for completeness of the corpus of Pushkin’s texts, while B. V. Tomashevsky was a proponent of a calculated architectonics of Pushkin’s editions, which implied an approximation to Pushkin’s own idea of his collected works. This «composition dispute» reemerged at the 1933 Pushkinists Conference. The article is based on archival sources. The author focuses primarily on the position of B. V. Tomashevsky who had failed to gain any support from the conference participants.

The name of Vyrin, the main character of Pushkin’s The Station Master, has varied even in his lifetime publications. The reason is that, due to an oversight of a copyist or a typesetter, The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin, published in 1831 and сopyedited by P. A. Pletnev, gave his name as Simeon, while his daughter’s name was Avdotya Samsonovna. In the errata printed at the end of the book, eight amendments to the texts of the stories were indicated. One of them specified that «Simeon» should be read as «Samson». The next edition of Belkin’s Tales, published in 1834, was prepared by Pushkin himself. He corrected all the errors indicated in the 1831 edition, except one: Vyrin’s name remained the same, Simeon. The subsequent editors of Pushkin’s collected works took various stands concerning the will of the author.

The article analyzes another possible source of A. S. Pushkin’s novella The Queen of Spades, associated with the French historical realities of the life story of the old countess. The authors believe that the poet might have used The Rollicking Chronicles (Chroniques de l’Œil de Bœuf) by G. Touchard-Lafosse, while the first edition of the book was published shortly before Pushkin’s text. Certain significant realities of The Queen of Spades are easily traceable in this source: Montgolfier’s hot air balloon, Mesmer’s magnetism, playing pharaoh at court, the description of Count Saint-Germain and the principal components of his myth. Comparing the respective parts of Pushkin’s text with the Chronicles, we came up with a slightly different outlook on the well-known work of Russian classical literature.

The article summarizes the research work on the Book of the Vitas of Saints (Chetia-Minea) by Dimitry of Rostov, the principal work in the legacy of the Metropolitan of Rostov. The article focuses on the analysis of A. M. Derzhavin’s Chetii-Minei of Dimitry of Rostov as a Religious and Historical Literary Monument, written in the pre-revolutionary period, yet never published before 2006–2018. What makes the work of A. M. Derzhavin outstanding is that he had identified most of the sources, handwritten and printed, Russian and Western European (Latin and Polish) that Dimitry of Rostov used while working on this piece. The article presents the research results and outlines the avenues of further studies of the Book of the Vitas of the Saints.

Sappho’s Second Ode was introduced to the Europeans in the middle of the 16^th century through the efforts of the French Hellenist and typographer Henri Etienne, who had included it into his collection of the Classical texts. Since then, the Ode was firmly established among the primary texts of the European culture. The prevailing translation tradition, however, had the Sapphic love triangle transformed both into the traditional ars amatoria and the other forms of romantic relationships. The article offers a typology of the Russian translations of the Second Ode, and analyzes their literary contexts.

The article deals with the authorship of the Modern Avengers short essay, published in the Novoye Vremya (New Time) newspaper (1879, August 24 (September, 5), № 1252). The analysis of the approach, theme, style and content renders the evidence confirming that this text was penned by N. S. Leskov who was one of the newspaper’s contributors at the time.

В статье предпринимается попытка ответить на вопрос о том, почему В. Г. Короленко не опубликовал статью «Новые явления в области столичной прессы». Черновая рукопись статьи с пометами автора рассматривается как текст, в котором использованы фрагменты уже напечатанной заметки «Метаморфоза „Гражданина“» (1896). Совпадение части цитат, комментариев к ним и интенции автора позволяют предполагать, что Короленко планировал на ее основе написать проблемную статью о консервативной печати.

The article examines the contributions of Arkady Georgievich Gornfeld (1867–1941), a literary critic and translator, to the Vsemirnaya Literatura publishing house in 1918–1922. Formerly unexplored archival documents are introduced into the academic circulation: administrative and financial documents of the publishing house, unpublished correspondence. The Appendix contains excerpts from the meeting transcript of the editorial board (1921), where translations of the novels by J. W. Goethe were discussed.

The article considers the case of Lieutenant Kizhe, that was derived from the story of a bureaucratic error, narrated by V. I. Dahl. Anecdotes about Paul I found their way both into the novella by Yu. N. Tynyanov and into the other works of the Russian literature; e. g. echoes of Tynyanov’s text can be found in the Oberiut poetics. A similar case is the short story Berdy Onzhe by V. T. Shalamov, where the novella of the Formalist is mentioned in the Introduction.

The article expounds Nabokov’s collaboration with the review Russian Annals (Paris; Shanghai, 1937–1938, Nos. 1–20/21), where the writer published five of his works between December 1937 (№ 2) and February 1939 (№ 14). Based on archival data from the Hoover Institution, the study outlines their publication history and reveals the reasons why the collaboration ceased. Quotes from the correspondence between M. V. Vishniak, the review’s secretary, and the publisher M. N. Pavlovskii offer new insights into Nabokov’s personal and artistic biography at the end of the 1930s.

The article analyzes literary links between Borges and Russian authors. In the course of the study, errors are identified and gaps filled in various sections of the largest Borges studies site «Borges Center». The contexts of mentioning such authors as P. D. Uspensky, A. A. Blok, M. P. Artsybashev, I. E. Babel, M. Gorky, L. N. Andreev and B. L. Pasternak are clarified. In addition, explanations for citing these authors are provided. Despite the small number of references to the texts of Russian authors, Borges demonstrates in-depth knowledge in certain areas of Russian literature.

The article deals with the alleged intertexts in A Mismatch, a play by A. N. Ostrovsky. The playwright’s familiarity with a group of French comedies of the late 17^th — early 18^th centuries is considered as a possibility, although there doesn’t seem to be a direct confirmation; it might, however, offer an explanation for certain originality of this play versus his other works, as well as shed additional light on his approaches to the classical genre tradition.

The article analyzes the works dedicated to A Journey Beyond the Three Seas by Afanasy Nikitin, published in 2022–2023: books by V. A. Tolstov and A. P. Bogdanov, as well as the latest articles by S. V. Gorodilin, O. L. Novikova, A. L. Gryaznov, A. M. Vvedensky and other authors. It is shown that the authors of these two monographs are not sufficiently informed about the articles of recent times, in which were revised and resolved many questions of the chronology and route of Afanasy Nikitin’s journey, questions about his goals, the origin of the Museum copy, etc. Numerous errors and inaccuracies testify to the low level of the analyzed monographs. The article outlines the prospects for further research and preparation of a new (fourth) edition of A Journey Beyond the Three Seas in the «Literary Monuments» series.

[Review:] Markovich V. M. O Pushkine. Raboty raznykh let. SPb.: Rostok, 2023. 351 s.