Vol 25, No 2 (2020)

“The Tale of a Luxurious Life and Fun” is a late composition of Old Russian literature, it includes some references to European sources (including Polish and Ancient Roman literature). Democratic literature of the 17th century offered the readers to get acquainted with other characters and plots: a person who is not distinguished by virtues becomes the main character of the story, which deals with staying in an amazing country of luxury and fun and the way to this country. With special care, the author draws a possible and desirable life of a hawk and a lazy person in a utopian world, but warns about the cost of staying in such an amazing place. Parodying the genre of walking known in Old Russia, in which the pilgrim was enriched spiritually, the writer tells about a new type of travel that devalues and depersonalizes a person, deprives him of the possibility of development. The absence of direct edifying and didactic digressions, however, does not deprive the text of depth: the hero is given the opportunity to choose, and he has the right to decide how to behave and which path to choose.

The article is devoted to two early draft autographs of the first chapter of V.P. Astafiev’s novel “Damned and Killed”, discovered in the State Archive of the Perm Krai. They are compared in detail with each other and with the definitive text, which allows to clarify for the first time some essential aspects of the creative history of the work of Victor Astafiev at its initial stage. The analysis made it possible to understand the sequence and meaning of a number of author’s decisions. The artistic imagery and stylistics of the novel tightened. This was reflected in the alteration of the title complex, as well as in a change in the visual angle, in strengthening the epic principle, and the increasing role of sound. Biographically motivated was the change in the name and surname of the protagonist Lyosha Shestakov (originally - Tolya Mazov). At the same time, the identification of differences between handwritten drafts and the final version showed that they do not affect the conceptual essence of the epic novel. The idea of war as an unnatural state of the world, as a series of events that irreparably traumatize human nature, unites all options, acquiring great expressiveness during the course of Astafiev’s work on the book.

The article discusses the plays of the contemporary author N. Kurilov, which raise a number of problems characteristic of Yukagir literature. Poor knowledge of northern literature, the lack of full-fledged research based on materials of modern authors confirm the relevance of this work. The purpose of the article is to analyze the features of N. Kurilov’s plays to determine their place in the Yukagir drama and to identify literary connections with the works of other Yukaghir authors. In his works N. Kurilov continues the traditions of G. Kurilov a children’s writer and playwright as well as G. Dyachkov whose plays highlighted the social and moral problems of the Yukagirs. N. Kurilov considers these problems from a different angle, which is significantly manifested in the spatio-temporal characteristics and in the selection of folklore material. In addition, the author introduces a number of new questions that have not previously been heard in Yukagir drama, a special place in the works is occupied by children and children's education. The playwright thinks about the causes of the disappearance of the people, the gradual loss of language, traditions and religious beliefs. One of the features of the author’s view is the idea that the destruction of an ethnic group occurs among other things through the fault of the Yukagirs themselves who have ceased to preserve their identity. However, the plays express not only bitter regret but also a bright hope for the revival of one of the most ancient Siberian cultures.

The article discusses the historical and functional aspect of the study about the novel by I.S. Turgenev’s “Fathers and Sons” in China. The focus is on a large number of works devoted to the Russian classic over the past century. At the same time, the historical path that the Chinese literary studies have gone through is viewed - a gradual overcoming of the sociological, in essence of Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), approach to the study of elegant literature, shifting the attention of articles’ authors from arbitrary interpretation of content to a plan for considering the content form. Such topics as Turgenev’s landscape, psychological depiction, and Turgenev’s hero are covered in more detail. The conclusion is drawn about the continued attention of Chinese writers to Russian classics.

In the 80s and 90s of the 20th century, women’s literature in Russia began to rapidly develop and become recognized as a special phenomenon - for the first time after the last turn of the epoch: Soviet literature was rarely considered in Russian literary criticism from a gender point of view. The creativity of modern women writers became a vivid phenomenon in the context of the Russian literary process, revealed a unique female view of many socio-psychological problems, and in its own way reflected the historical turning point experienced by Russian society. In China, traditionally sensitive to Russian culture, the growth of female literature in Russia was noted almost immediately, and Chinese scientists have so far achieved considerable results in studying the specifics of themes, plots, typology of heroes, artistic styles, and the language of Russian female literature. This article is aimed at summarizing the current state of research on the work of Russian writers in China. It presents both generalizing works and materials devoted to individual writers’ personalities (L. Petrushevskaya, T. Tolstaya, L. Ulitskaya).

