The fabula and the syuzhet of the fictional text are examined in this article. First, I provide some information regarding the etymology of these words, and then review some studies on poetics of the last 100 years or so. I note that only in the writings of the Russian Formalists was a distinction drawn at a high theoretical level between the meaning and the usage of the terms fabula and syuzhet. I explain the absence in the Formalists' theorizing of the concept of composition and the presence of motivation as a very important semantic category of syuzhet construction. I assert that a detailed investigation of extensional-semantic (diegetic) motivations and of intensional-semantic motivations might significantly advance research into poetics. Instead, the majority of scholars writing on this subject in the second half of the 20th century blurred the clear distinction between the fabula and the syuzhet present in the work of the Formalists. In addtion I note an alternative approach to the problem, fundamentally different from that taken by the Formalists. Next, I briefly consider the question of the structure of the fictional text; this is seen as the question of the fictional text's levels. I point out that only a correct solution to the problem of differences between the units within the fabula and within the syuzhet can help us better comprehend the categories of fabula and syuzhet. I demonstrate that fabula units are quasireal events and a chain formed by them (“5 members of the fabula”), while syuzhet units are all the episodes of the text. Following that, I put forward a typology of episodes. In my conclusion I emphasize that the fabula and the syuzhet are two levels of the same phenomenon — the text object organisation as a whole. I put forward a new approach to syuzhetology: it is the study of the syuzhet as the episodisation of the text

The paper is devoted to the analysis of the deixis of the oral mythological narrative. The subject of study are the first person grammatical forms, in which the narrator is represented. Study of deictic units shows that a first person narrative is the dominant form of subject organization of the mythological story. First person grammatical forms are used not only in memorates, where the speaker is both a participant in and a witness of events, but also in stories about someone else's experience of contact with a mythological phenomenon. In particular, the article discusses the specific narrative form of the “double 1st person”, in which the speaker uses first person forms in relation to himself and to his personage, spontaneously switching, while telling the story, to a narrative from the latter's point of view. The author of the paper concludes that the expansion of first person forms in mythological texts is due to the features of the communicative situation in which they arise, namely, the canonical situation of direct oral communication. The speaker prefers to convey the story in the form of direct speech, which describes the perception of a mythological phenomenon and contact with it. Obviously, this is due to the fact that in the canonical situation of speech the speaker is the subject of speech, consciousness, perception, deixis. Therefore, in the mythological story an active character who sees, hears, feels, and interprets is presented by forms relevant for such a subject in the canonical context of the speech situation.

The paper considers in detail the perceptive structure in Adolfo Bioy Casares' The Invention of Morel, in particular, the functioning of the artificial “images” — fantastic copies of the living people — in the narrative text. These holographic copies, created by a genius inventor and dwelling on an uninhabited island in the Pacific, are distanced from the reader by a dynamic frame — in terms of discourse (the ambiguity of the storytellers and commentators), space (the geographical distance of the island) and time (the chronological ambiguity of the novel's plot, where the chronology is replaced by a week's time, recurring in cycles, during which the copies are “recorded”). The “images” are perceptively incomplete: they can be seen and heard, but the storyteller can not touch them. The “images” are a technological illusion, and they have a tangible underlining — the underground machinery projecting them into the island's space; entering this underground hall is experienced as entering a sacred, enchanted place, which leads to an initiation transforming the person. All the “images” together seem to form a small world, which the storyteller protagonist seeks to join, but this world is ontologically invalid, lacking the subject: it is not a real world, but more a museum or an archive. Not the visual imagery itself, but only the verbal narrative, created by the protagonist over the course of his adventures, is capable of overcoming the ontological defect, of bringing a wholesome meaning to the “images'” existence. Bioy Casares' novel is based on the conflicting interaction between the image and the word, where the ultimate expression of the latter is the very text that we read.

The article discusses the role of biographical experience in the literary text and proposes the hermeneutical concept of “lived experience” (Erlebnis), introduced into Russian literary scholarship by Grigory Vinokur, as a frame, inside which social, political, historical, cultural and intertextual determinants and sources of the text can interact. Our case study is “Natasha's smile” — the famous episode at the end of the main part of War and Peace immediately preceding the epilogue. This episode is contextualised within the literary tradition to which Tolstoy adhered (we refer to the works that, according to the writer, made either a “very big” or an “enormous” impression upon him), the scientific ideas of the mid-nineteenth century that interested him, and his own biographical experience. Such a constellation of factors belonging to different layers allows us to see how Tolstoy interiorised and reworked the mythology of romantic love that defined so much both in his works and in his personal destiny. We do not try to read the literary text as a reflection of the author's biography or, in a reverse way, to uncover the literary models for the construction of life, but seek to analyse both as different ways to solve problems that were always important for the writer. Acknowledgements. This research was supported with a grant of the Russian Science Foundation (project no. № 16-18-00068, “Mythology and Ritual Behavior in Contemporary Russian City”).

