Vasyl’ Stus and Russian Culture: A Complex Issue

This article is part of a larger project, aimed at studying the many influences and intertextual connections of Vasyl’ Stus, a key figure for contemporary Ukrainian cultural identity, with writers of both Western, Ukrainian and Russian literature. Scholarship on Stus is growing rapidly, yet on the whole it fails to grasp the breadth of his knowledge of foreign literatures. More specifically, studies on the difficult last twenty years of his life often tend to obviate a truly scientific approach to his literary heritage. For fairly obvious reasons, one of the most neglected aspects of his biography as a poet is the role of Russian language, culture and literature in his artistic development. This article argues that a detailed study of the writer's Russian readings and of the possible influence they might have had on his work would help better understand his literary genealogy, his way of thinking and his poetic work. Discussions of works and authors of Russian literature constitute a significant part of Stus's letters. Russian (Soviet) reviews and translations were often for him the key to various foreign literatures and cultures. Russian writers and thinkers aroused his interest in a particular, “privileged” way. Special attention is also paid to the role of Donbas culture in shaping the identity of the young Stus.

The Thematic Composition of an Emigrant Autobiographical Novel: From “The Life of Arsenyev” by I. Bunin to “The Gift” by V. Nabokov. Part 1

Bunin’s novel “The Life of Arsenyev” is a completely new model, different from the classics of the 19 th century. In the novel “The life of Arsenyev” several themes are developed in a new way, in particular, the theme of aristocratic genealogy, it is deliberately deployed in all the richness of its cultural and historical semantics. The compositional rhythm of Bunin’s novel is subject, as often in the stories of this author, to elegiac laws with alternating and contrasting semantics of death, breakage, failure and rebirth, connection, love, life and creativity. Nabokov reproduces in the novel “The gift” many features of the model developed by Bunin: poetic name and literary genealogy of the character. Expansion of literary and cultural subtexts through the development of genealogical and travel motifs; the elegiac alternation of the theme of death, rebirth and its connection with the eventual Nabokov plot.

Feminismo y escritura: los ensayos de Diamela Eltit

I propose in this article to look into the essays of Diamela Eltit and focus on two topics: feminism and writing. For this purpose, I will analyze a text corpus published in the books Emergencias (2000), Signos vitales (2008) and Réplicas (2016) from three ideological and discursive operations: the deconstruction of the body, the recognition of the female literary genealogy and the reflection about writing. My hypothesis is that the author’s essay practice constitutes a critical exercise through which a multiplicity of voices is summoned in order to denature and reconsider the paths of the body, the subjectivity and the language within the frame of the contemporary societies. The theoretical and methodological frame tends to articulate the knowledge of cultural studies and of feminist critique. For this reason, this paper is not only expecte to explore a poorly tackled facet within the studies about Eltit, but also to characterize the variations and tensions related to feminism and writing that gravitate in her literary work.

‘The Secret Dotted Line’

This chapter explores the ways in which Irish writers have self-consciously invoked Irish-American return and/or the roots journey to address questions of literary genealogy. In other words, this chapter discusses narratives in which a thematic preoccupation with return also underwrites metafictional concerns with literary forebears, the Irish literary tradition and artistic exile. Exploring texts that span 1960 to 2008 and the work of prolific, exiled writers Brian Moore (1921-1999) and Edna O’Brien (b. 1930) as well as the much younger writer Denis Kehoe (b. 1978), this chapter configures ‘return’ in multiple senses: the literal returns of fictional characters to Ireland; return as ‘restoration’ (of occluded histories; of banned books); and return as an opportunity to engage with (literary) genealogies that do not conform to the gendered and heteronormative orthodoxies of the Irish literary tradition.