For the first time in literary criticism, the author of the article turns her attention to the image of the estate in Tolstoy’s later artistic work, showing the dynamics of the writer’s views on estate life, the image of an ideal estate, which for Tolstoy was always associated with the motives of work, family life, proper attitude towards the people, etc. It is noted that in 1880–1910, the estate theme in Tolstoy’s creative imagination was directly related to the problems of land ownership, proper management and correct and gradual path of the individual and their spiritual growth. The picture of estate life In Leo Tolstoy’s novel “Resurrection” is realized in two contrasting versions: luxurious existence of the upper class and the aristocracy, not supported by any content, and transforming into a new image of the working life of the intelligentsia and landowners on the land. The author demonstrates the facts of impoverishment of estate life at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries, which are introduced in the artistic world of the novel. It is proved that the idea in the work of inseparable connection of a person with the people around him and with humanity at large, which is the key conception of the novel, is directly related to Tolstoy’s understanding of the change of the forms of estate life, important and dear for the writer himself. Of great importance in the novel is the awareness of the characters of natural life, which is presented in contrast to civilization, which deviates from the basic laws of love and goodness. On the basis of an analytical comparison of the drafts of the novel and the final text, the author substantiates the importance of the estate theme for understanding the feelings of the protagonist and his inner life, for organizing the epic artistic world of the novel. The article illustrates the stages of the dialectical movement of Dmitry Nekhlyudov and the connection between the estate and family themes. The author rethinks some episodes of the novel that have received controversial interpretations in science and reveals the artistic links that connect different chapters of the work.

This paper deals with the study of communicative structure used in English and Russian utterances. The study is aimed at analyzing Russian EFL learners’ ability to convey communicative meaning of English utterances using a variety of L1 (Russian) lexical and syntactic means when translating experimental materials from L2 (English) to their native tongue. The application of theoretical and empirical methods allowed registering and classifying translation variants and identifying problems caused by inability of the Russian subjects to understand the communicative meaning of the source sentences with a different location of the communicative center. The results prove that conveying the emotional coloring of a sentence is a challenging task for the Russian EFL learners. Comparative analysis of the data with the results from previous studies helps reveal the connection between the ability of the Russian speakers to identify the location of the communicative center and their ability to choose a correct translation strategy. The paper also addresses the issue of determining nucleus position; its role in conveying the communicative structure in written speech is crucial. A potential area for application of the results of the study concerns the EFL teaching methods, as they contribute to the development of foreign language communicative competence of non-linguistic students as well as their translation competence. Outlined are the perspectives for further research aimed at deeper understanding of the mechanisms determining nucleus position in non-native written speech and significance of prosodic means for conveying communicative meanings in the process of written and oral translation.

The paper investigates the symbolic-semantic content of the spatial ideas of Andrei Platonov formulated in his novel “Yamskaya Sloboda” (1927). The aim of the study is to assess the semantic significance of the image of the steppe associated with the inner life of the characters, based on modern interpretations of the concepts of “topos” and “locus”. The paper looks at the dialogical interaction between poetic and philosophical forms of thinking, which makes up the basis of the author’s style. The artistic world of the novel is interpreted on the basis of the diachronic principles of historical poetics. The study analyzes the personage of Filat and the main topoi of the story: “steppe”, “steppe people”, “humble person” , and “return to his native place”. The suggested method of analysis allows to identify stable mythopoetic and autointertextual configurations of the spatial worldview. The interpretation of the “Yamskaya Sloboda” in the light of the phenomenology of space convinces that intense micro-topoi, topoi-situations, and rhetorical figures serve as impulses for the development of Platonov’s individual toposphere associated with national consciousness. The topoi of the steppe organize the plot structure of the story. They outline the possibility of restoring the social and natural unity of man. The reproduction of the whole (connection between the physical and spiritual) in its parts (characters, images of nature and everyday scenes) became the dominant law of composition and semantic form of the “Yamskaya Sloboda”. The connection between the individual properties of the soul of the protagonist of the novel and the value-based foundations of popular-historical existence characterizes the originality of Platonov’s artistic space. The novel actualizes the national topic: a centuries-old stock of motifs, plots, and mythologemes. With the help of the topoi of the steppe, Platonov translates events, images of memory, and phenomena of collective consciousness into an ideological and philosophical plan, considering the inner world of a person to be its center.

В статье рассматриваются основные факторы, препятствующие успешному обучению русскому языку как иностранному, и вырабатываются методические рекомендации по формированию коммуникативной компетенции у туркменских студентов.

