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In 1937, when Bulgakov was working on Master i Margarita and suffering from rejection by the theatre community, an old friend appealed to him: "Вы ведь государство в государстве. Сколько это может продолжаться? Надо сдаваться, все сдались. Один вы остались. Это глупо." And indeed "государство в государстве" ("a state within a state") is an appropriate way of describing a man who was feverishly working on a modernist novel at the height of socialist realism. The very fact that Master i Margarita was written in the oppressive environment of the 1930s makes it a unique modernist work, for it emerges as a protest against socialist realism and a defense of artistic freedom. In this respect the modernist qualities of Bulgakov's novel acquire a new dimension because Master i Margarita becomes a kind of artistic devil, fulfilling the traditional diabolic role of opposing authority. This is why Woland, as a character, is the metonymic expression of the novel's revolt.
Timothy Findley's "The Wars" is a very powerful and disturbing book. Despite the novel's historically distant setting, the events of "The Wars" do not seem distant at all: the reader is brought close to the horrible violence of World War I and its devastating impact on a young mind. The question is why? The topic is certainly not new — we are аll too familiar with the World War I period. The theme is also an old one — a young man's loss of innocence and baptism by fire on the battlefield. The novelty and vividness of Findley's work are attributable to another source: its form. I hope to show that one artistic device in particular — de-automatization — is largely responsible for the novel's powerful impact on the modern reader.
Vsevolod M. Garshin's story "Four Days" ("Четыре дня") made the author famous when it was published in 1877. Intended as a strong anti·war statement and based on a true incident during the Russian-Turkish war (1877-78), "Four Days" is the interior monologue of a wounded soldier left for dead on an empty battlefield. His last name, Ivanov, which is traditionally considered to be the most common one in Russia, may suggest the idea of "everyman" in order to generalize the protagonists terrible experience on the battlefield into a broad anti-war message. The protagonist finds himself pinned down next to 0the body of a Turkish soldier whom he had killed just before being wounded. Forced to look at the corpse for a long time, Ivanov experiences terrible guilt, since he has never killed before. After four days of physical and mental agony, during which Ivanov reassesses his formerly idealistic attitude toward war and ends up condemning it as something far from glorious and noble, the protagonist is found by his regiment, and, unlike his real-life prototype, he survives (Henry. 47). Throughout the text we do not lave the confines of the protagonist's mind; as a result, the intense, relentless focus on his mental and physical anguish created by the interior monologue: immobilized by his wound, he becomes a prisoner of his own mind; as a result, the intense, relentless focus on his mental and physical anguish created by the interior monologue technique enhances the "horrors of war" effect intended by the author. At the same time the war-related situation and setting provide motivation for the wounded man's interior monologue: immobilized by his wound, he becomes a prisoner of his own mind and its therefore forced by circumtances to think through his entire predicament and its causes.
This contribution was prompted by events in East Germany that ultimately led to German unification. Many forces contributed to the collapse of the GDR as a separate state, the final and most visible was the mass exodus via Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The Communist regime resisted change when change was taking place in most of East Germanys neighbors to the east and southeast. But an ever increasing number of increasingly restless citizens insisted on it and, not given a chance to change matters by improving the system, effected the most radical change of all: they swept away an unresponsive, cynical and calcified government.
In his lifetime Daniil Charms only succeeded in publishing two of his poems for adults. Publicly he was a children's author: a job in the Soviet Union which traditionally attracted many writers whose literature for adults was either rejected by the official literary system or had to be hidden altogether if its creators wanted to avoid trouble.
In fact up to the present day it is still Charms the children's author who is best known and loved, although finally under new historical and political conditions the writer for adults has also been allowed to make his debut. However, whatever he wrote, Charms' work was always dominated by an absurdist world view, a view that usually denied all dogma or ideology. His only aim seems to have been to present a world upside down and play around with literary and other conventions, i.e. more than anything else he wanted to be different, acting as a sort of literary "punk".
Although Charms and his associates were preceded by European absurdist authors, such as A. Jarry (1873-1907), it is very difficult to establish any relationship of influence between examples of Western European absurdism and Daniil Charms. Nonetheless, Charms' work, as well as that of Jarry, Ionesco and Beckett, all share the "grotesquely comic as well as irrational" (Abrams 1981: 1) quality of the absurdist movement in its larger modernist context.
There is a caricature of Marcel Proust in which the despairing writer is consoled by a friend saying, 'Aber, aber, mon cher Marcel, nun versuchen Sie sich doch zu erinnern, wo Sie die Zeit verloren haben.'
Literature in general, not only A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, deals with a different form of memory than that of mnemonics, in which the hints of places lead to a retrieval of what has been stored there before. Nevertheless it is difficult to pinpoint the criteria that make this difference. How does literature transcend the technologically limited sense of memory in terms of a storage and retrieval system? ...
One of the most striking and unsettling elements in Venedikt Erofeev's novel "Moskva-Petuški" is the ending where Venja, the protagonist-narrator, is murdered by four mysterious executioners in the stairway of a downtown Moscow building. [...] The last sentence turns the entire preceding narrative into a paradox: the narrator indicates that he could not have told his story, since he ceased to exist as a consciousness ("soznanie") as soon as the action stopped. The fact of Venja's death itself does not necessarily cancel out his ability to tell about the events leading up to his demise: literature knows a number of beyond-the-grave narrators, e.g., the murdered Olivia in Anne Hebert's "Les fous de Bassan" or the dead samurai Tekehiko in Akutagawa Riunosuke's "In a grove". What makes Venja's narrative paradoxic is his own reference to the end of his cogitative activity. at the moment of death the hero ceases to think and should, logically, lose the ability to narrate. Normally, a dead narrator acquires his/her ability to narrate by supernatural means, e.g., via life after death, as in "Les Fous de Bassan" or through a medium, as in "In a Grove". Such postmortem loquacity may also remain unexplained. In "Moskva-Petuški", however, the dead narrator seems to stress that his death appears as the ultimate end: a point where everything, including time and consciousness, stops.
Ten years after writing "Spotted dog running along the seashore" ("Пегий пес, бегущий краем моря") Chingiz Aitmatov said that this novella was his favorite. Perhaps this is because it represents the essence of Aitmatov's artistic world view. The term "essence" is appropriate here because the setting and the characters of the novella are totally removed from the modem world and from history itself. Unburdened by the need to relate his artistic goals and philosophical interests to any specific socio-political context - a requirement made all the more problematic for an author writing within the Soviet literary system - Aitmatov was free to develop his favorite themes in a kind of "tabula rasa" medium. Thus, it was with absolute directness that the author could face questions dominating much of his fiction: the moral soundness of age-old values, the need for continuity in social development, the necessity of humanity's hannonious coexistence with nature, and the positive ethical value of myth.