Changing Pieces

Three decades after American author Edgar Allan Poe laid down the foundations for the detective genre in the 1840s with his “tales of ratiocination,” native detective stories began to appear on Russian literary scene. Among them were those written by Aleksandr Andreevich Shkljarevskij today known as “the father of Russian detective fiction.” This article provides a short overview of Poe’s literary influence as well as of the conditions that brought about the onset of Russian detective fiction. It offers an extensive comparative analysis of short stories by the mentioned “fathers” and identifies many similarities in their poetics. Finally, by looking into the characteristics of American Romanticism and Russian Realism that constitute the sociocultural backgrounds of the authors, it proposes answers to questions stemming from the difference in the aspect of analysis they emphasize. Keywords: 19th century Russian detective fiction, Edgar Allan Poe, Aleksandr Andreevich Shkljarevskij, soci...

MGG: I still remember “my first time” as a translator very clearly, and fondly. In fact, it entailed two very different experiences. The first took place when I was around nine or ten years old, in the basement of a bar in the Montparnasse neighborhood in the south of Paris. It was an establishment exclusively for habitués; to get in, you had to knock on the door, and the owner would first look through the spyhole. In French, like in English, a “spyhole” is actually called a “judas” – seeing without being seen supposedly equates to betrayal. At any rate, I was there with my older brother, who didn’t speak Spanish, and a friend of my father’s from Spain, who didn’t speak French. The two were having a heated argument about the Communist Party being blind to Stalinist crimes, the lies of the Soviet regime, etc.AH: I was at the Avignon Festival once and saw a play about Stalin. During the play, Stalinist supporters outside were heard cheering for “the supreme leader.” I’d just moved to Fra...

This paper analyzes the covers of the weekly newspaper Novosti, on which the current refugee and migrant crisis is depicted with illustrations where various verbal and visual signs recontextualize the motif of barbed and razor wire. The symbolic, satiric, and metaphoric potential of barbed wire is discussed, and its functions in the narrative on migrants are defined. The examples are categorized according to the distinct semantic characteristics of acting on the body and enclosing space, and the presented research model confirms that the pronounced artistic and critical functionality of the motif of barbed wire lies precisely in the potential of establishing an antithesis that is simultaneously also an element of the satirical dialectic and the source of metaphoric interpretations. Keywords: barbed wire, satire, symbol, conceptual metaphor, semanticsWriting a summary for the history of barbed wire, from the prairies and war trenches to concentration camps, Razac (2009) stops at the con...

The paper investigates the extent and peculiarities of censorship in two Croatian editions of Pippi Longstocking, a classic of Swedish and world children's literature. Comparing the original Swedish text, contained in three books: Pippi Langstrump (1945/1948), Pippi Langstrump gar ombord (1946/1969) and Pippi Langstrump and Söderhavet (1948/1969), with the first edition of the Croatian translation published in 1973 and its revised 1996 edition shows significant differences in the number, layout, and title of chapters, and establishes the diversity of taboo topics present in both omitted and retained chapters. The retained chapters, after joining the micro-strategies previously adapted to the collected data (according to Desmet, Davoodi), also reveal clear variability in the way of translating taboo topics, such as inappropriate behavior, life (mis)fortunes, violence, racial intolerance, and religion.Keywords: Swedish children’s literature, censorship, taboo topics, translation micro-st...

“More liquor,” said the dark-skinned man holding out his glass.“No more liquor,” said the fat man grabbing the bottle from the counter. “Indian dance now; liquor later.”“Liquor,” said the dark-skinned man stretching for the bottle.“Afterwards,” said the fat man, shielding the bottle behind his vast bulk. “Now Indian dance.” He waggled his hips and his flabby belly shook. “Now Indian dance out front. Everyone watch Indian dancing.”The dark-skinned man stopped and stared at his fat counterpart, stared at him as a famished, skittish dog might at a person chewing a sandwich in a roadside bar. The fat man waggled his hips once more, his arms upraised, the bottle in one hand and a shot glass he was drinking from in the other. The dark-skinned man chuckled.“You like that, eh?” said the fat man. His flabby jowls wobbled with laughter, his eyes vanishing between puffy little lids. “Off you go, Indian. Bwana want to see Indian dance. Me bwana, you Indian, monkey.”“Not monkey.” The Indian shook h...

In Iza’s Ballad, Magda Szabó writes about the lives of two doctors who meet and fall in love at university. “Don’t get too involved with politics,” experienced Antal warns a seemingly ingénue Iza. To which she responds: “Politics will be my life as long as I live.” In this brief encounter, Szabó connects the predominant themes of her oeuvre: politics and life, or, to be more specific, Communism and the domestic. In its analysis of Iza’s Ballad (1963), Katalin Street (1969), and The Door (1987), this article illustrates how Szabó’s descriptions of the domestic convey the impact of Hungary’s troubled political history on the concept of the home/homeland. The article illustrates the ways in which Szabó contrasts the relatively comfortable years of Goulash Communism with the hardship endured during WWII, under Rákosi, and during the 1956 Revolution, to convey the lasting effects of the Soviet occupation on the notion of home. Keywords: Magda Szabó; Hungary; homeland; 1956 Revolution; Goula...