The article analyzes various approaches to the study of “metaphysical” lyrics in modern Belarusian and Russian literary criticism, which can be reduced to four main ones: 1) description of the literary school as a historical phenomenon; 2) identification of the key features of the “metaphysical” style in the work of an individual author and a group of authors; 3) identification of conceptual spheres in the lyric text (being / non-being, life / death, transcendental / immanent, world / person, etc.); 4) mutual relations between the categories “metaphysical, philosophical, meditative, religious, spiritual, intellectual”, etc., considered in the genre and paragenre theoretical field. Special attention in literary criticism is paid to the “metaphysical style”, the main features of which are: intellectualism, wit, complicated metaphorism, presence of a precedent prototext (“the Bible”), appeal (explicit and implicit) of the subject to the transcendental addressee or object (to what is beyond the physical world), meditativeness, philosophicality, tendency to expand the boundaries of time and space, associativity, conceptuality, ordinariness of the experienced “metaphysical” situation, synthesis of arts (poetry and music, poetry and painting, poetry, music and painting), “convergence” of somewhat distant ideas, mysticism, etc. The author of the article concludes that the main vector of research into the phenomenon of “metaphysical” lyrics in the works under analysis is reduced to substantiating the specific intentionality of the lyric subject in relation to the transcendental world: the type of consciousness, the dominant of spiritual search, the position of the subject, etc. Thanks to this intentionality, intellectualism and spirituality manifest themselves as a dominant of aesthetic search on all levels of text organization. The consequence of the designated creative attitude is the presence in the text of stylistic features, represented by rich metaphorization, semantic condensation, obscured meaning, synthesis of discourses, etc. In the conclusion, a hypothesis is posed about the existence of a transcendental or “metaphysical” mode of artistic presentation as a type of aesthetic interpretation, which reflects the existential relationships between the subject of creativity and the “transcendent” world.

Based on the material of short prose by I. S. Turgenev (“The Dream”, “The Song of Triumphant Love”, “Klara Milich”) and V. O. Pelevin (“Go to Sleep”, “The Blue Lantern”, “The Contemplator of the Shadow”), the article deals with the problem of transformation of conception and the ways of implementation of dream states. It also analyzes the change in the function of sleep and dreams in classical and post-classical literature. In classical literature, oneiric text is defined as a verbal presentation of a dream of a character or the author in a work of fiction. In mystery short stories and novellas by Turgenev, we are dealing with the verbal recreation of sleep as a borderline state of the character, as an experience of a different kind of existence, and as a way of immersion in the irrational region of the human psyche. Turgenev’s oneiropoetics and science fiction are aimed at discovering the unknown in the human psyche and are associated with the eternal problems of love and death, search for the truth, and the achievement of integrity of the artistic-philosophical world. In the postmodern era, dreams become one of the most common ways of text constructing and serve to convey the idea of total virtualization of reality. The modern author does not set the task to describe dreams; they create a text according to the logic of the dream. Meanwhile, the same eternal questions as in classical literature are subject to artistic reflection in Pelevin’s stories: the truth and lies, the good and the evil, the search for the meaning of life, freedom, and belief in God. The dialogue between the postmodern writer and the classic is based on the idea of inseparability of the sensuous and the supersensuous, the contradictions between which can be removed in an act of artistic study of the secrets of the human psyche. The writer of the epoch-making era speaks with contemporaries about the human consciousness that has fallen into the trap, because there are no practical methods for “lifting the shackles of the mind”, but the chances for transcendence and self-realization in consciousness-created worlds still remain. Pelevin’s dreams often become a manifestation of esoteric consciousness and mystical revelation.

This article analyzes the features of portraits in V. Ya. Bryusov’s short prose and A. Bely’s autobiographical short novel “Kotik Letaev”, which have never been studied in regards to the symbolists’myth-making. The writers of the second half of the 19th century assess the psychological states of a character and the metamorphoses they went through, which are usually reflected in character portraits, but the symbolists operate a different, synthetic form of psychologism. The first part of the article analyzes the peculiarities of visual characterizations in V. Ya. Bryusov’s short prose, which allows to draw the following conclusion: the portrait details that he introduces into the text serve to strengthen the multi-layered imagery of his works, and in “The Earth’s Axis” collection they assist in creating the tone of the narrative. The second part focuses on the portraits in A. Bely’s short novel “Kotik Letaev”, in which his descriptions of characters’appearance was influenced by his interest in anthroposophy and its concept of various bodies that a person consists of (the astral body, the ethereal body and the physical body). Bely was not interested in the “biological” aspect of a person. He depicts mental state of his characters and their fictional metamorphoses, which in turn motivate the inclusion of portrait characteristics in the text. Thus, the Russian literature of the 20th century saw the rise of a new approach to depicting a character’s psychological state, which in turn led to changes in the traditional methods of visualization of character appearance in the artistic texts.

