Despite the fact that there seems to be no direct link between the works of Nikolai Gogol and those of Oscar Wilde, Gogol’s novella, Портрет (The Portrait) and Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, share many elements in common, most notably the device of the predatory portrait. This report explores the parallels that exist between these two texts and argues that they mutually derive from elements found in Goethe’s Faust and the trope of the literary vampire. / text

In my dissertation, I examine the works of six writers (George S. Kaufman, Moss Hart, Clarice and Elisa Lispector, Evgenia Ginzburg and Vasilii Aksyonov) who did not explore their Jewish identity in their texts and were subsequently left out of the canons of Jewish literature in their respective countries. My goal is to recalibrate the concept of the Jewish canon from the charged notion of identity to a theory of shared thematic material in which the works of hyphenated Jewish writers will be considered under the category of ‘Jewish American, Brazilian, or Russian’ if they share definite attributes. This was a transnational study showing that similar forces were at work not only in one country, but across continents, affecting the sensibilities of Jewish writers in remarkably similar ways. On a larger scale their de-thematized narratives share thematic tropes and belong to a ‘minor, liminal, marginal narrative,’ a narrative which attempted to work within the scope of the master narratives produced by the hegemonic culture. I have claimed that even though these six writers did not thematize identity in their texts, because of the negative political and social situation for the Jew in the first half of the twentieth century in western civilization, this situation and the writers’ own alterity produced similar and overlapping narratives. / text

My dissertation examines the Russian influence on the critical writing, poetry, prose and philosophy of Mikhail Naimy (1889-1988), the world renowned figure in modern Arabic literature. Together with Jibran Khalil Jibran, Ameen al-Rihani, Ilia Abu Madi, Rachid Ayuub, and several other Arab-American men of letters he founded the Pen Association, a literary league in New York in 1920 that lifted Arabic literature from the quagmire of stagnation, imitation and old classicism. They also promoted the new generation of Arab writers and made it an active force in Arab nationalism. Numerous researchers have studied the impact of British, American and French cultures and literatures on the Pen Association's creative writings. Meanwhile it was Russian literature that had the most important impact on Naimy, as well as on some other members of this literary association (though less). This influence has still only been studied superficially aside from some Soviet era analyses. My dissertation makes a much-needed contribution to this blank spot, since the Russian literary critic Vissarion Belinskiī (1811-1848) and the towering figure of Leo Tolstoī (1828-1910) contributed greatly to the foundation of the modern Arabic literature. My dissertation traces Mikhail Naimy's Russian Orthodox heritage in Lebanon, his education in Poltava, Ukraine, and his readings of Belinskiī and Tolstoī to show how he incorporates critical social reform, anticlericalism and mysticism into his important Arabic language works. It also shows the influence of the Russian literary criticism on Naimy's critical articles. My dissertation sheds light on global literary processes, as Naimy was able to synthesize Russian, European and American literary traditions into his native Arabic heritage. This integration is an important part of the evolution of modern Arabic literature and an interesting phenomenon that emerged in the American melting pot of the early twentieth century. My research has significant methodological value, as it will identify the typology and significance of cultural contacts, based on the example of influence mentioned above. It will also contribute to an important topic of the renewed interest in the academy - Russian influences and impacts in the Middle East and in Arabic culture and literature.

Gogol, Dostoevsky and Bely are three Russian novelists, most of whose writings are set in the city of St. Petersburg, and whose feelings for their city were a bizarre mixture of love and hatred. / This dissertation is divided into four chapters, the first of which is a survey of the attitudes held by the literary predecessors and contemporaries of Gogol, Dostoevsky and Bely toward St. Petersburg, and a discussion of the influence of the French feuilletons on the nineteenth-century Russian urban novel. The second chapter is an investigation of the overall image of the city as presented to the reader by the three writers. The predominantly tragic fate of the novelists' heroes is discussed in the third chapter. The final chapter is a study of six major recurrent themes which link the urban novels of Gogol, Dostoevsky and Bely.

