War and Revolution in St. Petersburg : Modernist Links in the Poetry of Edith Södergran and Anna Andreevna Akhmatova

Important modernists in their own countries, Anna Akhmatova and Edith Södergran are compared in this dissertation as poets whose poetry reflects the climactic events of the early twentieth century in Finland and Russia. A comparatist, biographical and historical approach is used to uncover the circumstances surrounding these events. First the poets’ early works are reviewed and their contemporaries are mentioned to provide a poetic context. Then a brief review of Finnish and Russian history situates them historically. Next, the rich literary diversity of St. Petersburg’s Silver Age is presented and the work of the poets is viewed in context before their poetry is compared, as the First World War, October Revolution and subsequent Finnish Civil War impact their writing. While biography is not the primary focus, it becomes important as inevitably the writers’ lives are changed by cataclysmic events and the textual analysis of the poems in Swedish, Russian and English shows the impact of war on their poetry. These two poets have not been compared before in a critical review in English and this work contributes to needed work in English. They share certain common modernist traits: attention to the word, an intimate, unconventional voice, and a concern with audience. In addition, they both reject formal traditions while they adopt new forms and use modern, outside influences such as art, architecture and philosophy as subject matter and a lens through which to focus their poetry. While it may seem that Anna Akhmatova was the most socially aware poet, because of the censorship she endured under Stalin, my research has revealed that actually Edith Södergran showed the most social consciousness. Thus, a contrast of the poets’ themes reveals these differences in their approaches. Both poets articulated a vibrant response to war and revolution becoming modernists in the process. In their final works created in the years before their deaths, they reveal the solace they found in nature as well as final mentions of the violent events of their youth. Keywords: St. Petersburg, Modernism, Symbolism, Acmeism, Silver Age, Finland-Swedish literature

Why Do Russians Support Censorship of the Media?

This article analyses support for censorship in Russia as part of the democratization process. Censorship has been an important part of Russian history and it was strengthened during the Soviet era. After the collapse of the Soviet system formal censorship was banned even though the reality has been different. Therefore it is not strange that many Russians would like to limit the freedom of the media and to censor certain topics. The views of Russians on censorship have been studied on the basis of a survey carried out in 2007. According to the results, three different dimensions of censorship were found. These dimensions include moral censorship, political censorship, and censorship of religious materials. Support for these dimensions varies on the basis of socio-demographic characteristics and media use. The article concludes that many Russians reject new phenomena, while support for the censorship of political criticism is not as high, but political censorship seems to enjoy more support among elites than among the common people.

Canon and Beyond : Edvard Fazer and the Imperial Russian Ballet 1908 - 1910

The study explores the first appearances of Russian ballet dancers on the stages of northern Europe in 1908 1910, particularly the performances organized by a Finnish impresario, Edvard Fazer, in Helsinki, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Berlin. The company, which consisted of dancers from the Imperial Theatres of St. Petersburg, travelled under the name The Imperial Russian Ballet of St. Petersburg. The Imperial Russian Ballet gave more than seventy performances altogether during its tours of Finland, Sweden, Denmark and central Europe. The synchronic approach of the study covers the various cities as well as genres and thus stretches the rather rigid geographical and genre boundaries of dance historiography. The study also explores the role of the canon in dance history, revealing some of the diversity which underlies the standard canonical interpretation of early twentieth-century Russian ballet by bringing in source material from the archives of northern Europe. Issues like the central position of written documentation, the importance of geographical centres, the emphasis on novelty and reformers and the short and narrow scholarly tradition have affected the formation of the dance history canon in the west, often imposing limits on the historians and narrowing the scope of research. The analysis of the tours concentrates on four themes: virtuosity, character dancing, the idea of the expressive body, and the controversy over ballet and new dance. The debate concerning the old and new within ballet is also touched upon. These issues are discussed in connection with each city, but are stressed differently depending on the local art scene. In Copenhagen, the strong local canon based on August Bournonville s works influenced the Danish criticism of Russian ballet. In Helsinki, Stockholm and Berlin, the lack of a solid local canon made critics and audiences more open to new influences, and ballet was discussed in a much broader cultural context than that provided by the local ballet tradition. The contemporary interest in the more natural, expressive human body, emerging both in theatre and dance, was an international trend that also influenced the way ballet was discussed. Character dancing, now at low ebb, played a central role in the success of the Imperial Russian Ballet, not only because of its exoticism but also because it was considered to echo the kind of performing body represented by new dance forms. By exploring this genre and its dancers, the thesis brings to light artists who are less known in the current dance history canon, but who made considerable careers in their own time.

