Wiener Slavistisches Jahrbuch. N.F. 12 (2024) – Abstracts
Induviae. Zu den Anfängen der Plautusrezeption in Dalmatien
Christoph Koch (Berlin)
Starting with a motif common to Pelegrinovićs Jejupka and Plautus’ Menaechmi, the article covers the reception of Plautus in the Dalmatian Renaissance literature of the 16th century. At that time the drama becomes the most characteristic form of literary expression, and the comedy becomes its most representative form. In the history of comedy a stillborn attempt at reviving Plautine comedy in the original language in the school of Ilija Crijević should be distinguished from the rich literary production on the other side of the Adriatic sea, in which the free use of Plautine motifs and methods are applied in vernacular literature, emancipating the Dalmatian comedy from its Latin models and allowing it to speak to the social reality of the current day. This development reaches its highpoint in the work of Marin Držić, a precursor of Shakespeare and Molière little-known outside his Croatian homeland. His insight into the inadequacy of literary criticism as a means for social change led him ultimately to reject comedy writing in favor of a call for a coup d’état in his own city of Dubrovnik.
Keywords: Croatian literature, the reception of Plautus, Mikša Pelegrinović, Ilija Crijević, Nikola Nalješković, Marin Držić
The Church Slavonic Penitential Někotoraja zapovědь and Its Relation to the Latin Codex Sancrucensis 217
Miroslav Vepřek (Olomouc)
The article is focused on the analysis of the Church Slavonic penitential Někotoraja zapovědь. It is recorded in a Russian Church Slavonic manuscript from the turn of the 14th and 15th centuries but contains remarkable traces of its older archetype. The origin of the text in the Czech area in the 10th or 11th centuries was ascertained by Josef Vašica, and he also detected that this penitential was influenced by Latin sources. In the article, the text is compared with penitential texts included in the Codex Sancrucensis 217, i. e. with the manuscript that was present in Bohemia from the second half of the 10th century as an important part of books at the newly established Prague diocese. Three basic features are compared – subject content, assigned penance, and wording correspondence between Church Slavonic and Latin texts. Although the majority of canons from the CS penitential have no direct parallel in the Latin Codex Sancrucensis 217, some noteworthy correspondences can be found, and the Czech origin of Někotoraja zapovědь still can be accepted.
Keywords: Czech Church Slavonic, Latin, penitential, Codex Sancrucensis 217
Was the Language of Andrija Kačić Miošić Šćakavian or Štakavian?
Jurica Budja / Ivana Kurtović Budja (Zagreb)
The article deals with the question whether the language of Andrija Kačić Miošić, as represented in his body of work, exhibited the Šćakavian or the Štakavian reflex of Proto-Slavic *št’ and *žd’. Proto-Slavic *št’ and *žd’ are reflected in some Štokavian Croatian idioms as št (Štakavism), in others as šć (Šćakavism). The Makarska littoral subregion of Dalmatia, where Kačić was born and spent the better part of his life, has traditionally been regareded as a Šćakavian zone. A thorough examination of his opus, consisting of three books, shows that his language was consistently Štakavian. The attested Šćakavisms are easily explained away, except for few toponyms. If Kačić’s language was indeed Štakavian, the accepted view that the idiom of Makarska littoral has always been Šćakavian can be challenged.
Keywords: Croatian, Štokavian, Štakavism / Šćakavism, Makarska littoral, Andrija Kačić Miošić
“The deepest doubts”: Vladimir Nabokov’s Discursive Views of Religious Apostasy and Conversion
Maxim D. Shrayer (Chestnut Hill, MA)
The article discusses Vladimir Nabokov’s strong views and largely negative opinions of religious conversion of Jews and Christians as expressed mainly in his unpublished letters of the interwar period and in his diaries. A nuanced and complex view of Nabokov’s own religious beliefs and practices emerges as a result of this investigation.
Keywords: Vladimir Nabokov, apostasy, religious conversion, exile
Bilingual Doppelgangers or Mirror Opposites?
