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Галина Рылькова. Странная история: Чехов и Тургенев.

В статье рассматривается пресловутый факт доставки тела Чехова из Германии в Россию в устричном вагоне (июль 1904 г.) в свете теории «страха влияния» Гарольда Блума. Доказывается, что вагон-холодильник для свежих устриц был своего рода скрытым благословением (знаком первородства и признания Чехова), а не видом наказания, как было принято считать ранее.


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Galina S. RYLKOVA. Saint or Monster? Anna Akhmatova in the 21st Century

В статье рассматриваются особенности биографического письма вообще, а также то, как менялся и меняется образ Анны Ахматовой в соответсвии с духом времени. In April 1966, one month after Anna Akhmatova’s death, a minor literary critic, M. Busin, accused Soviet censorship of inflicting permanent damage on Akhmatova’s poetic legacy. We certainly don’t know Akhmatova’s poetic legacy in its entirety. The fine mesh of the [Communist] Party censorship sieve has let through only some of its pitiful crumbs. Some of her legacy has reached us by roundabout ways. A lot of it, however, has undoubtedly been lost irrevocably. What the late poet’s friends manage to preserve from the party-driven vandalism will become fully known to us only after the seeds of the future free and noble Russia that she sowed sprout and communist despotism disintegrates into ashes. By the early 2000s, Busin’s dreams had come true beyond his wildest expectations. As it turns out, the disgraced Communists did not sink into ignominy alone. They also managed to drag down with them such seemingly indestructible constructs as the Russian Silver Age and one of its major constituent parts—the Akhmatova institution.2 Since perestroika, Akhmatova’s legacy has not only been successfully recovered, rediscovered, studied, and carefully stored for posterity in multivolume collections of her works of poetry and prose, in literary museums, and in numerous books of memoirs but also subjected to scrutiny and rigorous reconceptualization....
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Galina S. RYLKOVA. Oyster Fever: Chekhov and Turgenev.

В статье предпринимается попытка объяснить появление вагона для перевозки устриц, который до сих пор не дает покоя поклонникам Чехова. Unlike other cultural celebrities who happened to die in desired and desirable cities like Venice (Wagner) or Paris (Oscar Wilde), Anton Chekhov died in a less than spectacular German resort for convalescing tubercular patients. As Chekhov’s letters reveal, his last trip was tedious and painfully meaningless on all accounts. Whatever Chekhov might have thought about the conclusion of his life, his funeral was far from boring. Olga Knipper’s immediate reaction was to bury her husband in Germany. But her plans were quickly dashed. At the request of the family, friends, and various cultural figures, Chekhov’s body was transported back to Russia and buried in Moscow on July 9 at the cemetery of the New Virgin Convent. Curiously, on July 5, the newspaper Moskovskie vedomosti reported the outbreak of a typhoid epidemic that spread from Constantinople and the Marble Sea to England and France. >>...
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