Visions of Past Glory: Nationalism and the Construction of Early Finnish History

The study is an examination of how the distant national past has been conceived and constructed for Finland from the mid-sixteenth century to the Second World War. The author argues that the perception and need of a national 'Golden Age' has undergone several phases during this period, yet the perceived Greatness of the Ancient Finns has been of great importance for the growth and development of the fundamental concepts of Finnish nationalism. It is a question reaching deeper than simply discussing the Kalevala or the Karelianism of the 1890s. Despite early occurrences of most of the topics the image-makers could utilize for the construction of an Ancient Greatness, a truly national proto-history only became a necessity after 1809, when a new conceptual 'Finnishness' was both conceived and brought forth in reality. In this process of nation-building, ethnic myths of origin and descent provided the core of the nationalist cause - the defence of a primordial national character - and within a few decades the antiquarian issue became a standard element of the nationalist public enlightenment. The emerging, archaeologically substantiated, nationhood was more than a scholarly construction: it was a 'politically correct' form of ethnic self-imaging, continuously adapting its message to contemporary society and modern progress. Prehistoric and medieval Finnishness became even more relevant for the intellectual defence of the nation during the period of Russian administrative pressure 1890-1905. With independence the origins of Finnishness were militarized even further, although the 'hot' phase of antiquarian nationalism ended, as many considered the Finnish state reestablished after centuries of 'dependency'. Nevertheless, the distant past of tribal Finnishness and the conceived Golden Age of the Kalevala remained obligating. The decline of public archaeology is quite evident after 1918, even though the national message of the antiquarian pursuits remained present in the history culture of the public. The myths, symbols, images, and constructs of ancient Finnishness had already become embedded in society by the turn of the century, like the patalakki cap, which remains a symbol of Finnishness to this day. The method of approach is one of combining a broad spectrum of previously neglected primary sources, all related to history culture and the subtle banalization of the distant past: school books, postcards, illustrations, festive costumes, drama, satirical magazines, novels, jewellery, and calendars. Tracing the origins of the national myths to their original contexts enables a rather thorough deconstruction of the proto-historical imaginary in this Finnish case study. Considering Anthony D. Smith's idea of ancient 'ethnies' being the basis for nationalist causes, the author considers such an approach in the Finnish case totally misplaced.

The Vexing Case of Igor Shafarevich, a Russian Political Thinker

The Russian mathematician, academician and former dissident Igor Shafarevich (b. 1923) is commonly mentioned in Western scholarly studies on perestroika and post-perestroika-era Russian politics as one of the most notable anti-Semites and extreme nationalists of the country. This notoriety owes to Shafarevich’s old samizdat article Russophobia, which was published in 1988. The scandal surrounding Russophobia came to a head when the president of The National Academy of Sciences in the United States asked Shafarevich, its honorary member, to resign. Nothing like this had ever happened in the academy’s history. The present dissertation discusses Shafarevich’s political activities, his texts and ideas as well as their reception. Particular attention is given to Russophobia, whose detailed examination proves very clearly that its reputation as an anti-Semitic text is groundless. The reasons for Russophobia’s hasty but fierce condemnation were many, but only one was that when the Soviet system began to tumble, it was commonly assumed that a vigorous rise in anti-Semitism and extreme nationalism in the Soviet Union/Russia would be just a matter of time. Many observers were highly sensitised to detecting its signs and symptoms. The dissertation also shows that most of those to write the first criticisms of Russophobia and to liken Shafarevich to the ideologues of Nazi Germany were the same people he had criticised in Russophobia for their deterministic view of history and irrational manner of connecting things for the purpose of fanning the flames of distrust between Russia’s Jews and Russians. In retrospect, it is fairly evident that Shafarevich actually managed to effectively “neutralise” the message of many of those obsessed with the Jews among his Russian contemporaries and contributed to the fact that anti-Jewish sentiments have been a great deal less popular in post-communist Russia than so many had feared and expected. The thesis also thoroughly discusses Shafarevich’s other texts and activities before Russophobia’s appearance and after it. In the 1970s, Shafarevich was one of the best-known dissidents in the Soviet Union. He worked together with academician Andrei Sakharov in a dissidents’ unofficial human rights committee and co-operated closely with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn before Solzhenitsyn’s exile. Then, during the chaotic years of perestroika, Shafarevich defended the basic rights of ordinary citizens and warned that the hype concerning democracy could become counterproductive if the most palpable result of the reforms was the disappearance of citizens’ basic security and elementary social justice. One of the conclusions of the thesis is that even if the world around Shafarevich has changed considerably, his views have remained essentially the same since the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The Saintly Madman : A Study of the Scholarly Reception History of Buile Shuibhne