Thesis (M.A.)--Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, 1985. / Typescript. Abstract precedes thesis as 2 preliminary leaves. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-06, page: 2853. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [80]-84).

This thesis is an exploration of the ways in which a number of important Russian writers and filmmakers of the 1910s and 1920s appropriated domestic interiors as structural, visual and literary metaphors. My focus is on the artistic articulation of the closed space of the Russian domestic interior, in particular as it surfaced in the narratives of the modernist literature and cinema of the time and became an essential metaphor of its age. In my discussion I take issue with two standard ways of understanding domestic space in existing literature. I argue that representations of home spaces in early twentiethcentury Russian culture mount a challenge to the conventional view of the home as a place of safety and stability. I also argue that, at this point, the traditional approach to the room and the domestic space as a fixed closed structure is assailed by representations that see domestic space as kinetic. The importance of the 'room in motion' means that I address cinematic as well as literary representations of domestic space, and show that even literary representation borrow cinematic techniques. My different chapters constitute case studies of various separate, but complementary, aspects of the representation of home space. The first chapter shows how domestic space in reflected in the poetical language of Anna Akhmatova. The second chapter focuses on the parallel exploration of rooms and a child's consciousness in Kotik Letaev by Andrei Belyi. The third chapter discovers the philosophy of a room built by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii in his short stories of the 1920s. The next three chapters focus on interiors of three different cinematic genres. The fourth chapter looks closely at films created by Evgenii Bauer, showing the director's innovative techniques of framing and set-design. The fifth chapter explores the film Tret'ia Meshchanskaia by Abram Room, focusing on the director's employment of the room as a structural device of the film. The last chapter analyses two lyrical comedies by Boris Barnet to show the comic effect produced by the empty room and domestic objects in his films, and also focuses on the image of staircase. In conclusion, I speculate that the representation of interior spaces in the period in question goes beyond genre, medium, and narrative structure and becomes an important and culturally dynamic motif of the time.

This thesis contributes to existing discussions of Soviet subjectivity by considering how the efforts of the Party leadership and state agencies to shape personal and collective identities were mediated by the teaching of Russian classics to teenagers. It concentrates in particular on the history of literature course provided by Soviet schools for the upper years. The study addresses the following questions: (1) How was literary expression employed to instigate children's emotions and create interpretive habits as a way of inculcating a Soviet worldview? (2) What immediate effects did the methods have on teenagers? (3) What were the long-term effects of this type of indoctrination? Answering these questions required close reading of material produced by official authorities, such as methodological programmes, teachers' aids, professional journals, and textbooks for class instruction, and also of material produced by those at the receiving end of Stalinist literary instruction, including both sources contemporary to the period under scrutiny (i.e. diaries written between 1936-1941), and later autobiographical material (memoirs, oral history). I argue that for many teenagers growing up during this period, indoctrination in the classroom blurred the boundary between reality and fiction, and provided a moral compass to navigate their social environment, to judge others as well as themselves along prescribed lines, and model their lives on the precepts and slogans of the characters and authors they encountered, particularly the 19th-century radical democrats. Retrospective accounts - interviews, memoirs, and written responses to questions - expose the durability of the moral and ethical lessons derived from Russian classics and reveal the enduring Soviet emotional complex formed by this literary instruction. Investigating the impacts of the study of Russian classics on Soviet recipients, particularly from elite groups such as the city intelligentsia, my discussion highlights the political traction of the literary in, for instance, forming feelings of group belonging and strong emotional responses to differing views. I conclude with a discussion of the relation of this to long-term political effects, including the re-appraisal, in the twenty-first century, of Stalin-era teaching methodology as an effective way of instilling patriotic sentiments in students, and the legacy of Soviet perceptions and practices in the expression of personal and collective identities in the post-Soviet period.

No description available.

