The article examines the relationship between the pictures of the spiritual world in the book by Mechtild of Hackeborn, The Book of Special Grace, and the customs and festive etiquette adopted among the high-born German nobility. The research focuses on visions reminiscent of court festivities, in particular, images of feasts and dances and their symbolic meaning. Analysis of the visions shows that the Heavenly Kingdom is depicted as an imperial palace, mystical experiences are expressed in forms prescribed by earthly court etiquette, and the exchange of gifts between the guests and Christ becomes a metaphor for confession and absolution. The feast itself symbolizes the Eucharist, and those who have not approached Holy Communion appear at this feast as paupers entitled to a “pot for alms,” that is, some spiritual consolation. The heavenly banquet ends with joyous song, symbolizing thanksgiving prayers. Spiritual joy is depicted as a dance of the soul and Christ. or Christ and all those present at the feast, with Christ playing the role of a juggler. The food at the Heavenly Feast appears as mystical dishes if it is prepared by Christ and the saints, and as earthly food which has a symbolic meaning. Parallels to the visions of Mechtild of Hackeborn can be found, on the one hand, in chivalric romances, and on the other, in the theological writings of her contemporaries.

Spanish epic legends, which originated in ancient times in the oral tradition, have come down to us in various written forms — from historiography (prose chronicles) and major epic poems to small folklore lyric-epic genres, such as the Spanish “old” romance (romancero viejo). The question of the genesis, the method of composition and distribution of such plots is one of the most important now. First of all, it’s connected with the problem of stadial or parallel origin of the texts. The article is devoted to the reconstruction of the ancient Spanish plot about Rodrigo, the last king of the Visigoths, in Latin and Old Castilian historiography, including in the “History of Spain” by Alfonso X the Wise. In addition, the reconstructed plot is compared with the folk epic romance about Rodrigo’s last battle with the Moors and the loss of Spain. The cycle of romances formed in the 14^th–16^th centuries has several separate plots about Rodrigo. The most interesting question here is which of the plots is the principal one in the cycle and goes back to the authentic folk epic text formed in the oral environment. The analysis undertaken in this article allows us to show, on the one hand, how the plot lives and develops in the tradition and what changes it suffers. On the other hand, comparing the reconstructed plot in the chronicle with the text of the romance allows us to try to identify the original text that is the foundation of the cycle and try to prove the parallel development of plots in romances and chronicles.

The article consists of two parts and is devoted to the formation of a new bourgeois ethic within the late Medieval mentality. This process is studied on the material of the creation of the so-called “small preachers”, whose activities unfolded in Germany in the 1^st half of the 14^th century. In the first part, the personalities of the preachers themselves (16 names) are considered, in the second part their teaching, taken in an integral form, is analyzed. This teaching is based on Neoplatonic emanationism. God, present in a person as a “spark”, reveals himself through actions, so that a person becomes attached to God’s actions as an instrument. This is what the “auto-determination” of a person taken out of the control of ecclesiastical and secular institutions looks like. At the end of the article, an attempt is made to re-read M. Weber’s famous book The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. After all, in his work Weber identified only the social manifestations of these mental dynamics. It is only through this internal dynamic that the external manifestations identified by M. Weber receive their ultimate justification. Without this underpinning, these manifestations remain little more than witty observations and have no binding character.

The representation of oral narrative in Renaissance novella books involves not only references to literary sources, but also descriptions of social and cultural practices of the era. The framing model of The Decameron, converging with the Courtois Courts of Love and the jeux-partis, was partly reflected in the arrangement of Charles VI’s Court of Love in the early fifteenth century. One form of such aristocratic pastime, collective reading accompanied by singing, music, and dancing, influenced the activities of Italian “academies” in the 16^th century. With the appropriation of this model of behaviour by urban literature, storytelling takes on the function of an exchange of news of a distinctly comic nature (Franco Sacchetti, Philippe de Vigneulles). The convergence between aristocratic and urban practices of recitation, reflected in particular in the titles of published novellas, brought to life — under the influence of the humanist tradition (Giovanni Pontano, Baldassare Castiglione) — the idea of the novella as a game, a collective performance, which was theorised in Girolamo Bargagli’s Dialogue on Games. The exchange of short stories can be considered one of the important practices of the era, the cultural content of which changed according to the historical and social context.