This study examines the scholarly reception history of an early Irish text, Buile Shuibhne (The Frenzy of Suibhne), by focusing on the various theoretical and methodological presuppositions which have determined the scholars’ understanding of the text’s religious allegorical significance in the course of the 20th century. The reception-oriented inquiry takes the intersubjective aspect of literary interpretation as the basis for accentuating the importance of communally shared presumptions and reading strategies in the explication of interpretive variety. The materials of the study have been divided into four frameworks of interpretation: historical, pre-Christian, Christian and anthropological. This heuristic division does not denote mutually exclusive paradigms, but rather refers to perceived similarities within each group regarding the questions posed, and the evidence adduced, in textual analysis. The historical framework concentrates on the issues of the origins of the tale and the possible historicity of its main protagonist. The pre-Christian framework covers the theories of the shamanic, Indo-European and Celtic elements in the text, whereas the Christian framework includes readings emphasising the biblical, monastic and ascetic aspects of the tale. The anthropological framework in turn focuses on the parallels drawn between the narrative and the universal structure of the rites of passage. In addition to the examination of these four frameworks, the study also links the question of methodology with wider issues of authorship and textual integrity, and critically reconsiders the manner in which J.G. O'Keeffe's 1913 edition of the text has been reified in previous scholarship as a representation of a 12th century authorial original. The overall objective of the present case-study is to relate theoretical conceptions of literary theory, comparative religion and historiography to the study of early Irish narrative material by considering the communal and institutional dimension of meaning-making, and the implications of comparative methodology for historical research. In this aim, the prevailing methodological presuppositions informing the scholarly discourse on Buile Shuibhne are set against the wider context of Celtic Studies scholarship, in order to draw attention to the need to critically reflect upon the operations of knowledge production in future research.

Empire, Tourism, Nostalgia: Joseph Brodsky and Travel Writing

Joseph Brodsky, one of the most influential Russian intellectuals of the late Soviet period, was born in Leningrad in 1940, emigrated to the United States in 1972, received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987, and died in New York City in 1996. Brodsky was one of the leading public figures of Soviet emigration in the Cold War period, and his role as a model for the constructing of Russian cultural identities in the last years of the Soviet Union was, and still is, extremely important. One of Joseph Brodsky’s great contributions to Russian culture of the latter half of the twentieth century is the wide geographical scope of his poetic and prose works. Brodsky was not a travel writer, but he was a traveling writer who wrote a considerable number of poems and essays which relate to his trips and travels in the Soviet empire and outside it. Travel writing offered for Brodsky a discursive space for negotiating his own transculturation, while it also offered him a discursive space for making powerful statements about displacement, culture, history and geography, time and space—all major themes of his poetry. In this study of Joseph Brodsky’s travel writing I focus on his travel texts in poetry and prose, which relate to his post-1972 trips to Mexico, Brazil, Turkey, and Venice. Questions of empire, tourism, and nostalgia are foregrounded in one way or another in Brodsky’s travel writing performed in emigration. I explore these concepts through the study of tropes, strategies of identity construction, and the politics of representation. The theoretical premises of my work draw on the literary and cultural criticism which has evolved around the study of travel and travel writing in recent years. These approaches have gained much from the scholarly experience provided by postcolonial critique. Shifting the focus away from the concept of exile, the traditional framework for scholarly discussions of Brodsky’s works, I propose to review Brodsky’s travel poetry and prose as a response not only to his exilic condition but to the postmodern and postcolonial landscape, which initially shaped the writing of these texts. Discussing Brodsky’s travel writing in this context offers previously unexplored perspectives for analyzing the geopolitical, philosophical, and linguistic premises of his poetic imagination. By situating Brodsky’s travel writing in the geopolitical landscape of postcolonial postmodernity, I attempt to show how Brodsky’s engagement with his contemporary cultural practices in the West was incorporated into his Russian-language travel poetry and prose and how this engagement thus contributed to these texts’ status as exceptional and unique literary events within late Soviet Russian cultural practices.

