This article examines the origins and meaning of the metaphor of the Ocean and Streams, by which Pierre de Ronsard was compared to Homer. Dating back to Quintilian, the metaphor had become a topos by the mid-16th century, thanks to the admirers of his talent and his own efforts. Throughout his poetic career, Ronsard presented himself to readers as a classical author, selecting genres and forms, as well as the book presentation of his texts. Following the publication of the four books of La Franciade, the epithet “French Homer” was definitively bestowed upon the poet. This motif appears repeatedly in the posthumous collection Ronsard’s Tomb (1586) compiled by his executor Claude Binet, as well as in the article on Ronsard in Antoine Du Verdier’s Bibliothèque Françoise (1585). With La Franciade, national culture finally had its epic — the last genre lacking to equal the ancient heritage, according to authors of poetic arts in the second half of the sixteenth century. However, Ronsard himself compared his work to the Iliad, but calling it a “novel,” or poetic fiction. He built the narrative around the figure of the protagonist, implicitly orienting himself towards another example: Ariosto’s Orlando furioso.

The article continues the work on the publication of the Valery Brusov’s journals. For the first time, we publish uncut entries from January 1, 1892 to October 16, 1892. In the proposed passage, Bryusov describes in detail the events of his life: studying at the Polivanov gymnasium, poetic and prose experiences, impressions of books he read, a series of his lovers, and his first acting jobs in an amateur theater. By the nature of the entries, the early Bryusov’s journal is similar to other youth journals of the turn of the 19th–20th centuries. For composing the commentary, as in previous publications, the article uses the material of Notebooks, in which the poet not only entered his poems but also analyzed his own work, and recorded the details of his life. For a more accurate interpretation of the diary, its text was compared with the manuscript and typewriting of the poet’s wife, I.M. Bryusova, who prepared the first publication of the diaries. The publication is provided with a preface and a detailed historical and literary commentary.

For the first time, the article highlights the history of A.P. Platonov’s appeals to the USSR Literary Fund, an organization created for the writers’ material and consumer services, which included medical care and sanatorium treatment, improvement of housing conditions, the issuance of allowances, loans, and scholarships, etc. A survey of the foundation of this organization in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI) for the period from 1934 to 1954 revealed numerous references to Platonov, as well as three of his previously unpublished letters. The article contains extracts from the minutes of meetings of the Board of the Literary Fund and other documents, which record decisions on issues of assistance to Platonov. A separate group consists of materials related to the posthumous period: estimates for funerals, decisions on the installation of a tombstone monument, petitions of the commission on literary heritage, etc. The published documents allow us to reconstruct some details of Platonov’s biography, supplement the chronicle of his life and work, as well as the history of perpetuating the writer’s memory.

The article examines Andrei Platonov’s unfinished novel The Macedonian Officer. A Novel from Ancient Times, which launches Platonov’s so-called eastern cycle. The novel is set in the 4th century BC, against the background of Alexander the Great’s conquests in Central Asia, but in the imaginary country of Kutemalia and with a number of details from modern life. Some of the characters are real historical figures: Alexander the Great, Callisthenes the chronicler of his campaigns, Aristotle and Plato. Platonov endows others with names from ancient history: Firs, Potamon, Phersalia, Glaucus, and Clusium. There are two characters to whom Platonov gives invented names: King Ozni of Kutemalia and Ophria, a slave from the silkworm plantations. The characters with ancient background as well as features of Greek history in the novel’s plot create an illusion of historicity. However, an analysis of the historical aspects of the plot, including the names from ancient history, allows us to conclude that the novel is not so much historical as pseudo-historical. A comparison of the “fantastic” scenes of the novel with the facts of ancient and modern history shows us that the novel’s “ancient” component is an artistic device, allowing the author to portray modernity under the guise of antiquity. The article examines the sources of the narrative strategy and the novel’s image system, conceived by the author as a caricature.

This article sheds light on the continuity between the poetic reforms initiated by the French Pléiade and the English Areopagus in the context of the doctus poeta ideal — the learned poet as a cultural reformer and moral legislator. Particular attention is devoted to the figures of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser as central representatives of the English circle of intellectuals who sought to reshape vernacular poetry in dialogue with classical and European traditions. Through a discussion of key texts — Sidney’s The Defence of Poesy and The Old Arcadia, as well as Spenser’s Complaints and The Shepheardes Calender — the study examines the literary embodiment of the doctus poeta figure via intertextual networks, experimentation with poetic forms, genre hybridity, and stylistic innovation. Special focus is given to the influence of French sources, particularly Joachim du Bellay, and to the role of tradition as a generative force in the construction of poetic authority. The article argues that the aesthetic and intellectual agenda of the members of the Areopagus group had a lasting impact on the formation of the early modern English literary canon.