By genre pragmatics the author understands the combination of all the external conditions that determine “the immediate orientation of the word in the surrounding reality” (Bakhtin / Medevedev). The pragmatics of Shakespearean comedy depends on the fact that most of his plays in this genre initially must have been commissioned for performance in a private house, or at court. Their wit, in at least one of its functions, had to represent an immediate reaction to circumstances known and intriguing to the audience. This was a short-lived response, either lost beyond this particular place and time, or dependent on scholarly commentary in academic editions. But the modern audience, completely unaware of the “immediate orientation” of the genre, is doomed to lose its pointedness and wit, and, consequently, to consider the play as not worthy of interest. There is a need then for a process similar to the one undergone in the 20^th century by Lοve’s Labour’s Lost, restored in its anti-Petrarchan actuality. New arguments in favor of this restoration are further advanced in this article. Love’s Labour’s Lost is one of the most pragmatically loaded Shakespeare’s plays. Its reactions cover a vast field of European history, English court intrigue, and literary fashion where domestic and foreign politics are embodied in the parody of literary conventions. The religious unsteadiness of the French King Henry IV, famous in Europe, is doubled in the plot with its initial situation of a broken oath by the King of Navarre and his four courtiers who start by swearing not to see a woman for 3 years, devoted by them to study and meditation, but immediately break their pledge when obliged to meet the French Princess and her beautiful companions. Politics serves as a pretext for the demonstration of the fragility of Petrarchian conventions played out in real life.

The paper examines various functions that the salon performed in France during the 17^th and 18^th centuries: the salon as a form of aristocratic and literary leisure, as a place of literary and linguistic innovations, cultivation of the art of conversation, theatrical play, etc. Various types of salons are considered: aristocratic, philosophical, literary, political, but it is shown that there was no clear boundary between these categories. Special attention is paid to the role that the encyclopedists played in the history of salons and how the functioning of salons changed after 1793 and again in the era of Empire and Restoration, when the salon turned from a social locus that was feeding literature into one of its nostalgic plots. The second part, Signs of salon life, analyzes the rules that allow us to operate with the concept of salon culture and to reconstruct its implicit and explicit etiquette (the role of a woman hostess and her status, conversation, hospitality, verbal and social games, theatrical performances arranged in salons). Such different authors as Stendhal, Balzac, Proust inscribe salons in the cultural memory of the nation, outgrowing the narrow limits of the world of aristocracy. In these new salons, the status of ladies who are no longer able to control public opinion is changing (Balzac). As a result, the art of conversation gradually loses its status as a practice of secular life, having also some literary ambitions.

Based on the pseudo-Pushkin texts, the paper examines the strategy of appropriating someone else’s identity as a manifestation of mass culture. The “Pseudo-Pushkin” phenomenon appeared during the poet’s lifetime, when his epigrams and impromptus began to spread in society, and the Pushkin myth began to arise. “Pseudo-Pushkin” became a part of this myth. It manifested itself in various forms: in the contemporary press, in more or less authoritative copies, in foreign or illegal publications, in collected works. The texts attributed to Pushkin may be anonymous, pseudonymous, cryptonymous, collective, or signed with his full name. They are extremely diverse in terms of genre: poems, epigrams, impromptus, articles, “Secret Notes”, drawings, etc. Especially many of the Pseudo-Pushkin texts appeared in the second half of the nineteenth century after the publication of his collected works by Pavel V. Annenkov. At this time, there was a need in society to collect everything that was written by Pushkin and to complete the publication of Annenkov with unpublished texts. A great many pseudo-Pushkin poems were published by P.A. Efremov, another editor of Pushkin. This trend continued in the 20^th century, especially during the celebration of Pushkin`s anniversaries. The question is raised how and why people of the most diverse character, upbringing, education, professional training, not to mention the difference of epochs, are seized by a desire to discover a hitherto unknown Pushkin. As an example of journalistic and editorial mistakes we consider the history of a handwritten notebook, known as A.A. Kraevsky’s — V.G. Belinsky’s notebook.

