The Koran became an inspiration to the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), made obvious in many of his works, such as Imitations of the Koran, The Prophet, and In a Secret Cave. Pushkin studied the translation of the Koran carefully and used many verses of its Surahs in his texts. Many of his contemporary poets and followers were influenced by his poetry, like Ivan Bunin (1870–1953), who continued the traditions of Pushkin. Bunin repeated many thoughts from Koranic discourse and placed them in his poems that were full of faith and spirituality. He wrote many of them at the beginning of the 20th century1, before his emigration to France in 1918, for example: Mohammed in Exile, Guiding Signs and For Treason. It has been noted that Bunin was quoting verses from the Koran to create an intertextual relationships between some Surahs and his poems, showing a great enthusiasm to mystical dimension of Islam. We find this aspect in many works, such as The Night of al-Qadr, Tamjid, Black Stone of the Kaaba, Kawthar, The Day of Reckoning and Secret. It can also be said that a spiritual inspiration and rhetoric of Koran were not only attractive to Pushkin and Bunin, but also to a large group of Russian poets and writers, including Gavrila Derzhavin, Mikhail Lermontov, Fyodor Tyutchev, Yakov Polonsky, Lukyan Yakubovich, Konstantin Balmont, and others.

Julius Margolin (1900–1971), a Jewish author of Russian and Polish origins, wrote his famous Russian-language novel A Journey to the Land Zeka in pre-State Israel, one year after his release from a Soviet concentration camp (1946–1947). Having been one of the earliest testimonies about Stalin’s atrocities, this book was published in 1952 in its abridged version, whereas the unabridged version came out only in 2016. While the social and political significance of this book has been repeatedly discussed, its poetical and discursive strategies are understudied. This article makes a few steps in the direction of understanding of Margolin’s book seriocomic style, discourse of fairytale and fantasy, the Palestine-Zionist text, the sea motif and other themes. The analysis unveils the author’s ambitious literary project that hides behind the historical testimony and is intended to strengthen it.

This article deals with the personal relations between Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol and Vissarion Belinsky. It examines the impact of these exchanges on Dostoevsky’s and Gogol’s literary works as well as on their biographies. The author argues that in order to fully understand Dostoevsky’s relation to the other two writers, one should take into account the change of his Weltanschauung during his exile years and his subsequent turn from pure realism ( Poor Folk) to fantastic realism ( The Double). With Gogol, one has to acknowledge his mature views expressed in Selected Excerpts from Correspondence with Friends, the last book he published before his death.

This article describes the results of the pilot stage of qualitative fi eld research on Russian social memory in the second half of the 1980s. The aim of the research was to reveal what is the image of perestroika preserved in today’s social memory of those Russians who remember the events of those years. The main objective of the pilot stage was the identifi cation of the lexicon of terms and the set of concepts used to verbalize the memories of the perestroika period, as well as the caesuras and temporal characteristics related to the memory of this time. The results are outlined in the main topics, terms and concepts that pop up in conversations with respondents.

: The article takes up the problem of autobiographical threads in the prose of Elena Dolgopyat. Although her work lacks a classic autobiography, most of her works are clearly connected with the writer’s biography. In this work I juxtapose two short, unpublished autobiographies of Dolgopiat, which are in my possession, with the writer’s prose works, trying to show the influence of the events in her life on her work. The theoretical basis for my considerations are the works of Małgorzata Czermińska, Katarzyna Citko, Georges Gusdorf as well as numerous reviews and critical texts by Russian literary scholars. In analyzing Dolgopyat’s stories, I also try to prove the thesis that her hometown – Murom – can be considered an autobiographical place.

The article aims to show literary images of skomorokh in the Russian versions of Christian‑Jewish disputes over faith. A textological analysis of 13 manuscript copies of Тhe Tale of the Christian and Jewish faith from the 17th‑19th centuries allows us to show how the image of the skomorokh changed in manuscripts of the Short redaction, the Extensive redaction, and the Unique redaction.

In Dolgopyat’s works, the world appears as an inscrutable mystery in which the wonderful and supernatural is closely connected with the realistic and everyday. Probably the most important part of this universe is chronotope. In this article, I focus on the category of time in selected stories in which it comes to the foreground. „The heroes of the analyzed stories travel in time, stop time or look for an answer to the question of the originality of their experiences. After all, if one can go back in time, maybe the whole of life is a mere repetition of what has already happened?”. Transitions between various time levels open up the way to other worlds and variants of one’s own destiny. The magical properties of time show that the reality of the heroes is not limited to matter and does not fit into the rationalistic picture of the world. This confirms the affiliation of the works to magical realism.

The theme of the article focuses on the description of the tactile sphere selected for the presentation of Russian literary prose figures from the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 21st century. The term “homo hapticus” is understood in the article as a characterization of a figure expressed through touch. At the same time, haptics, representative of the physical, biological side of the characters’ functioning in the world, is closely related to their spiritual sphere and can be referred to types of saintly characters. These dependencies are expressed by both the touching and the touched subject, and in particular by the body elements involved in the haptic turn – in my examples these are the hands and the mouth. The author of the article comes to the conclusion that the haptics of the analysed characters abolishes the binary between the material and spiritual worlds. He points out that touch reflects not only a specific physical action, but is closely related to the Russian cultural context, primarily the religious. It is the haptics of the figures who act as healers that allows them to be called righteous men – expressing a loving Christian attitude towards their fellow man.

Representations of loss, grief and mourning are have a prominent place in Mikhail Shiskhin's fiction. They coexist with other parathanatological themes such as funerals and reflections on life after death. As funerals provide the proper opening of periods of mourning, the first part of the article deals with the characters’ reactions to the scenes of death and burial. It is followed, in the second part, by a close examination of the internal life of selected female characters who experience grief after the loss of a person they love. On the whole, Shiskhin's characters seem to be less preoccupied with the funeral as a social institution, but rather tend to experience bereavement in a way which is typical of a melancholic. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's conceptualization of mourning, the article demonstrates how Shishkin's female characters conceal mourning by the act of incorporating the dead into their own bodies and allowing them their voice. At the same time, the activity of letter writing enables them to hinder or even deny bereavement, and in this way, hold off the admission of a complete loss.