Ryssän koulussa : Suomalaiset Venäjän stipendiaatit autonomian aikana 1812-1917

Finnish scholarship students in Russia during the autonomy (1812-1917) During the autonomy in Finland (1809-1917), an attempt to improve the knowledge of the Russian language was made through special language university scholarships. With these scholarships the students could go and study the Russian language and acquire cultural knowledge in Russia. Other member countries on the edges of the Russian Empire, like Poland and the Baltic provinces, did not have similar programs. The first two scholars started their journey in 1812. A system of travel allowances was introduced in 1841. Between the years 1812- 1917 a total of almost 400 students studied in Russia. The studies mainly took place in Moscow. These scholarship students were called the Master s of Moscow ". In this paper, Finnish-Russian relations are studied based on the attitude towards the Russian language and the people who studied it in Finland. Although the attitude towards them was neutral in the beginning, in 1844 there was a strong change. Students of Russian, and especially the scholars, received the stigma of being unreliable and unpatriotic, a stigma they were never able to get rid of. The study of the Russian language was voluntary in Finnish schools between 1863 and 1872. Starting from 1890, however, the study of the Russian language was enforced. In doing so, the Russians attempted to unify the Empire, while the Finns had the illusion that they had their own state. Thus, Russia saw the language as a way to unify the Empire and Finns as an attempt to make them Russians. The purpose of studying in Russia was to improve the student s practical language skills and overall knowledge of the customs and culture of the country. Besides knowing the language, knowledge of Russian culture and customs is essential in understanding Russia and Russians; therefore, the studies of literature, geography and history have been noted in this research. Without knowledge it is difficult to develop understanding. After their studies, almost all of the scholars returned to Finland and did not continue their careers in Russia. They worked mainly as teachers and civil servants, and managed to improve the Finnish people s weak knowledge of Russian and Russia through teaching, translations of literature and newspaper articles. Through these scholars, it is possible to see how the attitudes towards the language have been closely related to the political history between Finland and Russia. The language became the subject of resistance and these attitudes were transferred to its students. In 1917, the study of Russia and the Russian language ended and it was no longer possible to use the acquired knowledge of language and country in independent Finland.

Mifopoètika Andreja Platonova v romane Sčastlivaja Moskva

This dissertation focuses on the mythopoetics of the Soviet writer Andrej Platonov (1899-1951) in his late novel Schastlivaja Moskva (Happy Moscow), written in 1932 1936. The purpose of the work is to reveal the mythopoetic world model in the novel, to characterize the most significant features of Platonov's mythopoetics and finally, to reconstruct the author's myth in the novel by placing the novel in the context of Platonov's oeuvre and Russian literature and culture as a whole. The first chapter provides a representation of the problem and methodology of the work, a short overview of the history of creating and publishing the novel, and a survey of critical work on Platonov done to date. The study utilizes a structuralistic-semiotic approach devised by Tarto-Moscow scholars for analyzing mythopoetic texts and applies the methodology of a conceptual analysis of the mythology of language. The second chapter examines the peculiarities of Platonov's mythopoetics, and its relation to the neomythological paradigm of Russian literature. Some special consideration is given to the character of the scientific utopism of Platonov's myth, to the relation of Platonov's mythopoetic world model with mythopoetic thinking and to the syntagmatical, and paradigmatical aspects of Platonov's myth, in particular to the mythopoetical metasjuzhet and the ambivalent binary structure of myth. The third chapter presents a close examination of the mythopoetics of the novel by discerning the motif structure of the novel, analyzing the characters and main thematic oppositions of Platonov's myth in the novel. It is contended that in every textual level Platonov strives for ambivalency which provides an opportunity to discern his poetics as both utopian and antiutopian. The analysis in the fourth chapter of the key Platonovian ideological concepts revoljucia, kommunizm and socializm confirms this observation. The study concludes that Platonov's myth in the novel is based on the mythologema of his early prose, but reflect the gradual transition from early utopian themes to the intimate "humble" prose of the late 1930's.

