The article provides an overview of published and archival materials from the collections of Alexander Solzhenitsyn Russia Abroad House. It allowed to reconstruct biographical background of the writer of Russian young emigration Leonid Zurov and his contacts with engineer Dmitry Kotomkin. They participated in the Civil war, lived in Riga in the 1920s. Later Zurov moved to France at the invitation from Ivan Bunin, Kotomkin found himself in Spain. The analysis of their correspondence allowed to restore the facts of their biographies, as well as details of the creative history of Zurov’s works and history of the Russia abroad. The results of the study can be addressed to both philologists and all interested in the Russian literary process of the 20th century.

The article discusses the artistic function of insects in A. Pushkin’s works on the material of his poems “The Message to Yudin”, “Advice”, “Cold winds still blow ...”, “Collection of insects”, etc., the novel “Eugene Onegin”, some prose works and letters. It is concluded that the function of insects in his works is different, although, as a rule, it is associated with different situations, pictures and seasons (most often with the spring). Some insects are used in Pushkin’s lyrics, in “Eugene Onegin” and in other works both in direct and in figurative-ironic, symbolic or metaphorical meaning.

The article for the first time poses the question about the influence of the poetics and ideology of G. Uspensky on the works of D. Merezhkovsky. The comparative analysis of Uspensky’s essay “Выпрямила” (“She Straightened Out”, 1885) and the corpus of the texts of Merezhkovsky, written in 1890-1900s (the poem “The End of the Century” and the trilogy “Christ and the Antichrist”) discovers that one of the central images of Merezhkovsky, the statue of Venus, was born in creative competition with Uspensky. The study, carried out in the framework of the historical-literary method, allows to establish the continuity between the late literary populism and the symbolist art of the Silver Age. The article is addressed to all those interested in the Russian literature and the history of the Russian intelligentsia.

The article offers a look at the new course of metamodernism as a basis for the formation of a holistic, syncretic consciousness, which replaces the diachronic-discrete one. Using the method of comparison, the authors analyze the literary works of the postmodern era (P. Süskind “Perfume”) and metamodernism (G. Muller “Breath Swing”, verses), reveal the main features and prove the pattern of changes in the national consciousness. It is suggested to identify the transition to a holistic consciousness as a result of overcoming the diachronous-discrete one, to determine the common features and patterns of its manifestation in the modern literature. Metamodernism is not just a new trend, but also a change of milestones, a natural cultural and historical process.

The purpose of the article is to identify the relationship between the researches of of battle ode done by Russian writers and critics of the 18th century. The author of the article analyzes the nature of the works of V. Trediakovsky, M. Lomonosov, M. Sumarokov, A. Shuvalov, A. Volkov, M. Kheraskov, N. Novikov in the framework of research of battle ode. The conceptualization of battle ode genre in the works of these authors illustrates the process of changing the normative-theoretical principles of genre characteristics to the more mobile historical and literary approaches, associated with the development of artistic consciousness of the era from the normative-traditionalist to the individual-creative type, which is an evidence of the change of creative guidelines of the era as a whole. The article is addressed to researchers of the Russian literature of the 18th century, students-philologists.

The purpose of this article is to reveal the relationship between G. Derzhavin’s lyrical poems on the pages of N. Karamzin’s almanac “Aonidy”, thus proving that the works of Derzhavin, that were published in all three books of the almanac and in one way or another addressed the image of women, represent the metatext. The author of the article analyzes the nature of the creative interaction between Karamzin as a publisher and Derzhavin as a poet. The main content of the research is the analysis of nine of Derzhavin’s works, embodying images of women and published in Karamzin’s almanac from 1796 to 1799. The analysis allowed to identify a stable set of motifs associated with the embodiment of the female image in Derzhavin’s works. The article is addressed to students-philologists, researchers of the Russian literature of the 18th century.

The article presents the first systematic examination of the thanatological motive in L. Tolstoy’s early works. Basing on a number of Lev Tolstoy’s novels and stories written in the first half of 1850s (“Childhood”, “Boyhood”, “Cossacks”, “The Raid”, “A Billiard-Marker’s notes”, “The Cutting of the Forest”, “How Soldiers Die”, “Sevastopol in December”, “Sevastopol in May”, “Sevastopol in August 1855”, “Three Deaths”), the article analyzes the thanatological features to demonstrate, how the suffering in young ages predetermined the writer’s art. In his early novels, Tolstoy wanted to understand why people kill each other. He demonstrated, that war is evil, but as a writer at war, a participant of the events he described, he admired the courage of a simple soldier, his attitude to life and death.

The article is devoted to the analysis of etiquette formulas of greeting and farewell, which became constants of address in the I. Turgenev’s letters to his native uncle - N. Turgenev. The author of the article relies on the prevailing ideas in science about the importance of private letter in the process of interpersonal communication, which is demonstrated in a scientific review. The epistolary genre is an actual area of stylistic research related to the category of the author’s linguistic personality; related to the idea of the role of the speaker/writer’s intention in expressing the emotional relationship with language resources within the framework of the You-category. The category is characteristic of the anthropocentrism as the methodological basis of the research. The constant formulas of the address are revealed with the method of continuous targeted sampling and are considered in connection with the process of phraseologization as a subject of research, the purpose of which is to analyze their stylistic and communicative-pragmatic role in the texts of these letters. It was concluded that the constant formulas of address demonstrate certain features of the writer’s evolving idiostyle and reflect changes in the development of the linguistic and psychological personality of I. Turgenev.

The article studies the process of metaphorization of lexical units with semantics of tactile perception in the Russian and Chinese languages. The author specifies the figurative meanings of these lexemes and defines the complex of the conceptual spheres which are subjects to modeling with a support of a «tactile» metaphor in the Russian and Chinese language pictures of the world. The article attempts to prove that the identity of figurative lexical units with semantics of tactile perception in the compared language systems lays in the ethnic universalization of process of perception, and the original specifics of lexemes come to light at specification of lexical word compatibility, identical on basic meaning.

The article considers various approaches to the ideas of the language personality, which determines the intentional specificity of the discourse of modern media, which is concretized by showing the language personality of the journalist. The author considers media discourse as a special kind of discourse, in which the stylistic specificity of media texts is conditioned and broadcasted by media workers (editors, reporters, speakers, etc.). On the example of Andrei Dobrov’s media texts presented in the program “Dobrov on the Air”, the features of metalanguage reflexion (occasionalisms, metaphorical turns, neologisms, including composite structure, etc.) were identified by the method of continuous sampling and analyzed in the semantic-stylistic, pragmatic aspects. They describe the language personality of the journalist and its role in the discourse of the media. The conclusion is made that confirms the importance of the speech behavior and communication culture of the journalist as a linguistic personality, that forms the discourse of the media, in achieving success with the audience and in creating a unique image of the author-presenter in the media space.

Interrogative sentences with the question adverb откуда are frequently used both in spacial meanings and in non-spacial contexts. The expressive potential of this interrogative pronoun especially shows itself in the structures with verbs брать / взять and браться / взяться. These structures convey different meanings, such as source of information, methods of situation realization, as well as its reason. The main purpose of this study is to analyze semantic specialities of these verbs in combination with different classes of nouns in an interrogative sentence with pronoun откуда and to demonstrate the connection between meaning of nouns and meaning of the whole interrogative sentence.