From editor-in-Chief

Abstract

Dear colleagues, our authors and readers!

For this issue of the journal, we have chosen a classical theme of Russian philology: the literary text, limiting our interest to works of prose. The articles in this issue present the problems in different aspects.

The key concepts of literary text analysis are “author”, “addressee”, “character”, “other texts”. At the same time, it is difficult to talk about one thing, abstracting from others: for example, the author's manifestations are almost always oriented towards the addressee, dictated by the desire to impress them in one way or another. Other texts are found in the one under consideration, and these are the voices of other authors or characters. Given the difficulty of “separating the inseparable”, the articles were grouped into rubrics, bearing in mind the centrality of certain concepts for a particular experience of analysis.

Thus, the author and addressee are the main ones in the articles by Viktoria Didkovskaya, who analyzes the modern woman's detective story, and by Natalia Maksimova and Anna Maksimova, who are discussing classical works and their parallels with modern ones. The characters are in the center of attention of Irina Bashkova, which gave us a reason to place her article under the "Character Sphere" heading; it must be said that the characters are considered only in one aspect – speech behavior, which introduces an important motive into the vocabulary of the works.

A special section, “Qualities of the Prose Text”, is comprised of an article by Svetlana Solovyova, who recently – in September of this year – defended her doctoral dissertation on the syntax of Pasternak's prose. Montage is one of the qualities of the prose she studied, and it is shown in the article included in this issue on the example of one of the poet's works. I consider this analysis impressive, subtle and deep, demonstrating how the principles of the construction of fictional prose correspond with the principles of other arts.

In our regular column “Young Voices” an article by a post-graduate student Olga Navolotskaya is published; it presents observations on the stylistic device of the prose of a modern British writer, which characterizes his poetics. It is worth recalling that the second young voice sounds in an article about the permeability of prose for other people's voices, this is an article by student Anna Maksimova.

Speaking about other authors of this issue, it is worth mentioning that they are doctors and candidates of philological sciences, a graduate student and a student representing Cherepovets State University, Novosibirsk State Theater Institute and Novosibirsk State Pedagogical University, Siberian Federal University and, of course, Yaroslav-the-Wise Novgorod State University.

The range of literary texts they studied was not narrow: it included female detectives T. Ustinova and E. Mikhalkova; classical works by M. Bulgakov, L. Petrushevskaya, E. Vodolazkin and N. Gogol, which echoes the “literary descendants”; stories by V. Shukshin; prose by B. Pasternak. In addition, the novels by British writers Joan Harris and Nick Hornby turned out to be in the sphere of attention of researchers of fiction. One can probably say that this issue of our journal brings its own modest touches into the complex picture of research on the literary text.

I sincerely thank everyone who responded to the invitation and wrote an article for this issue of the journal. Special thanks to our reviewers – Boris Norman from Minsk and Vladimir Zaika from Veliky Novgorod.

Until we meet again on the electronic pages of our journal!

T. V. Shmeleva