Imazhinist Mariengof : Dendi. Montazh. Ciniki.

The study is dedicated to the Russian poet and prose writer Anatolii Borisovich Mariengof (1897–1962). Mariengof – “the last dandy of the Republic” – was one of the leaders and main theoreticians in the poetic group of the Russian Imaginists. For his contemporaries, he was an Imaginist par excellence. His Imaginist principles – in theory and practice – are applied to the study of his first fictional novel, Cynics (1928), which served as an epilogue for his Imaginist period (1918–1928). The novel was not published in the Soviet Union until 1988. The method used in the study is a conceptual and literary historical reading, making use of the contemporary semiotic understanding of cultural mechanisms and of intertextual analysis. There are three main concepts used throughout the study: dandy, montage and catachresis. In the first chapter, the history, practice and theory of the Russian Imaginism are analyzed from the point of view of dandyism. The Imaginist theatricalisation of life is juxtaposed with the thematic analysis of their poetry, and Imaginist dandyism appears as a catachrestic category in culture. The second chapter examines the Imaginist poetic theory. It is discussed in the context of the montage principle, defining the post-revolutionary culture in Soviet Russia. The Imaginist montage can be divided into three main theoretical paradigms: S. Yesenin’s “technical montage” (reminiscent of Dadaist collage), V. Shershenevich’s “nominative montage” (catalogues of images) and Anatolii Mariengof’s “catachrestic montage”. The final chapter deals with Mariengof’s first fictional novel, Cynics. The study begins with the complex history of publication of the novel, as well as its relation to the Imaginist poetic principles and to the history of the poetic movement. Cynics is, essentially, an Imaginist montage novel. The fragmentary play of the fictional and the documentary material follows the Imaginist montage principle. The chapter concludes in a thematic analysis of the novel, concentrating on the description of the October Revolution in Cynics.

Ivanov-mistik : Okkul'tnye motivy v poèzii i proze Vjačeslava Ivanova (1907-1919)

The subject of this work is the mysticism of Russian poet, critic and philosopher Vjacheslav Ivanov (1866-1949). The approach adopted involves the textual and discourse analysis and findings of the history of ideas. The subject has been considered important because of Ivanov's visions of his dead wife, writer Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal, which were combined with audible messages ("automatic writings"). Several automatic writings and descriptions of the visions from Ivanov's archive collections in St.Petersburg and Moscow are presented in this work. Right after the beginning of his hallucinations in the autumn of 1907, Ivanov was totally captivated by the theosophical ideas of Anna Mintslova, the background figure for this work. Anna Mintslova, a disciple of Rudolf Steiner's Esoteric School, offered Ivanov the theosophical concept of initiation to interpret paranormal phenomena in his intimate life. The work is divided into three main chapters, an introduction and aconclusion. The first chapter is called The Mystical Person: Anthropology of Ivanov and describes the role of the inner "Higher Self" in Ivanov's views on the nature of human consciousness. The political implications of the concepts, "mystical anarchism" and "sobornost" (religious unity) are also examined. The acquaintance and contacts with Anna Mintslova during 1906-1907 gave a framework to Ivanov's search for an organic society and personal religious experience. The second part, Mystics of Initiation and Visionary Aesthetics describes the influence of the initiation concept on Ivanov's aesthetic views (mainly "realistic symbolism"). On the other hand, some connections between the imagery of his visions and symbols in his verses of that period are established. Since Mintslova represented the ideas of Rudolf Steiner in Russia, several symbols shared by Steiner and Ivanov ("rose", "rose and cross") have been another subject of investigation. The preference for strict verse form in the lyrics of Ivanov's visionary period is interpreted as an attempt to place his own poetic creation within two traditions, a mystical and literary one. The third part of this work, Mystics of Hope and Terror, examines Ivanov's conception of Russia in connection with Mintslova's ideas of occult danger from the East. Ivanov's view of the "Russian idea" and his nationalistic idea during World War I are considered as a representation of the fear of the danger. Ivanov's interpretation of the October revolution is influenced by the theosophical concept of the "keeper of the threshold" which occurs in the context of the discourse of occult danger.

