Academic literature on the topic 'Contemporary Russian literature'

This is a review of recent English-language scholarship on the development of Russian identity since the collapse of the USSR in 1991. The first part examines literature on the economic and political changes in the Russian Federation, revealing how scholars became more sceptical about the possibility of Russia building a Western-type liberal democracy. The second part investigates approaches to the study of Russian national identity. The experience of empire, in both the tsarist and Soviet periods, gave Russians a weak sense of nationhood; ethnic Russians identified with the multi-national Soviet Union. Seeking legitimacy for the new state, President El'tsin sought to create a civic identity focused on the multi-national Russian Federation. The Communist and nationalist opposition continued to promote an imperial identity, focused on restoring the USSR or creating some other formation including the Russian-speaking population in the former Soviet republics. The final section discusses accounts of the two Chechen wars, which scholars see as continuing Russia's imperial policy and harming relations with Russia's Muslim population. President Putin's co-operation with the West against ‘terrorism’ has not led the West to accept Russia as one of its own, due to increasing domestic repression and authoritarianism.

This short literature review’s goal is to examine available papers regarding the study of Russian Rouble determinants. For purpose of analysis, 35 articles were studied among which 22 were selected, for a total of 414 pages shelled. This work analyzes most recent empirical articles, in order to identify factors responsible for the Russian currency fluctuations. Different models will be compared to learn if some are more effective than others, from basic Linear regression to Structural vector autoregressive, through Ordinary least squares or Vector error correction models. Moreover, a very special and particular attention will be paid to variables used. Which combinations of variables are used to study factors influencing the Russian currency? While it seems vital to include oil prices, interest rate, and consumer price index, is it important to have them all together in the same model? Are results among papers similar? In addition, would it be necessary to add variables such as GDP, gold price, gas price, M2 aggregate or sanctions? However, this paper will compare data from each model and try to find out if there is one best way to study the Russian currency determinants.

Throughout the 20th century, Russian children’s literature in Latvia was a unique phenomenon. Against the background of the general trends of Soviet children’s literature, Latvian children’s literature (in both Latvian and Russian) developed in a space that was less constrained in respect of ideological censorship. 21st century children’s literature in Latvia is developing both taking into account the previous history and current trends. The article is devoted to the specific features of children’s literature in Russian, taking into account the general status of the Russian language as a foreign language and general trends in the socio-cultural space of Latvia. The study considers two main issues. First, it is a sociological analysis of the situation: an assortment of children’s books, the specifics of the school programme, awareness of contemporary Latvian and Russian children’s literature. On the other hand, the corpus of texts of contemporary children’s literature is studied, and an overview of the oeuvre of contemporary Latvian authors is presented. The material for literary analysis was the book by Vladimir Novikov, “The Mischief of the Obedient Martins”. In the course of the analysis, the specifics of the traditional children’s story, the cultural and historical context of the cross-border identity of the author and his potential readers, the specifics of the contemporary narrative, the identification of the concept “one’s own – other’s” were revealed.

This article attempts to comprehend the perception of contemporary Chinese literature in Russia. One of the main research areas of Russian Sinology focused on the study of Chinese literature is Chinese classical literature and modern literature. However, at the turn of the XX-XXI centuries, the interest for contemporary Chinese literature becomes more and more obvious. In recent years, the translation of contemporary Chinese literary works has been continuously developing. The most typical characteristic of contemporary Chinese literature in the interpretation of Russian sinologists is pluralism, which is understood as the simultaneous existence of various literary trends, ideologies, genres, etc. The author analyzes the main trends of reception in the research of Russian scientists and comes to the conclusion that the most interesting for sinologists is the problem of attention to “People” in contemporary Chinese literature, the problem of tradition and modernity, the works of Chinese women writers.

This article studies translated Russian literature as a factor of the development of contemporary Russian-Chinese intercultural communication. The authors examine the main traits of the reception of Russian literature in contemporary China, the mechanisms of the transformation of the interest of the Chinese public at large in the works of Russian writers, and the reasons for the sustainable role of Russian classic literature (A. Pushkin, M. Lermontov, N. Gogol, I. Turgenev, F. Dostoyevsky, L. Tolstoy, A. Chekhov, M. Gorky, M. Sholokhov, and N. Ostrovsky) as a basic element of the image of Russia. The authors identify the reasons why the Russian literature of the second half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries whose translations are available in China (some of them have received the Best Foreign Novel of the Twenty-First Century award) has not managed to change the established structure of priorities remaining at the periphery of contemporary processes of intercultural communication. It is demonstrated that the reception of classical and contemporary Russian literature in China has followed two scenarios, i.e. “profound” and “superficial”. The study of works of Chinese literary critics and cultural figures (Liu Wenfei, Wang Jiezhi, Cui Guoxin, etc.) makes it possible to identify the main criteria for the selection and perception of literary works in the conceptual, ethical and stylistic domains, and the domains of plot and imagery. It is emphasised that 21st-century Russian literature, which has lost its function as a model for emulation and a standard for copying, is interesting to Chinese specialists and readers as a corpus of texts that reflects aesthetic issues and ethnocultural regional traits without generating qualitatively new worldviews. The authors present the results of the quantitative and qualitative analysis of digital resources (Baidu, Sogou, etc.) that reveal the main features of the contemporary perception of Russian literature by Chinese Internet users.

Ethical totalitarism in the sphere of culture – a feature of the present time – is more dangerous than ethical indifferentism. One of the possibilities for realizing the principle of ethical independenсe is focusing on aesthetic issues. The history of Russian literature shows that the less ethics bounds there is in creativity, the more successful is the creativity itself, and it is less dangerous to exist within the framework of some generally accepted moral codes than in situation of self-limiting by ethics rules. It turns out that, on the one hand, the rights of individuality are expanding in the modern world, on the other, the behavior of an individual is strictly regulated by the rules that are put forward by representatives of certain social groups. In the realm of aesthetic experimentation, the author seems to have more rights than responsibilities; in the sphere of ethics author is limited by the dominated norms of social institutions.