Joseph Brodsky’s and Vladimir Nabokov’s Attitudes toward English and Approaches to Translation Revisited
Zakhar Ishov (Uppsala)
The two Russian writers from St. Petersburg/Leningrad who achieved great literary success in America – Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky – are often compared. The article reexamines, in light of Nabokov’s and Brodsky’s respective conditions as writers-in-exile, the role each assigned to English at various stages of their bilingual careers. An archival find of a hitherto untranscribed and unpublished recording of a Brodsky lecture and discussion with his American students on Nabokov’s translation experiment with Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, as well as his novel Pale Fire, provides a Nabokov-Brodsky literary juxtaposition from an utterly new perspective. The article concludes that while Nabokov’s and Brodsky’s contrasting approaches to translation largely reflect the different cultural experiences of the “First” and the “Third Wave” of Russian émigrés to America, both writers sought the respect and admiration of their anglophone peers. Accordingly, both worked to translate their identities as writers into English and to establish, each in his manner, his lineage within the Russian poetic tradition with a new audience. Thus, far from being “irreconcilable antipodes and mirror opposites,” their views on translating Russian poetry into English exist in an intriguing dialectical relationship.
Keywords: Vladimir Nabokov; Joseph Brodsky; Aleksandr Pushkin; Poetry translation; Literary Bilingualism; Russian-English translation; Exile; Comparative Versification; the “Third Wave” of Russian emigration
Andrej Platonov’s Reception in Samizdat and Tamizdat:
An Analysis of Editions 1960s–1980s
Giuseppina Larocca (Macerata)
The article sheds light on a previously unexplored aspect in studies dedicated to Andrej Platonov, specifically his reception in samizdat and tamizdat editions between 1969 and 1982, which allows to gain insight into which works were circulating therein and the issues that were considered most important in the editions published across the borders as well as in the clandestine editions circulated in Soviet Union. The present contribution investigates two categories of articles and volumes: the first includes articles published in the journals “Posev” (1945-), “Grani” (1946-), the newspaper of the Russian emigration in New York “Novoe russkoe slovo” (1910-), the New York journal “Novyj žurnal,” essays published in the Leningrad samizdat journals “37” and “Transponans” in the years 1979-1980, and short introductions published in the Parisian journal “Echo”; the second category comprises the volumes of Michail Geller – which due to their academic nature are inevitably different from the other contributions. Vol’naja russkaja literatura by the dissident Jurij Mal’cev (1932–2017), published in Frankfurt am Main in 1976 by “Posev” will also be examined. Finally, a short essay by the writer and radio broadcaster Viktor Frank (1909–1972) included in his volume Po suti dela (1977) will also be analysed. Reports, articles, and reviews published in Slavic journals in Europe and overseas are not taken into account, as they do not fall within the circulation typology addressed in this contribution.
Keywords: Dissent Literature, Twentieth-Century Russian Literature, Andrej Platonov
Lev Tolstoy as a Literary Frontline of the Russian Revolution
Tatyana Gershkovich (Pittsburgh, PA)
This article examines the literary-cultural dispute over Leo Tolstoy’s legacy in the decade after the Russian Revolution. Both the Soviets and the Russian émigré community sought to lay claim to the great writer and to use his texts for their own purposes. Where did they succeed in instrumentalizing his texts, and where did they fail? How far could the work be bent? More broadly: What factors – from the formal to the sociological – constrain in practice the ideologically motivated reading of a text? I address these questions by considering the reading practices of three groups: Soviet pedagogues and their students in Siberia; White Russians in Paris; and avant-garde artists in Leningrad. I show that these readers, far from reading Tolstoy the way they wished to, were considerably circumscribed: by the texts themselves, by competing communities of readers, and by their own aesthetic commitments.
Keywords: Leo Tolstoy, Bolsheviks, Russian émigrés, Soviet Avant-garde, literary trials, Igor Terentiev
«Я слишком люблю литературу, предан ей всецело, живу только для нее»: неизвестный автобиографический текст Владимира Ленского
Марко Каратоццоло (Bergamo) / Людмила Спроге (Rīga)
In 1909, the German-born Russian poet and translator Fedor Fiedler curated a collection of short autobiographies from various contemporary Russian writers. However, not all of the autobiographies submitted to him were included in the final volume, which was published in 1911. Notably absent from this publication is the contribution of Vladimir Lenskii, the pseudonym of Vladimir Abramovich. Recently unearthed, this previously unpublished text is presented and analyzed here for the first time.
Keywords: Vladimir Lenskii (Abramovich), Mikhail Artsybashev, Fedor Fiedler, Semen Vengerov, autobiography
Korrespondent der Moderne.
