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The active perception and assimilation of a wide Western European, Eastern European and American cultural context is one of the most important developmental trends in Latvian literary process. Translations of Russian literature into Latvian are not very demanded, though they are rather significant. Yevgeny Vodolazkin (b. 1964), Doctor of Philology, expert in Old Russian culture, author of several novels, collections of essays and literary travelogues, is among the most popular and widely read writers. “Laurus”...

The article attempts to consider the ways the persistent perceptions of Russian literature by Latvian inhabitants have been formed and developed. Russian literature has been part of Latvian cultural landscape for a long time. Its perception in Latvian society is heterogeneous and changeable both in the temporal and in the socio-cultural aspect. First, when studying the specifics of the perception of Russian literature in Latvian society, it is necessary to take into account the stages and characteristics of the fo...

Elena Katishonok is a contemporary author, who is writing in Russian. Elena was born in Riga, graduated from the Faculty of Philology of the Latvian State University. In 1991, she moved to the USA; now she lives in Boston. In the last few years, Elena Katishonok’ oeuvre has become known to a wide range of readers. The novels “Once upon the Time There Lived an Old Man with His Old Woman” (2006), “Counterclockwise” (2009), “When the Person Leaves” (2011), “Light in the Window” (2014) have not only f...

The present study focuses on two interrelated issues: specifics of Russian literature in Latvia in the period after the World War II and peculiarity of childrenВ’s literature of this period. The post-war period is dramatic in the history of Latvia; it is a period of lost independence and occupation, which directly affects the literary process (presence of ideological doctrine). Nevertheless, LatviaВ’s cultural space becomes a place of relative artistic freedom and minimization of ideological dictate. In a phenomen...

V.MakaninВ’s artistic world is analysed as an ontological model of correlation between social and personal universes, which is disharmonious in its essence. One of the reasons that makes this situation possible is a gap formed between the masculine and the feminine sides of the contemporary world. The suggested study provides an analysis of V.MakaninВ’s evaluation given to the model of contemporary civilization created by men and for men: this evaluation is related to crisis and hopelessness. In turn, a woman is m...

One of the important features of the contemporary literary process is an actualization of a variety of transgressive or hybrid phenomena. In this connection, the novel “Laurus” (2012) by Eugene Vodolazkin is not an exception. Expressed criticism is sometimes not satisfied with the discreteness of E. Vodolazkin’s text, its peculiar mosaic, explicit eclectic mixture of semantic, speech, structural and genre elements. It seems that these elements have a deeper meaning. The article analyzes the semantics of the b...

Doubleness is one of the most spread artistic methods of constructing a personality in European culture, which has a rich tradition. It received a special universal status in the era of Late Romanticism. In Romanticism, doubleness is an embodiment of a tragically incomplete breakthrough of a man to the eternally beautiful and perfect in those times, when the world started to be perceived as terrible and hopeless. Modernity presented a specific variation of Romantic doubleness; a double of the turn of the 19th – ...