In Shakespearology there are no generally accepted interpretations of “Hamlet” either conceptually or textologically. Many interpretations of this tragedy make a demoralizing reading, for they ignore the obvious solutions to the “Hamlet enigma”: accepting the early dating of the first drafts of Shakespeare’s play, treating the so-called “Bad Quarto” of 1603 as an early variant of Shakespeare’s celebrated text and explaining the intricacies and the possible inconsistences of the plot within the context of the religious conflicts of the Elizabethan England.

In the present article literary criticism activity and artwork of one of the leading Danish writers of the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century H. Bang are considered. Shaping Bang’s esthetic views similar to the esthetic position of the initiator of the “Modern Breakthrough” cultural movement, the Danish critic G. Brandes is traced, the writer’s perceptions of the tasks of impressionist psychological novel are investigated, as well as style features of his novels “At the Road” (1885) and “Tine” (1889) are analyzed.

When it comes to Slavic literatures, the phenomenon of exile and emigration, including domestic emigration, appears to be a never-changing paradigm and predictable subject of research. Having deep historical and cultural roots, this phenomenon has clearly been a subject of contrastive literary research which seeks to explore communications and processes of cross-cultural interference.
The 20th century kicked off with utopia and ended in nostalgia. This is how the late internationally acclaimed Svetlana Boym (1956–2015), researcher of Slavic literatures, described the paradoxical path of the 20th century. Pointing out the unison between nostalgia and exile, Boym distinguishes between two kinds of nostalgia, restorative and reflexive. We argue that this constant of a special mental state can be added to the temporal aspect which makes the relationship between exile and nostalgia interactive. It is the temporal axis that links nostalgia with the past (or bygones) and ties utopia with the future. Ironically, in the recent past these things looked differently. As Katarina Luketic said, ‘In the time of ideological singular our utopias were manifested as plural.’ Hence, the popular cult of nostalgia was desirable as it was safe for the existing order. It conveyed obedience, irreversibility, loss, pain, and disability. ‘The more frightening gets the world, the more abstract grows art’, said Kandinsky.

The article discusses how The Belorussian writer Leonid Dajneko depicts World War I in his novels ‘People and Lightning’ and ‘Remember Yourself Young’. It is argued that the novels have some typological links with the books of Dajneko’s predecessors, Z. Byadulya, A. Harodnya, M. Haretsky, and K. Chorny. Among the links are the psychological portrayal of a peasant who accidentally went to the war; understanding of the changes which took place in the consciousness of the hero who had radically changed their social status; stories about the impact of German ‘Ordnung’ on the inhabitants of the occupied territories. Special emphasis is laid on the ‘lynching’ episode in a novel: the soldiers took revenge on their officer. It shows the narrator’s attitude to the problems of Belarusian statehood obtained during the war.

This article explores stylistic idiosyncrasies of Denis Davydov’s lyric poetry. The lyrical hero’s state of mind, or inner sufferings, is largely depicted lexically and syntactically, with the help of metaphors, root repetitions and word repetitions, evoking a wealth of connotations. Research suggests a set of lexical and syntactic devices common for elegiac poems. It includes metaphor, figure of default, syntactic parallelism, slavicisms. Special emphasis is laid on how anaphora, epiphora, alliteration act in the poem’s organization.

The article comprises various forms of V. Nabokov’s activities in the USA (1940–1960’s) in the field of academic research, university education, translation, critique commentaries and publishing works of Russian authors as well as his creative contacts with American academic and literary circles.

This article discusses the place and role of written discourse in today’s model of teaching Russian as a foreign language. It is argued that the system of instruction has to be amended, making written discourse a stronger aid in off-class work.

The article concerns the features of Kondratiev’s artistic style. The genre, descriptive structure and plot principles of “Selizharovsky Trakt” are analysed to show the originality of the war picture, created by Kondratiev. The analysis of biografical and historical-literature context reveals external factors that has influenced the formation of an indivi­dual style of the writer. His creative work is presented in the historical perspective to answer the question why Kondratiev’s Greate Patriotic War image is so important today.

The article deals with the realism aesthetics building in the situation of confrontational relations in Russian society in the first third of the 19th century, which, on the one hand, complicated the process of elaborating aesthetic principles, dependent on extra-aesthetic factors, primarily ideological factor, on the other, enriching the literary school that was being formed. Realism inherited from its predecessors (classicists, sentimentalists, romanticists) and systemised the art tools, rethought and reformatted the oppositions that they used, prefered basing on a new type of humanism that excludes Renaissance individualism.