The diaries and correspondence of Alexander Turgenev, to this day published only fragmentarily, contain important information on the early, pre-publication history of Petr Chaadaev’s First Philosophical Letter and the first stages of the heated debate provoked by its appearance in print in 1836. The first part of the article illuminates Chaadaev’s attempts to publicize his Letter in France in the mid-1830s. Because of his deep, well-established ties to Paris journalism Turgenev was selected by Chaadaev as his intermediary but showed surprising hesitation. Turgenev, a self-proclaimed Protestant “in his mind,” did not share Chaadaev’s Catholic zeal, and the Letter’s rhetorical fervor could not fully compensate for its derivative dependence on well-worn tropes of European political thought of the time. The article draws on Turgenev’s unpublished letters to Chaadaev to trace Turgenev’s maneuverings that allowed him to avoid the questionable honor of facilitating a French publication by the “Russian de Maistre” or “Russian Lamennais”. The second part of the article is based on Turgenev’s unpublished diary written in Moscow in October-November 1836. Confronted with public outrage after the publication of Chaadaev’s First Letter in Teleskop, Turgenev developed a double strategy. In conversations with Chaadaev and his inner circle, Turgenev harshly criticized Chaadaev’s self-centered ambition that led to the prosecution of the editor of the journal and its censor. At the same time, as a regular participant of the Moscow salons where rage against Chaadaev’s letter was in vogue, Turgenev was possibly the only one to “argue in favor of the freedom to speak freely about Russia”.

The article attempts to trace the way society’s perception of public schools has reverberated in fiction. We consider the genre of British “school stories” and focus on its most popular specimens in the late 19^th — early 20^th century. The first novel to be examined in the article is Tom Brown’s Schooldays by Thomas Hughes — a classical “school novel” and a model to be followed for many years to come. However, soon “serious” writers, such as R. Kipling and E.M. Forster, turned to the topic of public schools, using the flaws and problems existing in the system as material for creating plot collisions. This, among other things, testifies to the fact that in the late 19^th century elite boarding schools were going through a rough patch – a fact further argued for in sociological studies of the recent decade. The publication of Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh, which is analyzed in greater detail in the article, seems to have signaled the end of the “golden era” of public schools and marks a radical shift in their societal status. Since that time public schools have appeared to be in need of justification. Waugh’s novel undermines the very genre of “school” novel by filling the model with subversive content, and, as a result, creating a striking image of a “lost epoch”.

The purpose of the article is to offer an explanation of the intertextual density characteristic of the poetry of Russian modernism. Intertextuality is viewed from two perspectives — the reader’s and the author’s. In terms of perceiving the text, intertextuality is not needed to “encode” the meaning of a work (according to Taranovsky’s and Ronen’s ideas, derived from the large intertextual theory) — it implements a memorial function (maintains the memory of significant canonical texts) and brings the reader special cognitive pleasure. The main focus of the article is on the author’s perspective. The citation thinking of modernist poets may be comprehended through the categories of folklore studies, first of all, within the framework of the model of epic storytelling. The use of this theory allows one to give a systematic explanation of the intertextuality of many poets (first of all, V. Khodasevich, but also other poets with neoclassical features or with an intense dialogue with literary tradition) and to see in the consciousness of the modernist writer features peculiar to the consciousness of the bearer of the folklore tradition. Particular attention is paid to the topics, the lexical cliches and to work with tradition in modernist lyrics, as well as to the mechanisms of text generation.