The modernization of the Russian education policy of the intercultural communication era is marked by the inclusion of English as an academic subject along with the academic subject “Russian language” in the content of primary linguistic education. The problem of a search for the ways and means of its integration as a condition for raising the level of students’ linguistic competence is based on its integrative nature, sensitivity of the primary school age for its manifestation, the need for its content definition beyond the framework of learning a single language, and the specificity of its formation based on the systemic activity-centered approach to education. The novelty of the problem formulation, its conceptual understanding and theoretico-methodological solutions, specified in relation to the urgent material of the English borrowed vocabulary, determine the relevance of the material published. The article suggests an authored conception of formation of linguistic competence in the context of integration of the primary linguistic education through a comparative analysis of Russian and English, which is in line with the natural mechanisms of the development of linguistic competence as a cognitive-representative psychological structure. Such an approach helps to substantiate the components of linguistic competence and the typology of the corresponding educational language tasks aimed at their formation. The study models the corresponding educational system comprising the target, substantive-procedural, evaluative and effective components. The system is supplemented with a didactic support and is specified through the construction of an integrated educational module for the study of lexical borrowings. The results of the study may be of interest for domestic and foreign science in the search for concrete didactic solutions of the problem of integration of school education with reference to the specificity of its subject areas, to build the education process, holistic in its content and nature-friendly in the ways of teaching, in the correlation of competence-based and systemic activity-centered approaches.

The paper analyzes Bella Akhmadulina’s poetry of the late 1970s–80s, published in her books “The Mystery” (1983) and “The Garden” (1987). Researchers identify these books as the beginning of her literary maturity. In his review of “The Mystery”, Yu. Kublanovsky stated that the book had singled the poet out of the context of values dominating Soviet culture. Poetics of space is the subject matter of this paper. In contrast to the previous works that addressed this topic, the paper does not analyze the individual topoi, such as “the garden”, “the house” or “the road”, but focuses on space itself as a category of poetic vision, expressed by the semantics of the lexeme “space”, its perception by the poet and the specificity of its prosody. In the poems of the studied period, “space” became the focal point of Akhmadulina’s poetic reflection. It was manifested in the generalization of its semantics and the recurrence of the word in her texts. Space became both the object of reflection and the subject of action. Akhmadulina’s appeal to space expressed her turn to the ontological foundations of values. Analysis of the semantics of the category of space shows that at this stage, it had become a metonymy of the highest principle of Being, which is later identified in the framework of Christianity. Developing the idea of the role of space in Akhmadulina’s poetry, the paper poses a hypothesis that the experience of “space” determines such a prosodic feature of her poems as their relative redundancy, frequently criticized by literary critics. Akhmadulina’s poems of the period develop the motif of the verse and space isomorphism. The duration of verse echoes an endless approach to the mystery of space. An additional foundation for the aesthetic conditioning of verse duration may be found in the phatic function, which is enabled in the structure of poetic communication. It is determined by the specificity of the addressee – the incomprehensible space itself. Keeping in contact with it, i. e. continuing to speak, becomes an intrinsically valuable concern of the speaker. In terms of literary history, Akhmadulina’s concept of space is deeply connected with B. Pasternak’s poetry.

The study proposes an interpretation of Maggie Gee’s short story The Artist (2006) through Bakhtinian perspective, which enables its reading both as a piece of social criticism and as a mediation about the true artist’s capacity for empathy and responsiveness towards the Other. A nontrivial meditation about the dimensions of being an Artist is conceived in an elaborate narrative, revealing the protagonist’s lack of ethical consciousness and sensitivity through some formal means. The first set of means foregrounds monological aspects of Emma’s (a would-be artist) approaching Boris (a migrant worker), which leads to his objectivized image, and its silencing as an equal subject. The ‘central consciousness’ mode of narration with signs of unreliability is combined with instances of the unexpected shifts from Emma’s to Boris’s point of view, some effects of ellipsis, and a ‘circular story’ structure in order to provide a key to satirical message of the author. The second set of formal means are signs and symbols, which represent lack of protagonist’s sensitivity and ‘answerability’ to the Other: the protagonist’s ability to perform (verbally and corporeally) with empathy is questioned. Her vision is highly selective and displaced, which is rendered through ‘ostranenie’ (Shklovsky). Ironic and playful use of title is combined with a repetition of attributive ‘sensitive’, used and understood in a different way all through the story, which deconstructs a banal love story and widespread cultural preconceptions, gives way to a social drama of migrants’ silencing, and finally questions the artist’s ethics.