This article discusses Voltaire’s philosophical tale ‘Candide: Optimism’ (1759) in terms of the fairytale genre. This approach is not accidental as it is attributable to the evolution of fairy tale (conte) in 17–18th century France, on the one hand, and features of the genre in Voltaire’s Candid, on the other hand. It starts and ends as a fairy tale, has the typical fairytale characters (a hero, princess, magical helpers), a fabu­lous miracle, an entirely unreal subject, and a narrative structure which, according to V. Propp, is based on the function of trouble or shortage.

The article deals with the problem of mental trauma in Italian literature of recent 20 years. The paper focuses on autofiction, as the most representative example of literature about trauma. The author analyses novels which combine elements of reality and fiction, where the reader is invited to perceive the author and the protagonist as the same person. Based on reviewed examples, the researcher concludes that the ontemporary Italian writers want to perceive themself and Italian society through the prism of mental trauma, and trauma, real or imaginary it is, affects the collective identity of Italians, thereby contributing to their consolidation.

The article analyses the representation of queen Ginga (1582–1663) in the novel “Queen Ginga, and how Africans invented the world” (2014) by the modern Angolan writer José Eduardo Agualusa. Looking at Ginga and her reign from the African point of view, Agualusa represents the legendary queen in a new way, considering her as a complex historical figure.

The article discusses a dispute between the student and the teacher that occurs in the literary works to do with theological education. Basing on episodes from F.M. Dostoevsky, N.S. Leskov and I.S. Nikitin, the author shows the structural proximity of situations prompting the characters’ reactions to complicated theological questions. It is argued that the Russian literature had encountered this kind of situations for the first time. The author links a dispute on religious issues with the ideology of nihilism, on the one hand, and Church teachings, on the other hand.

The article discusses the phenomenon of ikota (hiccups) in North Russian dialects in the Arkhangelsk region. Research is based on the Arkhangelsk Regional Dictionary and data of expeditions in Arkhangelsk region. Ikota is a social and cultural phenomenon which has a special manifestation in the language of North Russian dialects speakers. The paper shows a relationship between mythical thinking of North Russian locals and their views on social, material, cultural and ritual practices.

This article discusses how syntactical idioms may realize a false positive assessment. The syntactical idiom, as is known, consists of a constant and a variable. A complete or partial semantic loss of the constant component may bring about different evaluative connotations. The word acquires its meaning only within the structure of a syntactical idiom. The formal absence of a negative assessment and, therefore, asymmetry between the signi­fier and the signified manifest idiomaticity which is characteristic of all syntactical idioms in modern Russian. The colligation and collocation patterns “Хорош + N1”, “Много + Pron + V”, “Буду / стану + Vinf”, “Надо (же) + Vinf”, “Охота + Vinf” illustrate false positive assessment most vividly. These, however, do not rule out other models.

The poetic language of the сhivalric novel of the 12–13th centuries is closely connected with the courtly culture of the High Middle Ages. One of the methods of studying it for the historian of language is to discuss the names of “non-chivalrous” weapons in the Middle High German language, their nominative potential and peculiarities of usage in the literature of this period. This paper studies the сhivalric novels “Iwein”, “Perceval”, “Tristan”, and the epic poem “Nibelungenlied” with the intent to establish the connection between the language of сhivalric novel and chivalric culture from the standpoint of the dichotomy “chivalrous – non-chivalrous”.

Drawing on Baudelaire’s poems and their translation by L. Kobylinski this article focuses on synesthetic metaphor and provides five structure-based and modality-based models of putting it across in Russian.

The article narrates the history of the conference “Andreev Readings: Slavic Literatures and Literary Relations” dedicated to the memory of the outstanding Slavist Vsevolod Andreev (1929–2000). The conference is held annually at the Faculty of Philology of the St. Petersburg State University since 2009, and in 2018, the university hosted the Tenth Anniversary Readings. The main topics of the conference are the history and current state of Slavic literatures, an interplay between Slavic cultures, and problems of inter-Slavic translations.

This article talks about the opening on June 8, 2017 on the wall of the former Russian boarding house in Italy’s Nervi of a plaque to commemorate the stay of the Tsvetaevs from the autumn of 1902 to the spring of 1903. Maria Tsvetaev (nee Maine), mother of the renowned poetess Marina Tsvetaev, brought her daughters, Marina and Anastasia, here as she underwent medical treatment. The unveiling of the commemorative plaque was thanks to the persistent efforts of the author of this article and her Italian assistant Marta Tongiani, an admirer of Marina Tsvetaev’s poetry.