The article examines animalistic motifs in Heinrich von Kleist’s works through the prism of Rousseauian and Kantian philosophy. The comparison of the animal and the human world was one of the most common methods with which Kleist depicted the crisis of humanity caused by the collapse of Enlightenment ideals and the historical and social catastrophe that followed the French Revolution at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. By polemics with Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schiller, Kleist rethinks the traditional opposition of culture and nature, as well as the concept of morality. Through the prism of the essay “On the Puppet Theater,” where Kleist theoretically comprehended his views on the place of man in the universe, the article shows the evolution of animal images in his works of art, starting from the particular situation of The Schroffenstein Family and ending with the nationalistic pathos of The Battle of Hermann. The core character for Kleist is a woman who deviates from her traditional role and is associated with the animal, as shown in the example of such characters as Penthesilea, Kätchen from Heilbronn, and Thusnelda from the The Battle of Hermann. Dehumanization is one of the constant and most important motifs of Kleist’s work.

The relevance of the research topic is caused by the necessity to reconstruct the picture of the perception of L.N. Andreev’s early work in literary criticism of the early 1900s considering modern approaches to the nature and poetics of criticism. The article aims to identify the different critical strategies manifested during the scandalous polemic around Andreev’s story “In the Fog.” The study relies on such concepts as “creative strategy of criticism,” “polemics,” and “scandal.” The article shows that the story’s fate after publication played out according to a scandalous scenario. The results of analyzing and comparing various responses to the work highlight such critical strategies as confrontational and defensive. In turn, the so-called defensive strategy includes tactics of apologizing for the author and the story, a constructive approach, as well as a confrontational strategy directed against the opponents of the work. The author of the article concludes that in the structure of all the speeches about the story, a significant place was taken by criticism “on the occasion of,” such as journalistic statements about literature and morality, about the writer’s right to depict negative aspects of life, but mainly about the problems of adolescent sexuality. The article argues that the comparison of the short stories with Russian classics of the 19th century and the best modern writers contributed to the consolidation of Andreev’s success.

For the first time, the publication introduces a multi-act play by A. Platonov, restored from the materials from two collections of the writer from the Moscow (Manuscript Department of the Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences) and St. Petersburg (Manuscript Department of the Institute of Russian Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences) archives into scientific circulation. The play is not titled, not dated, not finished, and contains copious unfinished edits. The introductory article to the publication substantiates the dating of the play, indicates the close inclusion of the work in the context of the autumn of 1939, and traces some of the realities of 1939 reflected in the work.

In the book “Production of Presence. What Meaning Cannot Convey,” H.-U. Gumbrecht defines aesthetic experience as “an oscillation between presence effects and meaning effects,” but presence effects are researched relatively less often in literary and film theory. How is the presence effect produced in literature and cinema? In the article, the author examines both cinematic and fictional “excess” and “lacunae” that participate in the production of the presence effect, as well as other means that shift the focus from the production of meaning to the creation of a bodily, sensually experienced contact. Haptic images are involved in creating such an experience, activating the tactile perception of the reader. In recreating the effect of presence, the speed of representation is also involved: it allows us to simulate the non-mediated contact of the reader with the narrative world. The presence effects in literature and cinema also problematize the mimetic interaction between the reader and the narrative: it is possible to talk about establishing “bodily-mimetic” relations that would characterize the peculiarity of the reader’s experience shaped by the effects of presence.

The article raises the question of the artistic representation of Tolstoyism by analyzing the works of two authors, I.A. Bunin and S. Karonin (N.E. Petropavlovsky). The researcher aims to show the difference in writers’ approaches, justifying them not only by the peculiarities of individual authors’ perceptions but also by objective cultural and historical processes. Based on the thesis of E.V. Agarin about the division of Tolstoyism into two groups, communitarian and individualistic, which also have internal differentiation (the communitarian group is represented in the form of communities and artels; individualistic — in the form of neighboring settlements, in closed farm life, in the phenomenon of vagrancy), the author hypothesizes that Bunin and Karonin in their works gave not only a different image of Tolstoyism but also an image of fundamentally different Tolstoyism. Bunin’s approach emphasized the individual embodiments of Tolstoy’s ideals, Karonin — in the representation of their social forms, which is directly related to the discussions about Tolstoyism in the populist environment. The portrait characteristics of the Tolstoy characters help clarify this duality of Tolstoy’s teaching. The article concludes that the difference in approaches to Tolstoyism in Bunin and Karonin’s prose is connected with the internal contradiction of Tolstoy’s teaching, on the one hand, fundamentally denying any dogmatism from the standpoint of counterculture, antistatism, and criticism of the institution of the church, on the other — dogmatizing its moral foundations and their public presentation.