The attempts to “re-fight” or “re-play” the Russian Civil War were frequently undertaken in both Soviet and émigré Russian literature by authors of practically all artistic and political persuasions. Mikhail Bulgakov did not only clearly proclaim his political stance, but was also exceptionally tenacious and consistent in this regard. In his Fatal Eggs, an unsuccessful attempt to revolutionise animal husbandry brings down hordes of counter-revolutionary reptiles on Red Moscow. In Heart of a Dog, a successful attempt to remake a dog in the image of man causes a local apocalypse within one particular house. In the play Adam and Eve, most of the inhabitants of Soviet Russia die from “solar gas”. The early versions of The Master and Margarita remained within that trend: the Devil who visited Moscow struck it with fire and fought Red Army units in this newly formed hell. However, even in the early fantastical narratives the end of the world somehow remained inconclusive. Some of the changes might be attributed to the direct or indirect influence of censorship — however, it seems to us that in this case an interaction with external constraints served as a catalyst for some internal attempts to achieve understanding of what was occurring. In our opinion, the latter especially manifested themselves during Bulgakov's work on The Master and Margarita, where an initially purely satirical, linear plot gradually acquired new dimensions, until it became a fundamentally ambivalent “musical” system of meanings (as B. M. Gasparov has defined it). The events that the author had previously taken for the end of the world turn into a “local engagement” in The Master and Margarita — and this change produces a chain reaction, creating a set of extremely interesting artistic and philosophical implications. In the article, we investigate these mechanisms and consequences.

This paper discusses Oleg Chukhontsev's poem “A Parade Rehearsal” (1968). The author analyzes the rhythmic structure of the text, and puts forward an interpretation of it alongside a historical and cultural commentary. The poem arouses emotional and conceptual associations with Vasily Zhukovsky's ballad “The Castle of Smalgholm”. A common feature of both texts is an atmosphere of apprehension accompanied by motifs of nocturnal tactical movement, victims of war, memories of malefaction, retribution (Last Judgment). I consider the intertextual level of the poem, which is mainly represented by references to Mikhail Lermontov, as well as allusions to political and military events in which Russia (the USSR) participated: on November 4, 1794, the slaughter of Poles by Russian troops during their assault on Praga, a suburb of Warsaw on the Vistula's right bank; the suppression of the 1830–1831 Polish uprising; the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact armies on the night of August 21, 1968 and the suppression of Prague Spring. In “A Parade Rehearsal” Chukhontsev undermined something considered by most Soviet people as unshakable, almost sacral: the solemn movement of troops with military hardware across Red Square, along the Kremlin Wall and past the Lenin Mausoleum. Watching this event at night, Chukhontsev suddenly recognizes distinctive marks of the Russian (Soviet) imperial consciousness. The principal valor of the latter is military, while its main objective is to expand its territory and preserve its grandeur whatever the cost. The poet perceives this military display as the dominance of the mass over the individual, the state over a person. Oleg Chukhontsev expressed this disquieting idea with great artistic power just before the end of “the Thaw”.

In Chapter 12 of I. S. Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, a progressive official is described as being like the statesmen of the Alexandrine era, who, “getting ready for a soiree at M-me Swetchine's, who dwelled at that time in St Petersburg, read a page from Condillac”. Various editions of Turgenev's novel provide commentaries on both Sophie Swetchine (a Russian Catholic) and Condillac (a French philosopher, deist and sensualist). Yet no explanation is given concerning why statesmen, in preparation for a visit to a Catholic, would need to read a sensualist philosopher instead of, say, some work of theology. The two names and the two persons are commented upon separately, while, if their relationship is analyzed, it becomes obvious that an important link is missing from this fragment. This paper attempts to uncover this missing link, which proves to be Joseph de Maistre, Sardinian emissary in Russia and French religious thinker. A memoir source mentions that Pavel Dmitrievich Kiselev, later on a prominent minister during the reign of Nicholas I, used to visit Mme Swetchine's salon and talk to de Maistre at the instigation of his friends, who also made him read a few chapters from Condillac beforehand. Discussing Condillac with the hostess was pointless; but this was not the case with de Maistre, who in his writings routinely disputed with the French sensualist, and whose demeanor suggested that he needed to be challenged to engage in an eloquent monologue. The story of Kiselev reading Condillac prior to visiting Swetchine's salon and talking to de Maistre comes from Prince P. V. Dolgoruky, who used to meet Turgenev frequently in Paris, just when Fathers and Sons was still a work in progress. Therefore, it is entirely possible that Turgenev could have heard this story. But both de Maistre and Swetchine were water under the bridge for him, so he did not hesitate to skip the missing link and paid no attention to the paradoxical nature of what was left — a construct in which, to worm oneself into Swetchine's favor, one has to boast about one's mastery of Condillac's writings.