Biobibliographische Notizen zu Alexander Eliasbergs Beiträgen in den Zeitschriften Vesy (1907–1909)
und Russkaja Mysl’ (1909–1914)
Carmen Sippl / Fedor Poljakov (Wien)
“Correspondent of Modernism. Biobibliographical notes on Alexander Eliasberg’s articles in the journals Vesy (1907–1909) and Russkaya Mysl’ (1909–1914)” provides an overview of the articles and reviews that the translator Alexander Eliasberg published in these two central journals of Russian modernism. On the basis of Eliasberg’s contributions and his contacts to Valery Bryusov until the outbreak of World War I, the article lists the reviewed German titles and attempts to reconstruct Eliasberg’s intermediary activities.
Keywords: Alexander Eliasberg, Valery Bryusov, Petr Struve, Vesy, Russkaja Mysl’, Russian literature, diffusion of German and Austrian literatures, Russian modernism, translation studies, bibliography
«В изгнании»: из заграничной переписки Евгения Замятина
Андрей Устинов (Сан-Франциско) / Бенджамин Музаккио (Принстон)
This essay examines hitherto unpublished correspondence between Evgenii Zamiatin and his collaborators, including the artist Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, the theater director Fёdor Komissarzhevsky, and his translator George Reavey. These letters, sourced from a variety of Western archives and composed in both Russian and English, date from Zamiatin’s years abroad (from the end of 1931–1937), when the writer had already left the Soviet Union for Europe. This correspondence provides fascinating insight into Zamiatin’s desire to publish, translate, and stage his work in Europe and America. Not all of his intentions were realized; for instance, he never did travel to the United States to collaborate with the American film director Cecil B. deMille. Our accompanying commentary positions Zamiatin in Europe’s dense multinational and multilingual publishing networks of the 1930s.
Keywords: Evgenii Zamiatin, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, George Reavey, Fёdor Komissarzhevsky, émigré culture
Историография авангарда в ГИИИ: новые материалы
Валерий Отяковский (Cambridge, MA)
The article “Historiography of the Avant-Garde at The Institute of Art History: New Documents” consists of three notes each of which investigates the avantgarde within the walls of the Institute of Art History in the late 1920s. We publish here new documents that illuminate the preparation for the twentieth anniversary of Russian Futurism at the Institute of Art History. These documents help clarify some details of the biography of Konstantin Fofanov (Olimpov) and provide new insights into the connection between Daniil Kharms and the Office for Contemporary Literature.
Keywords: Institute of Art History, Office for Contemporary Literature, Konstantin Shimkevich, Arsenii Ostrovsky, Konstantin Olimpov, Daniil Kharms
Из Именного указателя к «Записным книжкам» Ахматовой
Роман Тименчик (Иерусалим)
“Towards the Index of Anna Akhmatova’s Notebooks”. – This part of series of historical and literary commentary to the poet’s notebooks examines several of her literary and non-literary relationships.
Keywords: Alexander Blok, George Gordon Byron, Andrei Belyi, Alphonse Daudet, Emil Gilels, Nikolai Gumilev, Nikita Khrushchev, Rudyard Kipling, Sergei Kirov, Leonid Leonov, Mikhail Lomonosov, Empress Maria Feodorovna (Dagmar of Denmark), Caecilia Metella Cretica, Pope Paul VI, Piotr Pavlenko, Alexander Prokhorov, Solon, Vladimir Soloukhin, John Steinbeck, Ekaterina Tauber
Those that "remain":
Неизвестный лекционный конспект Набокова
Публикация и комментарий Григория Утгофа (Таллинн)
What can be learnt from these previously unpublished Vladimir Nabokov’s notes to a prospected lecture found in his NYPL archival collection, titled “Those that ‘remain’,” and probably dating to the early 1950s, is Nabokov’s unbiased vision of the 20th century Russian literary canon. While the list of the best prose writers, according to “Those that ‘remain’,” coincides with our expectations (with Andrei Bely, the author of Petersburg, coming first, and Ivan Bunin coming second), the list of the best Russian poets is surprising, if not sensational: not only does it include Vladimir Mayakovsky, a Soviet poet Nabokov prevented himself from mentioning in his numerous interviews, but it also treats very favourably Anna Akhmatova’s poetry.
Keywords: 20th century Russian Literature, Anna Akhmatova, Andrei Bely, Alexander Blok, Ivan Bunin, Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, Vladislav Khodasevich, Osip Mandel’shtam, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vladimir Nabokov, Yuri Olesha, Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Textual Criticism, Literary Canon