Naïve poetry, that is, poetry that has not passed through editorial filters, published by the authors on the Internet (on the website stihi.ru), provides unique material for the study of natural interpretations of important political events. The article analyzes poems in which the word “Crimea” is mentioned, from the website stihi.ru, for the period 2000–2019. These poems are processed using the technology of topic modeling. The essence of this technology is that in a large collection there are co-occurring words, usually semantically close within a certain unified context. A series of such words serve as representations of “topics”, that is what characterizes the text from a semantic point of view. The sample was divided into several stages and a model of 5 themes was built for each. For the Crimea, one of the main topics is that of paradise on earth. It is the topic that unites most of the poems written before the events of 2014. After 2014, in works by amateur authors we observe the invasion of current topics into the established world of the resort; the latter does not disappear, but gives way to politics. Five years later, political topics remain, but landscape and love lyrics return as well. On the topical level, we do not trace a clear influence of “high” poetry on the authors of stihi.ru. Traditional in form (verse division, rhythm, rhyme), the response of naïve poets breaks sharply with the literary tradition of substantive embodiment of such a response. Topic modeling allows us to evaluate the transformation of the Crimean plot in that segment of public consciousness which is reflected in the production of naïve poets.

The authors analyze the reader’s interaction with the texts and the image of a poet whose authority is not questioned. The models for legitimizing literary authority (according to B.V. Dubin) may differ. One model presupposes an institutionally supported attitude towards an author as a guarantor of literary and moral norms (“poet-classic”), while the other focuses on public recognition and the reader’s ability to establish an emotional connection with the author’s texts and his figure (“poet-star”). Both instances lead to the appropriation of texts by readers, including the actualization of these texts at the time of reading. The poems of a poet-classic work as canonical art (according to Iu. Lotman) — they do not carry information but refer to a set of values, realities, and idioms. They require a different mode of perception than poetic texts perceived within the framework of the author-star model when personal understanding and feeling becomes necessary. Tactics of actualization help the reader when he needs to actualize the texts of the canon (author-classic) or create a personal interpretation (authorstar). The article was written on the basis of participant observations and interviews in one of the “literary” places (the “spiritual home” of Nikolai Rubtsov). Assessments of the poet’s creativity and personality given by readers, as well as situations of reading poetic texts and spontaneous comments on them are interpreted through the prism of sociology and anthropology of literature.

Heinrich von Kleist’s novellas are characterized by a caleidoscopic alternation of the lands and the eras, where and when over and over again take place natural and (or) historical disasters. The heroes of these novellas, who find themselves in the sphere of such disasters, intuitively perceive providential intervention in their life and follow it in their behavior. In the novella “Michael Kohlhaas” (1808 / 1810) the land and the folk show themselves as the epically unified subject of national history, and the basis of the historical disasters are the irreversible social transformations. As for Providence, which shows itself as a chain of incidents, it becomes the symbolic sign of these transformations. This makes the narrator a hypostasis of the author’s figure. Unlike the narrator, this “author” can not only discern providential intervention in the described events but also can understand its historical underpinnings and dialectic. Together, the author, the narrator and “providential” history as their common subject are clearing the path to the realistic novella of the coming 19^th century, when the social logic of life and of history was freed from the “providential” shell.

Even though the Russian reception of Ch. Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre, as well as I.I. Vvedensky’s translation activity, have been the object of research more than once, a systematic analysis of the 1849 translation in the context of Russian reception of the Victorian novel has not yet become the subject of special study. The article attempts to analyze the “liberties” in the translation of the novel, which include both domestication, characteristic for its time, and omissions of passages that contain religious motifs. The author of the article suggests that such omissions may be due to both extra-literary factors, in particular, an indirect ban on mentioning Western Christianity of any confession, in any context, and the emerging literary paradigm of the “progressive” realistic novel, for which religious issues are irrelevant. Vvedensky’s translation in 1849 set the frame for perception of Brontë’s novel, which retained the plot, action, attention to the narrated story and the unique heroine. The philosophical-religious, anti-ideological problems raised in the novel faded into the background or were entirely neutralized. This is a watered down novel by Ch. Brontë; yet even in such an abbreviated version it made an impression on the reader both in the 19^th and in the 20^th centuries, because omissions of religious matters, albeit for other ideological reasons, are preserved in V.O. Stanevich’s translation made in the Soviet period (1950).