The central issue of this article is the specific character of diplomatic correspondence in the 16th century and, as a consequence, the difficulty in determining whether or not some examples of Ivan the Terrible's correspondence belong to the realm of diplomacy. There were two distinct lines in Ivan's diplomatic correspondence — with the rulers of Europe and with those of the conventional “East”; this in addition to the nature of medieval diplomacy as a relationship between the authority and charisma of individual rulers, rather than between independent and equal subjects of international law (as becomes the case by the Early Modern period). In dealing with this problem, this article suggests a comparative analysis of two conditionally distinguished discourses in Ivan the Terrible's diplomatic correspondence — “Eastern” and “Western” ones. However, the model of correspondence used for contacts between the Muscovite State and the successors of the Golden Horde was frequently being extended to the correspondence with European rulers. This took place in those cases where Ivan believed his “Western” interlocutor unworthy of being granted a status equal to Ivan's own and, as a result, used in his missives elements of his correspondence with the successors of the Golden Horde, who by then occupied a lower, semi-subordinate position in Ivan's hierarchy of states. The article lays out conclusions regarding the significance of such examples for the theoretical problem of drawing the boundaries between diplomacy and non-diplomacy in the corpus of Ivan the Terrible's letters. We show that the the question of how the addressee of Ivan's missives was viewed – as a diplomatic partner or a “vassal” – was an essential part of the way diplomacy was considered in the 16th century Muscovite State.

The autobiography of Harkhuf enjoyed much attention in egyptological studies of the geography and history of Egypt and its neighbours at the end of the 3rd millenium BC. The most useful in this regard are his first three journeys, while details of the fourth expedition, which resulted in bringing a dwarf or a pygmy to the court of Pepy II, mostly fall out of focus in these studies. The fourth expedition is widely known outside Egyptology however, where it usually affords a context for Homer's Simile of the Cranes and Pygmies. Nevertheless, apart from this sphere of classical studies, it has hardly been seen in the context of comparative mythology. In this study the author returns to the hundred-year old issue of the close resemblance between particular expressions in Pepy II's letter to Harkhuf and the Pyramid Text Spell 517. A pygmy or dwarf is referred to as a dancer of a god's dance, diverting the heart of the god. The formulaic manner of this description seems to indicate a presistent cultural stereotype. Another token of such mythological background can be seen in the provenance of a pygmy from “the Land of Horizon dwellers”. These and certain other traces of mythologically formed perception and interpretation of real “historical” events in Egyptian sources allow the author to consider Harkhuf's biography as the earliest record of the mythological motif “Underworld dwarfs” (I20). The whole issue is also a contribution to the problem of the fuzzy border between “historical” and “mythological” in ancient monuments.

In this article, the author considers the question of how old age and the process of ageing are portrayed in three diary texts from the Soviet era: the diaries of Nina Lashina, Lyubov Shaporina and Vladimir Propp. The author of the article shares the view that both old age and gender are sociocultural constructs, and therefore one should speak of different old ages determined by the historical context, by the individual features of personality, and by the diarist's narrative strategies. The article analyzes both different models of aging and different narrative strategies for describing one's own old age ‘day by day', as well as the common features of Soviet female old age, which can be seen in the two women's diaries. Aging in them is described as a process of transformation from mother to grandmother, and as that of (traumatic) adaptation to the role of old woman/grandmother imposed by society. The idea of male old age, as can be seen from an analysis of Vladimir Propp's Diary of Old Age, is much more variable and gives more freedom to choose a suitable model of old age. This is a revised and enlarged variant of the article [Savkina 2017].

Until recently, studies of the fine art of naive artists and of texts of naive literature were conducted separately, independently of each other. At the same time, it is well known that many naive artists create various kinds of literary texts: stories, scripts, poems, memoirs. This article sets out the neccssity of an integrated approach to the works of naive artists. It offers an analysis of the meta-text of their visual and verbal works as an expression of the non-stop process of understanding the world and their place in the world, clarifying their own identities and the identity of their social group, building up narrative about the meanings and purposes of lives. The article contains brief essays on several naive artists (E. Bartsev, P. Ustyugov, A. Chepkasov) that attempt to evaluate the relative weight of the visual and verbal portions of their heritage. Supplementing stylistic and compositional analysis of naive art works with a study of their author's fictional and non-fiction texts leads us to understand the naive artist's social mission, which forms his naive utterance. This method allows us to test the hypothesis of naive art as an individual reading of the mass culture's metanarrative. We envisage as the next step a detailed, step-by-step study of this topic, which would necessarily include collecting all available materials created by naive masters, studying the great diversity of their creations, and clarifying the balance between heteromorphic creative spheres.