The paper explores Kazuo Ishiguro’s short story Nocturne, which is placed in the short story collection, ‘Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall’ (2009) and, due to its oneiric and music narrative substance, may perplex a reader. We propose a draft of various hermeneutic strategies for reading this story. These strategies address the tale from different premises, leading to coherent yet seemingly ‘conflicting interpretations’ (Ricoeur). By application of the mimetic approach, we dwell on Marxist criticism, as well as celebrity studies, which help to reconstruct social and cultural contexts in their relation to the imagery of the story. In the framework of an expressive approach, phenomenological, psychoanalytical, and archetypal readings are shown as supported by symbolic imagery, sets of characters and surrealistic space, and place configurations. The critical tools of an objective approach - formalism, narratology, and intermediality studies - reveal leitmotif clusters, structural patterns, and musical nocturne remediation in the textual poetics. Finally, the reader’s perception of any intratextual relations of this story with Ishiguro’s oeuvre as a whole lead to one of the focal points of his writing - appraisal through mastery, through continuous rehearsing and a nocturnal strumming effect of the same intimate motives of longing for lost love and public recognition. The short story abandons the typical Ishiguro imagery easily found in his earlier novels, and can be viewed as a confessional ‘self-recollection’ remediation and narrative project.

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“A disappointed lorgnette”, American shoes, posters: strategies of interpreting the futurists’ speech acts

Shvets Anna V.

Статья научная

The paper focuses on the poetic activities of the Cubo-Futurist circle (comprising D. Burliuk, A. Kruchennykh, partly I. Zdanevich, although the latter had never been explicitly associated with the Cubo-Futurists). More precisely, the paper zeroes in on author-reader communication and the communicative models informing social and aesthetic experience. The author analyzes a particular communicative mode (“a literary scandal”), its specifics and pragmatic functions. A literary scandal is seen as a primarily participatory phenomenon contingent upon the existence of a mass public (according to M. Warner’s conception of public). The ultimate pragmatic goal of a literary scandal as a mode of communication is not only shocking the audience out of their complacency but also enticing the audience to take part in a performance. Two audience responses become prominent in that regard, and two profiles of reception could be singled out, respectively: a critic, “a newspaper reporter”, on the one hand, and an “ally”, on the other. The first type prefers to frame a speech act in a fixed, stable context whereas the second type gravitates towards putting a speech act into several context and observing the meaning change. The first recipient aims to highlight the violation of the norms in a speech act (even though the violation in question has to be exaggerated), draw the public attention to the violation and thus spread the news of a scandalous event. In doing so, the critic-recipient would advertise the performance to a broader public and broadcast it to the masses. The second recipient is more open to changes of meaning that happen when a speech act migrates from one context to another and perceives such shifts of meaning as a play they could share with the author. The conceptual model outlined above is projected onto the phenomenon of Futurist book demonstrating that there are two readers (a page-skimmer and a co-author) and two conflicting orientations: broadcasting the new aesthetics and enabling the reader to become one of the selected few, the one who completes the meaning of the text.

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“Lyric poetry... under suspicion”: vicissitudes of “self-expression” in the 1950's

Lapushin Radislav

Статья научная

The essay traces the origins of the “poetic renaissance” of the Thaw, namely, the 1953-1954 discussion on lyric poetry and poetry’s reappearance in literary periodicals during that time. Initiated by Ol’ga Berggol’ts’s article “Conversation on Lyric Poetry,” the discussion revolved around such concepts as “self-expression,” lyrical persona, and poetry’s right to express the whole spectrum of human emotions. The essay sheds light on the role that the discussion played during this period and its contributions to the development of “Soviet interiority” at large.

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“Poem-paintings” by V. Kamensky: performative gesture and its material embodiment

Shvets A.V.

Статья научная

The paper focuses on the poem-paintings (“stikhokartiny”) by V. Kamensky, verbo-visual texts published in his experimental book “Tango with Cows” (1915). Given that the poems were seen as located halfway between literature and painting, the author tries to account for the hybrid character of the poems by placing them in a wider communicative and aesthetic context. One of the contexts to be taken into consideration is the visual arts background, namely, artistic exhibitions that became a site of meeting for most Futurist poets. Besides providing futurists with publishing and financial resources, visual arts unions and groups exerted conceptual influence on the artists suggesting a new aesthetic orientation. That orientation could be described as stressing the pragmatic dimension of the text over its semantics, choosing an act produced by the words over their literary meaning. Elaborating on that artistic choice, the paper addresses scandal as a PR strategy and asserts that this strategy was promoted by the means of gesture as a device. A few examples and testimonies from Futurist practices are examined as the body of evidence. Then the paper transitions to arguing that gesture as a device for generating an overall pragmatic effect of shock, scandal etc. could be recreated virtually, by material properties of the book. A few examples of Futurist productions are called for to prove the point. Then the paper provides a thorough analysis of one of ferroconcrete poems.

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“That, when translated incorrectly, was saying something like this”: Victorian context and intertext in the works of Juan Benet

Bazhenova-sorokina A.D.

Статья научная

The article analyzes Juan Benet’s essays on Victorian literature, short stories “De lejos”, “Una linea incompleta” and “Viator” and his non-fiction book “Londres victoriano” in which the Spanish writer addresses 19th century Anglo-Saxon writers from Charles Dickens to Joseph Conrad. Benet is mostly known as an author who brought the discourse of European and American modernism to Spanish literature and as the creator of the Spanish new novel, who consciously renounced Spanish realism of both 19th and 20th century. However, his standing as a postmodernist writer is often debated, as the neomythologism and complex narrative structure of his novels are more often associated with American and European modernist landmarks. Proustian, Joycean and Faulknerian heritage of Benet is widely studied, while his connection to Victorian literature stays largely overlooked. Meanwhile, in his essays as well as in his short fiction, the author addresses his favourite 19th century writers, and in short stories he establishes intertextual dialogue with many of them, producing some of his greater postmodernist works. It demonstrates that pastiche, parody and allusions to Victorian discourse in his work are examples of Benet’s postmodernist prose, only comparable epistemologically to his novel “En el estado”. Therein, intertextuality serves a goal that is undoubtedly postmodernist - that of showing the textual, fictional nature of narrated events, establishing an ironic dialogue with the reader and revealing the nature of the narrator as an entity that creates an illusion of reality rather than describing it, and deconstructing the author’s own narrative practices.

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