The article discusses the translations of Anna Akhmatova’s poems into Slovenian. These have been published in Slovenian periodicals, anthologies, and collections of selected poems over the past fifty years. This helps to make a judgment as to what kind of Akhmatova’s poems have been favoured in Slovenia and how they influenced the national culture.

Sherwood Anderson’s “Death in the Woods” exemplifies the new strategy in the American fiction of the 1920’s, a combination of realism, naturalism (e.g., truthful details of a specific historical moment and psychological motives) and modernism (subjective worldview, deductions and philosophizing, and a complex inverse composition).
There are two main characters in “Death in the Woods”: an old woman “destined to feed” men and animals, and a nameless narrator composing a story through a complex interaction of his memories, personal experiences, and a strong desire to understand life by mythological thinking. The characters are opposing entities: male and female, youth and old age, freedom and submission, word and silence, object and narration.
Sherwood Anderson did not use traditional myths in his short story, he created his own myth-making symbols out of simple things and occurrences like gender, age, a feeding process, a house in the forest, a bag with meat, dogs running in circles, a dependent life, or casual death of a woman.
The narrator calls his story “simple” but its simplicity is deceptive. There is a new complexity and depth in it. This strategy of complex simplicity and making personal myths were characteristic features of the modern American short story of the first half of the 20-th century.

The article discusses the concept of “decadence” and its derivatives (decadent, decadisme, decadentism) in the French literature in 1885 and 1886, when it underwent a certain “institutionalization”, denoting since that time a literary movement as well. The author analyses program writings, like “ ‘Les déliquescences’, poèmes décadents d’Adoré Floupette”, Jules Laforgue’ “Complaintes”, the activities of the littérature revues “La Revue Wagnérienne”, “Le Décadent littéraire et artistique”, “La décadence. Littéraire et artistiques”, “Le Symboliste”, the theoretical publications of Paul Bourget, Paul Bourde, Anatole Baju, René Ghil, Jean Moréas etc., poetry of S. Mallarmé, P. Verlaine, A. Rimbaud etc. The paper emphasizes the role of irony as an integral part of the poetics of decadence in these years, the relationship, and sometimes “coincidences” with symbolism, the institutionalization of which in France was largely provoked by decadence.

This article comments on why and how V.V. Izmailov is his “Puteshestvie v poludennuyu Rossiyu” (“A Journey to Midday Russia”) makes a reference to the poem “Kljuch” (“The Fount”) by G.R. Derzhavin. A contextual analysis reveals sources of poetic inspiration. The article discusses a link between the commented fragment and literary reputations of S.S. Bobrov and M.M. Heraskov.

The article discusses polyphonic voices in I. Shmelev’s novel “The Sun of the Dead”: the narrator’s voice, discursive styles of characters, voices of nature, and voices of the post-revolutionary time. The narrator reproduces and stores in his memory voices of many people, combines them with delicate commentaries, and shares his stoic experiences in confessional monologues.

The article focuses on allegory as a figurative expression of an abstract notion, designed to instruct, preach, or teach. It provides insights into its semantics, different from metaphor and symbol, and discusses how it was evolved by ancient and medieval philosophers. Allegorisation can be regarded through a single word or a chain of judgments. An example in question is the poetry and prose of the Portuguese playwright and poet Jil Vicente. To illustrate this, the article analyzes the JOURNEY concept in Vicente’s works.

As is known, some scholars single out grammatical phraseological units (GPUs), i.e. combinations of two and more words which are cemented semantically and grammatically. GPUs are based on typical use of grammar rules and their sense is a sum total of the constituent parts, yet their conceptual grounds are different. The paper seeks to distinguish GPUs types and focus on prepositional adverbial expressions.

The paper focuses on the correspondence of the Greek communist poet K. Varnalis and his wife D. Moatsou-Varnali with T.V. Kokurina, who translated Varnalis into Russian. Varnalis visited the Soviet Union three times: in 1934, 1959, and 1962. In 1959, he became a Lenin Prize laureate. The correspondence discusses his stay in the USSR, his contacts with Greek political refugees living there, and his interpretations of his poetry.

The article is a review of foreign studies into classical philology in the past decade. Special emphasis is laid on Homer-related publications. In them, scholars oftentimes associate the ancient world with contemporary society, pointing to issues people have now and had back then. One such issue is emotions. The article studies emotions prevailing in the Homeric epic in the context of such ever important issues as hostility and upbringing (paidion).

The article views the Russian spelling reform in the early 20th century through the prism of the printing process in Baku in 1915–1917. The books printed back then are still underexplored from the linguistic point of view. Research has shown that the realization of the reform in Baku was largely sporadic as there were publishers who met the academic recommendations to normalize Russian spelling and there were publishers who made adjustments in their own way.

The article studies several stories and lyrical sketches by Jean Toomer. The focus is on the selection of short stories “Cane” (1923). In his works Toomer largely exploits lyrical genres and folk songs – forced leitmotives, rich imagery, reiterations, metaphor and comparison, symbol and metonymy, inversion, ellipsis and oxymoron; various discursive forms and practices – verses and prose, informative and poetical, personal and collective speech. All of this is squeezed into very short stories which look like musical pieces, songs or blues.
Meanwhile, the stories in “Cane” have all elements of epic narration – the author vividly portrays his characters, puts their real-life stories in a historic context, and shows how they survive in a society full of sins and vices.

The article discusses the role of Caroline Shlegel-Shelling, a most remarkable woman at the turn of the 19th century, whose image largely reflects the cultural and literary life in Germany at that time.

The article focuses on the thematic trends of the exhibition of the renowned Russian artist Vasily Nesterenko at the St.-Petersburg Central Exhibition Hall, April 2017. The paper features Nesterenko’s signature style and his views on paiting.

Poetry for children is a field of special responsibility. Regrettably, substituting genuine children’s poetry with quasi-children’s poetry is a trend. The latter allows for lifeless ideology-bound formalism, lecturer-like mode of speech, and advocacy of unlimited material freedom. And all in vain. Both ideology-based poetry and ideology-free poetry, of the demonstrative type, play into the hands of today’s elites who tend to encourage destructive utopism. Their goal is to slow down human growth, make him/her incapable of independent thinking, rob him/her of freedom to oppose the sluggish social system. Children’s poetry may grow up only if it starts to show kids in striking contrast genuine images of compassion, altruism, mercy, and justice, on the one hand, and falsehood, meanness, selfishness, outward superiority, on the other.

The article highlights the past decade of Homer-related criticism and Homer translations by M. Amelin, A. Salnikov, and Gr. Starikovsky. Homer’s popularity never stopped. This is proved by new translations of the Iliad and Odyssey. Remarkably, Homer appears to be in tune with modern society. He makes the eternal issues of upbringing and human feuding relevant again.