O presente trabalho tem como objetivo traduzir para português brasileiro e fazer uma análise semiótica da novela Parque cultural (1983), do escritor russo Serguei Dovlátov. Além disso, pretendemos apresentar aos leitores e pesquisadores brasileiros os traços fundamentais da obra deste, que é um dos principais prosadores russos da segunda metade do séc. XX e um dos maiores representantes da Terceira Onda de emigração russa. Uma das especificidades do método artístico de Dovlátov consiste em uma forte vinculação de sua obra com fatos da cultura, literatura e história da Rússia e da União Soviética. Essa característica permite-nos analisar seus textos como textos de cultura, segundo a concepção semiótica de Iú. Lótman. Na novela Parque cultural, espelham-se tais fenômenos da cultura soviética, como o mito soviético do poeta Aleksándr Púchkin, considerado símbolo da cultura, a existência na União Soviética de duas culturas paralelas (a oficial e a não oficial), o fenômeno da massiva emigração dos anos 1970, entre outros. A tradução da novela Parque cultural (título em russo, Zapoviédnik) para o português do Brasil, com notas e comentários, constitui parte integrante deste trabalho. Praticamente toda a obra de Dovlátov é humorística, e a transmissão dos elementos de humor e marcas culturais, presentes no texto, foi um dos desafios dessa tradução. / This work is aimed at translating the novel Pushkin Hills by Sergei Dovlatov into Brazilian Portuguese (the title in Russian is Zapoviednik, and the title in Portuguese is Parque Cultural, 1983) and analyze this text from a semiotic point of view. We furthermore intend to present the basic features of Dovlatovs work, who is considered to be one of the leading Russian prose writers of the second half of the XX century and one of the greatest representatives of the Third Wave of Russian Emigration, to readers and Brazilian researchers. One of the features of Dovlatovs artistic methods lies in the close connection of his work with the culture, literature and history of Russia and the Soviet Union. This feature allows us to analyze his texts as cultural texts, according to Yuri Lotmans semiotic concept. The themes of the novel Pushkin Hills reflect such phenomena of Soviet culture as, among others, the \"Soviet\" myth of the poet Aleksandr Pushkin, who is considered to be a symbol of culture, the existence in the Soviet Union of two parallel cultures (official and unofficial), the massive emigration of the 1970s. The translation of the novel into Brazilian Portuguese, with notes and comments, is an integral part of this work. Almost all of Dovlatov\'s work is humorous, and conveying elements of humor and cultural references in the text was one of the challenges of this translation.

À diferença de outras obras de Ivan Serguéievitch Turguêniev (1818-1883), a novela Klara Mílitch (Depois da morte), publicada em 1883, ano da morte do autor, dispõe de recursos que sugerem uma ruptura dos padrões de representação da escola naturalista (conceito russo). Este trabalho visa apresentar, a partir do estudo da caracterização das personagens e de seu narrador, indícios que apontam para uma real contribuição para o novo momento literário desenvolvido na Rússia nas duas últimas décadas do século XIX: o Simbolismo. Compõem este trabalho a tradução da obra, inédita em língua portuguesa, e o estudo Um outro Turguêniev: marcas do Simbolismo na caracterizaç~o das personagens e do narrador de \'Klara Mílitch\', no qual se aborda as questões listada acima à luz de Todorov, Meletínski, Hauser, entre outros. / Differently from other works of Ivan Sergeyevitch Turgenev (1818-1883), the novella Klara Militch (After Death), published in 1883, the year of the autor\'s death, uses resources that suggest a rupture with the ways of representation of the Naturalism (Russian concept). This work aims to present, through the study of the characters and the narrator\'s characterization, signs that point to a real contribution to the new literary moment developed in Russia in the last two decades of the nineteenth century: the Simbolism. Compose this work the translation of the ouvre, unpublished in Portuguese, and the study, The other Turgenev: signs of Simbolism in the characterization of the characters and the narrator in \'Klara Militch\', in wich the questions listed above are analised in the light of Todorov, Meletinski, Hauser, among others.