Konstrukcija mnimosti : K poètike "Voskovoj persony" Ju. Tynjanova

The subject of this work is the poetics of «The Wax Effigy», a short novel or novella by Jurii Tynianov, Russian writer, literary critic, historian of literature and prominent literary theoretician. The plot structure of the novel is based upon a real event, the creation by Bartolomeo Carlo Rastrelli in 1725 of a wax sculpture of the first Russian emperor, Peter the Great. «Construction of the Sham» consists of three chapters, an introduction and a conclusion. Due to the fact that Tynianov was at the same time a prose writer and theoretician of literature it seemed important to consider the reception of his prose and his works on literary theory in relationship to each other. The introduction is devoted to this task. The first chapter is about the history of the creation of the novel and its reception. Tynianov stopped writing one short story in order to write the novel; these two works have some common traits. It seems almost obvious that his work on the first text was a real step toward the creation of the second. In the first story there is an opposition of dead/alive which is semantic prefiguring of a central motif in «The Wax Effigy». An analysis of the reception of the novel demonstrated that almost every critic writing about the novel has described it as nonsense. Critics considered Tynianov's work in terms of «devices» and «content» and could not understand how devices are related to the content of the novel: the novel was thought as a signifier without any signified. Implicitly, critics thought the signified of the novel as a traditional one of the historical novel, as the historiosophical «idea», embodied in the system of literary devices. In this case literature becomes something instrumental, a kind of expression of extraliterary content. In contradistinction to that Tynianov considered literary semantics as an effect of the literary structure. From his point of view the literary sense is immanent to the process of signification accomplished inside the literary text. The second chapter is devoted to a rhetorical analysis of the opposition dead/alive. Tynianov systematically compares both terms of the opposition. As a result of this strategy the wax effigy of the dead emperor becomes «as if» alive and the world of living people «as if» dead. The qualifier «as if» refers to the fact that Tynianov creates an ambiguous semantic system. This rhetoric is related to European Romanticism and his «fantastic literature» (Merimé, Hoffmann, Maupassant etc.). But Tynianov demonstrates a linguistic origin of the strange fantoms created by romantics; he demystifies these idols by parodying the fantastic literature, that is, showing «how it was done». At the same time, the opposition mentioned above refers to his idea of «incongruity» which plays a prominent role in Tynianov s theory but has never been conceptualised. The incongruity is a inner collision of the literary text; from Tynianov's point of view the meaning of the work of literature is always a dynamic collision of semantically heterogeneous elements struggling with each other. In «The Wax Effigy» Tynianov creates a metalevel of the work demonstrating the process of creation of the literary sense. The third chapter is a reconstruction of Tynianov's conception of the historical prose, specifically of the mechanisms by which historical facts are transformed into literary events. Tynianov thought that the task of the historical novelist is to depict his hero as an actor, to demonstrate that as a wearer of many masks he is a creator of appearances, ambiguities. Here, in the «figure of fiction» (Andrei Belyi), the very idea of the historical prose and rhetoric employed in «The Wax Effigy», history and literature meet each other. In his last theoretical work, «On parody» Tynianov writes about the so-called sham structure of parody. In his opinion every parody is a text about other texts and «serious» work which could be read at the same time as a text about «reality». This twofold structure of parody is that of «The Wax Effigy»: that text speaks about ambiguities of the history and about ambiguities of the literary sense, about social reality of the past and - about the working of the literature itself. «The Wax Effigy» is written as a autoreflective text, as an experiment in literary semantics, as a system of literary ambiguities - of hero, rhetoric and the text itself. The meaning of the novel is created not by the embodiment extraliterary idea, but by the process of signification accomplished inside the work of literature. In this sense Tynianov's novel is parody, a break with the tradition of the historical novel preceding «The Wax Effigy».