The article is devoted to a comprehensive review of an Early Medieval Chinese poetic cycle, consisting of two friendly messages preceded by a preface, - the “Parting With a Friend” by Cao Zhi (192-232). The article is the first to provide an interlinear translation and a sequential analysis of the cycle. In progress of the analysis the images, tropes and figures in both poems, the motives, different types of connection between the motives, the themes of the poems, their compositional structures, genre identity, and the peculiarities of the poetics of the “Parting With a Friend” as a cycle were examined in detail. By the example of the “Parting With a Friend”, conclusions regarding the appearance of a poetic cycle in Chinese literature at the turn of Antiquity and the Middle Ages were drawn. The poetics of the “Parting With a Friend” was examined on the base of the Western theoretical material, which makes our study not purely synological, but partly comparative.

The article is devoted to the flagship of the evening Hungarian press - the newspaper Az Est . The publication is considered in the context of the situation in the press in the first third of the twentieth century. The article provides a comprehensive analysis of the innovations applied by the publishers of Az Est . Attention was drawn to the placement of serious news information along with the publication of sensations, a special layout, including, in particular, large headlines, one-column articles and a large amount of illustrative material addressed by artists, the rejection of templates familiar to other Hungarian publications of that time. It is noted that the political diary, as the newspaper described itself, lacked a political position and attachment to any political party. The circulation of the newspaper significantly exceeded the circulation of other publications and in some years reached almost half a million copies. The first major Hungarian press tycoon Andor Miklos is featured as the founder, owner and editor-inchief of the newspaper. The formation of his media empire was fully facilitated by the success of Az Est , a newspaper that was initially considered by its creator as a business project that created a competitive situation in the Hungarian newspaper business and, subsequently, in the publishing business. It also analyzes the PR and advertising campaigns that preceded the launch of the newspaper and aroused public interest. The novelty of this article is that there is no research by the Az Est newspaper in the domestic scientific literature, as well as any materials in Russian related to the Hungarian evening press.

The article is devoted to the foundation of the rhetorical model of communication in the text of an unknown author “A Word of a Some Monk about Reading Books”, included in one of the most ancient collections of manuscripts Izbornik of the year 1076, in the plan of its specification concerning communication. In the communicative direction, the subject of this rhetorical model is the communicative-rhetorical activity of man as a subject acting by a word, and the reader to whom the influence of the “Word” is directed. The main components of the rhetorical model of communication are analyzed: communicative context, author’s image, audience image, situationally oriented, rhetorically processed text. This is the first essay in the history of Russian culture about the benefits, methods and purposes of reading. A feature of the writing of the text in the “Word” is the reinvention of the Holy Scripture by the author in the presence of non-canonical motifs, the predominance of practical over theoretical.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the activities of Russian television channels on the YouTube site. This is one of the stages of a comprehensive study conducted by the Department of Television and Radio Broadcasting, Faculty of Journalism, Lomonosov Moscow State University to understand the processes of transformation of audiovisual content in digital space. At this stage, in 2019, July 27 Russian television channels were selected (including channels in Russian multiplexes), their YouTube accounts were analysed, in terms of the number of subscribers and added videos, as well as the most popular video data channels, the audience’s reaction to them, monetisation, timing, etc. As a result of the preliminary stage of the study, it was found that on most channels there is a “cheat” of views and likes by “bots”, as a result of which the videos do not go to the YouTube trends section and do not become viral.

This article presents some results obtained in the study of the advertising image characteristics in marketing communications (on the example of Russian residential real estate advertising). The study materials present print media advertising and online advertising, as well as construction companies and residential areas websites. To achieve the goal, a survey, analytical, theoretical, systemic, pragmatic methods, as well as methods of continuous sampling of linguistic means, techniques and units from marketing communications texts that create an image of a product, and of semantic interpretation and identification were used. The analysis revealed that brand names, epithets, metaphors and phraseological units are the most productive in creating the image of residential real estate in marketing communications. The concept of social and ethical marketing integrates advertising of real estate marketing products, when the product image goes beyond consumption standards and becomes media itself, creating a new communication.

The review analyzes the edition published to the anniversary of the Russian writer Yu.M. Polyakov. The collection with an interesting subtitle “Scientists (and not so) notes of one seminar” does not correspond to the canons of a collective monograph or a collection of scientific articles. It is built in the form of a dialogue between the head of the scientific seminar “The Twentieth Century as a Literary Epoch” Professor M.M. Golubkov and his students, this is the peculiarity of the book. On its pages, the work of Yu.M. Polyakov represented by the main works, such as “Novel in the Era of Change”, “Kid in Milk”, “Mushroom King”, “Plaster Trumpeter”, “Fun life, or Sex in the USSR”, stories, novels, and other works is analyzed in the aspect of literary relations, problems, and poetics. The book is also addressed to the general reader, as it touches upon the understanding of the problems of the historical “today”.