The following publication is a collection of excerpts from a diary kept between 1961 and 2005 by Yu.A. Smirnov-Nesvitsky — Dr. Sci. (Art History), theatre historian, stage director, playwright, founder of the “Subbota” (“Saturday”) authors’ theatre, Honoured Artist of the Russian Federation. Across the pages of the diary are scattered the names of various theater personalities — N.P. Akimov, V.N. Pluchek, G.A. Tovstonogov, O.N. Efremov, A.M. Volodin, O.P. Tabakov, A.A. Mironov; theatre historians and theorists S.L. Tsimbal, R.M. Beniash, V.M. Krasovskaya, D.I. Zolotnitsky, G.A. Lapkina, S.V. Vladimirov, V.A. Sakhnovsky-Pankeev, and many others, whom fate brought together with Smirnov-Nesvitsky. He keeps records of discussions of Moscow and St. Petersburg premieres, put on by the professional community of the time; recounts “Subbota’s” many-year struggle to stand up for its own voice, and tells many creative, scientific and human stories of his own life, and of the times in general.

The publication contains the first Russian translation of the Renaissance treatise “On the Philosophy of Arms and its Mastership” by Jerónimo de Carranza. This treatise is considered to be a starting point of a new trend in European theory of fencing combat that was named Destreza (the word meaning “mastership, art”). As an object of investigation and reconstruction primarily within the framework of historical fencing, Destreza, is mainly known from the abridged versions of Carranza’s art as retold by French and Spanish masters of fencing (Narvaez, Thibault). However, Carranza’s composition, consisting of Prologue, introductory verses and the treatise itself that includes four dialogues, still lacks a modern scholarly edition. That is due, partly, to the excessive (as both contemporary and posterior critics see it) philosophical scope of the treatise that claims not only to produce a detailed technical manual for fencing combat, but to create a specific science of mastering swordcraft. This noble science is based both on philosophical foundations combined with natural sciences, and on Christian ethics as well.

The book by the famous 19^th century French writer Prosper Mérimée is devoted to Spain of the 14^th century. The book focuses on the life of King Pedro I of Castile named the Cruel and his struggle for the throne against his half-brother Don Enrique, illegitimate son of his father. The author describes in detail the domestic and foreign policy of Don Pedro, shows how his severity, initially aimed at centralization of the state and curbing the will-fulness of the “seigneurs”, turns into unjustified cruelty, suspicion and vindictiveness. This pushes internal and external supporters away from of the king and inevitably leads to his death. The book is based on medieval chronicles, while at the same time the writer reflects on History itself, on the role of a particular person in historical events, and on the possibility of moral choice in a time of troubles. The book is translated into Russian for the first time. The translator faced the problems of transferring the stylistic diversity of the book, where the impassive narrative of Mérimée-the-historian alternates with the emotionally tense language of Mérimée-the-artist, as well as the problem of conveying in Russian the realities of medieval Spain.

A review of: Sofokl. Tsar’ Edip [Sophocles. Oedipus Rex] (2021) (G. Starikovsky, Trans. and Intro., & N. Grintser, Notes). (Ser. ΣΚΗΝΗ). Agraf. 192 p. (In Russian).

A review of: Kastil’one, B. (2021). Pridvornyi [Trans. from Castiglione, B. (1981). Il Libro del Cortegiano (A.Quondam, Ed.). Garzanti] (P. Epifanov, Trans. from Italian). Izdatel’skaia gruppa “Azbuka-Attikus”; KoLibri. (640 p.). (In Russian).