Volume 66, Issue 3

This study offers a comprehensive comparative analysis between F. M. Dostoevskij’s classic Prestuplenie i nakazanie (PSS 6, 1973) and the black-and-white adaptation Crime and Punishment created by Alain Korkos and David Zane Mairowitz (2008). According to author and artist, the adaptation is meant for recipients acquainted with the novel and first readers of the graphic novel alike. With 417 pages of close-printed canonic text turned into a picture-dominated graphic novel of 118 pages, the adaptation – paying attention to the sequence of crucial fictional scenes – follows the storyline from the beginning of the canonic text to the Epilogue. About 95 % of the precisely and densely formulated verbal material contained in captions can easily be traced back to Dostoevskij’s classic. In this respect, the adaptation is „true to the source material“ (Kick 2012). However, as large portions of text concerning Sonja or Sonja and Raskol’nikov are – discernibly purposefully – eliminated, the adaptation turns out to be a revised version of the canonic novel. E.g., Sonja neither reads the Lazarus-chapter to Raskol’nikov nor follows him to Siberia. In contrast to Sonja, Raskol’nikov – with his emotional-mental instability, rebellion against the state of the world, self-authorization to commit crimes – is represented in accordance with the source text. The hermeneutic gain caused through verbal-pictorial reproduction of the classic text – i. e. through meaningful handling of panels and graphic design within the panels – is significantly enlarged through verbal-pictorial material not inspired by the classic text, e. g. a poster showing Edvard Munch’s graphics The Cry . In view of the 21st century’s preference for visual and multimedial presentation, the study encourages the coexistence and ‚co-reception‘ of the literary classic and the graphic novel as well as further forms of cultural processing.

The present article deals with Easy-to-read Russian. It focuses on the level of syntax which is mainly characterized by the avoidance of complex sentence structures. The necessity to write sentences that are as short and simple as possible is intuitively comprehensible, but often difficult to implement in practice since Easy-to-read texts also have to express causal, final or many other relations. Suggestions for avoiding complex syntactic structures in Russian are submitted and put up for discussion by consulting results and important proposals of studies about German “Leichte Sprache”. This includes both clause constructions and complex sentences with their individual subgroups as well as asyndetic compound sentences. On the whole, the study is intended to make a linguistically substantiated contribution to the development of Easy-to-read Russian, for which there are only initial approaches available today.

The present investigation is a response to the discourse analytical methodology expanded by corpus linguistic techniques. Within a discursive approach the university’s identity is seen as existing in and being constructed through discourse. The research interest is in how ideology and the obligation models set by the state construct the university’s self-image and university-based research as its core mission. The study is generally consistent with current trends in social constructivism where identity is considered as the process of identity construction rather than a rigid category. It is presumed that key factors are developed within a definite socio-cultural practice, which then shape the concept of collective identity. Detecting and analyzing such factors on the basis of Russian realities and modern Russian university is becoming a new research objective. The focus of the given article is on how certain values can be foregrounded in texts representing university strategies to the public. The research employs corpus linguistic methods in discourse analysis. The organization of the paper is as follows. First, it outlines the socio-political context in which the transformation of academic values and organizational principles of Russian national universities are embedded. Second, it discusses corpus findings obtained from an original research corpus which includes mission statements posted on the websites of Russian national research and federal universities. Conclusions concerning the university mission statements reflect ongoing transformations of the universities’ role in the society. The rhetoric of the statements is declarative and foregrounding new values. The linguistic data analysis shows their socially constructive nature as they build a framework for currently relevant uniformed ideas and concepts.