Talking About Time in Russian and Finnish

In this study I look at what people want to express when they talk about time in Russian and Finnish, and why they use the means they use. The material consists of expressions of time: 1087 from Russian and 1141 from Finnish. They have been collected from dictionaries, usage guides, corpora, and the Internet. An expression means here an idiomatic set of words in a preset form, a collocation or construction. They are studied as lexical entities, without a context, and analysed and categorized according to various features. The theoretical background for the study includes two completely different approaches. Functional Syntax is used in order to find out what general meanings the speaker wishes to convey when talking about time and how these meanings are expressed in specific languages. Conceptual metaphor theory is used for explaining why the expressions are as they are, i.e. what kind of conceptual metaphors (transfers from one conceptual domain to another) they include. The study has resulted in a grammatically glossed list of time expressions in Russian and Finnish, a list of 56 general meanings involved in these time expressions and an account of the means (constructions) that these languages have for expressing the general meanings defined. It also includes an analysis of conceptual metaphors behind the expressions. The general meanings involved turned out to revolve around expressing duration, point in time, period of time, frequency, sequence, passing of time, suitable time and the right time, life as time, limitedness of time, and some other notions having less obvious semantic relations to the others. Conceptual metaphor analysis of the material has shown that time is conceptualized in Russian and Finnish according to the metaphors Time Is Space (Time Is Container, Time Has Direction, Time Is Cycle, and the Time Line Metaphor), Time Is Resource (and its submapping Time Is Substance), Time Is Actor; and some characteristics are added to these conceptualizations with the help of the secondary metaphors Time Is Nature and Time Is Life. The limits between different conceptual metaphors and the connections these metaphors have with one another are looked at with the help of the theory of conceptual integration (the blending theory) and its schemas. The results of the study show that although Russian and Finnish are typologically different, they are very similar both in the needs of expression their speakers have concerning time, and in the conceptualizations behind expressing time. This study introduces both theoretical and methodological novelties in the nature of material used, in developing empirical methodology for conceptual metaphor studies, in the exactness of defining the limits of different conceptual metaphors, and in seeking unity among the different facets of time. Keywords: time, metaphor, time expression, idiom, conceptual metaphor theory, functional syntax, blending theory

Literaturnaja skazka A.M. Remizova (1900-1920-e gody)

Literary tale of A.M. Remizov (1900’s – 1920’s) The thesis is devoted to a detailed historical-literary description of a tale as a genre tradition in the creative work of Alexei Mikhailovich Remizov (1877-1957), one of the major Russian prose writers of the 20’s century. This very approach allows to specify the place and functional meaning of this genre in literary practice of the writer and to appeal to one of the key problems of the 20-21 century literature history – a specific of modernistic literature composition principle and a role of montage techniques in its formation. Remizov was working on tales during his whole life, though the most productive years of folklore studies fell to 1900’s – 1910’s. During this period he intensively studied folklore materials, narrated several hundreds of folk tales and in 1900’s – 1920’s published eight tale collections which played a significant role in the formation of stylistic and compositional principles of his prose of the 1910’s – 1920’s, especially montage techniques, which in its turn influenced the development of the narrative forms in the Russian post-revolutionary literature. At the same time a tale has specified not only poetics but also problematics of Remizov’s creative work, as when choosing folklore sources the writer always alluded to modern themes and relevant intellectual trends. The current research work, based on various archive materials and a wide spectrum of modern historical-literary data, complies four chapters with a consistent description of creation history, publication and critics’ reviews of Remizov’s tale collections and single tales contributing to his creative evolution characteristic. Furthermore, the work refers to composition and subject of the particular collections. On the whole it enables to follow up genre dynamics. The first chapter of the work is devoted to Posolon’ (Sunwise), the earliest tale collection of Remizov. The main feature of the collection is that its composition is oriented on the agrarian calendar and the subject – on the system of mythological views reflected in the Russian folklore. This very collection to a large extent corresponds to the writer’s views on the myth represented in Pis’mo v redaktsiyu (Letter to the Editor). The history of this manifesto appearing is analyzed in the second chapter. The incident which caused its forthcoming contributed to ‘legitimization’ of Remizov’s narrations as a relevant genre of modern literature and to upgrading the writer in professional hierarchy. The third chapter analyzes Remizov’s collections of 1900’s – early 1920’s, a result of Remizov’s scrupulous work with a specific tale material. He is acting here as a tale repertory researcher and in some cases as a collector as well. The means of such collections’ topical organization is not the myth but the hero of the tale. According to this principle single pieces are grouped into cycles, which then form complicated montage constructs. Texts themselves can be viewed as a sort of hyper-quotations, as they in fact entirely coincide with their original sources. Besides, collections usually have their own ideal patterns. In the fourth chapter a connection of Remizov’s creative work with folk fun culture and a tradition of the folklore noel story is being demonstrated on Zavetnyie skazy (Secret Tales) material. A consistent collections’ history creation analysis convinces us that the tale was a sort of laboratory in which main writer’s prose methods were being worked out.