Volume 62, Issue 2

Economic and national questions often go hand in hand in Leskov’s work, and their combination makes one of the author’s strategies particularly apparent: In the economic actions of his characters, he takes the rivalry of the nations to the point of absurdity. But work and economics, commerce and craftsmanship also permeate Leskov’s texts from within: Writing itself is an economic proposition. The paper presents Leskov’s narrative economies with particular reference to his stories Skaz o Tul’skom kosom Levshe i o stal’noi blokhe and Zheleznaia volia . Unlike the majority of his contemporaries, Leskov gives prominence to the Russian “third estate” – craftsmen, merchants and small businessmen – yet he also questions the morality of the market, expresses scepticism regarding the burgeoning industrialisation in Russia, and criticises political interference in economic processes.

A comparison of parallel stories in two cultures, in this case two remarkable legal cases, reveals much about both cultures' specific characteristics by highlighting the narratives' differences and similarities. This study compares one of German literature's most important novellas, Heinrich von Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas , with the "Russian Kohlhaas" Suchovo-Kobylin to investigate their proposed similarity. While doing so, it draws on Suchovo-Kobylin's diary, his contemporaries' testimonies, legal documents and archival material to reevaluate the life and work of the wrongly forgotten leading Russian dramatist of the nineteenth century, whose two-hundredth anniversary will pass on September 17, 2017. Both Suchovo-Kobylin's court case, in which he was a murder suspect, as well as corruption in Russia, which was for the first time so vehemently criticized, remain unresolved.

In the presented paper the motive of the devil in the folk narrative literature of the west Slavic regions will be analysed. The text corpus consists of orally handed down folk tales. In these sources the devil is presented as a contradictory demonic creature, who signs an agreement on the division of spheres of power. This agreement will be confirmed with magical ploughing as a cosmogonic act. In the paper will also be submitted a hypothesis about the functional similarity of the folk tales devil with the old Slavic mythological system based on old Indo-European sources. The paper attempts to prove, that the cosmogonic act of the devil in the folk tales could be connected with aspects of the Indo-European first functional duality of the Gods-Sovereigns Mitra-Varuna based on description and analysis of Georges Dumézil.

This article attempts to critically analyze ‘The Executed Renaissance’ anthology edited by Iurii Lavrinenko and its impact on the formation of the post-war historical and literary discourse of the 20 s in the Ukrainian Humanities. The aim of this paper is a critical review of the most important topics of the anthology, which has founded the paradigm of the “executed renaissance” era. The work revolves around four issues: a) biographical and historical factors and conditions underlying the anthology and the discourse of the “executed renaissance,” b) the issue of criteria for the selection of works, which was the basis of the anthology, as well as a canon and anti-canon of literature of the period, c) heuristic usefulness of the “executed renaissance” metaphor, conceptualization of literary phenomena with constituent figures proposed by Lavrinenko in the title of the anthology (“execution” and “renaissance” figures), d) the impact of the closing essay in the anthology – Literature of vitaism (1917–1933) by I. Lavrinenko on ideological and theoretical-literary image of this period.

The paper presents the Polish study Ty-wy-pan. Kartka z dziejów próżności ludzkiej (‘You (singular)–you (plural)–Lord. An overview on the history of the people’s vanity’, 1916) by Alexander Brückner from a linguistic-pragmatical as well as ideological point of view. In his pioneer study on politeness, the German-Polish slavist Brückner (1856–1939) critically reflects on the current system of Polish addresses and titles, especially in relating to the soon-to-be refoundation of the Second Polish Republic (1918). The paper analyzes how his linguistic description and his ideas for reformation of the Polish addressative system are pragmatically justified and how they are ideologically motivated. Furthermore, the paper reconstructs the status of Brückner’s concept of politeness in the context of current studies on Polish pragmatics.

This article proceeds from the observation that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin—two politicians frequently correlated and compared since Trump’s bid for the Presidency—have been remarkably successful in mobilizing support for their politics and in seemingly immunizing their rhetorics against vernacular critique. To work toward an understanding of this phenomenon, we propose to look at how political communication by and around the two politicians draws on forms and venues of popular culture. Both contexts, we will argue, have developed new strategies for the instrumentalization of popular culture, strategies that, while actualized differently in the two settings, revolve around an ‘invective turn’ in political communication—a radicalization of the familiar nationalist rhetoric of ‘us versus them’ that seems specifically fueled by pop-cultural forms. To explore this traffic between pop and politics, this article puts into conversation two case studies: On the one hand, of Trump’s campaign speeches which, we contend, symbolically organize around the logic of agôn—of the competitive game—as it has coagulated in the reality-tv genre of the gamedoc. On the other hand, we look at (state-controlled) pop music in the Russian genre of Ėstrada which, thus our argument, advertises a distinct form of patriotism through the principle of ‘glamour.’ Glamour, in Putin’s Russia, operates simultaneously as a style and as an ideology of self-glorification. The article will outline how reality tv’s logic of agôn and patriotic pop music’s aesthetics of glamour each fuel a qualitatively new orientation of political discourse toward the aesthetically charged, affect-saturated denigration of others and valorization of self.