Task 5. Translate from Russian into English.

1. Правление Петра I в начале XVIII века вызвало ряд изменений в русской литературе.

2. Сатирик Антиох Кантемир был первым писателем, восхвалявшим идеалы реформ Петра I.

3. Кантемир выражал свое восхищение Петром I, критикуя «поверхностность и мракобесие» России, в которых он видел проявление ее отсталости.

4. Современник Антиоха Кантемира, поэт, драматург, эссеист и переводчик Василий Тредиаковский переводил на русский язык классические произведения французской литературы.

5. Перевод «Путешествия на остров любви» Поля Тальмана был первой попыткой использовать родной русский язык в противоположность формальному и устаревшему церковно-славянскому языку.

6. Интерес молодого писателя Александра Сумарокова к французской литературе отразились в его увлечении идеей европеизации Петра I.

7. В своем произведении «Петр I» Михаил Ломоносов показал императора как внушающего страх, но в тоже время величественного правителя.

8. Ломоносов разделил литературные стили на высший, средний и низший.

9. Во второй половине XVIII века темы литературных произведений стали более острыми и дискуссионными.

10. Александр Радищев шокировал публику изображением социально-экономического положения крепостных, за что был сослан в Сибирь.

11. Произведения Николая Карамзина отражали растущее уважение к женщине-правителю Екатерине Великой.

12. Другие писатели были более открыты в своем восхвалении Екатерины Великой.

13. Например, известный своими одами гаврила Державин часто посвящал свои стихотворения Екатерине II.

14. Денис Фонвизин считал, что дворянство должно придерживаться стандартов, которые были при правлении Петра I.

15. Фонвизин критиковал в своих произведениях систему вознаграждения дворянства, считая, что элита должна вознаграждаться на основе личных заслуг, а не иерархического фаворитизма, распространенного во время правения Екатерины Великой.

Text 3. Golden and Silver Ages

Golden Age

The 19^th century is traditionally referred to as the "Golden Era" of Russian literature. Romanticism permitted a flowering of especially poetic talent: the names of Vasily Zhukovsky and later that of his protégé Alexander Pushkin came to the fore. Pushkin is credited with both crystallizing the literary Russian language and introducing a new level of artistry to Russian literature. His best-known work is a novel in verse, Eugene Onegin. An entire new generation of poets including Mikhail Lermontov, Yevgeny Baratynsky, Konstantin Batyushkov, Nikolay Nekrasov, Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, Fyodor Tyutchev, and Afanasy Fet followed in Pushkin's steps.

Prose was flourishing as well. The first great Russian novelist was Nikolai Gogol. Then came Nikolai Leskov, Ivan Turgenev, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, all mastering both short stories and novels, and novelist Ivan Goncharov. Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky soon became internationally renowned to the point that many scholars such as F.R. Leavis have described one or the other as the greatest novelist ever. In the second half of the century Anton Chekhov excelled in writing short stories and became perhaps the leading dramatist internationally of his period.

Other important 19^th-century developments included Ivan Krylov the fabulist; non-fiction writers such as Vissarion Belinsky and Alexander Herzen; playwrights such as Aleksandr Griboyedov and Aleksandr Ostrovsky and Kozma Prutkov (a collective pen name) the satirist.

Nineteenth century Russian literature perpetuated disparate ideas of suicide; it became another facet of culture and society in which men and women were regarded and treated differently. A woman could not commit the noble, heroic suicide that a man could; she would not be regarded highly or as a martyr, but as a simple human who, overcome with feelings of love gone unfulfilled and having no one to protect her from being victimized by society, surrendered herself. Many of the 19^th century Russian heroines were victims of suicide as well as victims of the lifestyle of St. Petersburg, which was long argued to have imported the very idea of and justifications for suicide into Russia. St. Petersburg, which was built as a Western rather than a Russian city was long accused by supporters of traditional Russian lifestyles as importing Western ideas – the ideas of achieving nobility, committing suicide and, the synthesis of these two ideas, the nobility of suicide being among them.

Novels set in Moscow in particular, such as Anna Karenina, and Poor Liza, follow a trend of female suicides which suggest a weakness in character which exists only because they are women; they are said by readers to be driven by their emotions into situations from which suicide seems to be the only escape. These instances of self-murder have no deeper meaning than that and, in the case of Poor Liza, the setting of Moscow serves only to provide a familiarity which will draw the reader to it, and away from Western novels.

Contrastingly, many novels set in St. Petersburg viewed suicide primarily through the lens of a male protagonist (as in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment) as opposed to the females who held the spotlight in the aforementioned titles. Beyond that, instead of the few females who commit suicide in these Petersburg texts being propelled to such lengths by a love so powerful and inescapable that it consumed them, financial hardships and moral degradation which they faced in the Imperial Capital contaminated or destroyed their femininity; related to this, prostitution became markedly more prominent in popular literature in the 19^th century.

Another new aspect of literary suicides introduced in the Petersburg texts is that authors have shifted their gazes from individuals and their plot-driving actions to presentations of broad political ideologies, which are common to Greek and Roman heroes – this step was taken in order to establish a connection between Russian male protagonists who take their own lives and Classic tragic heroes, whereas the women of the literature remained as microcosms for the stereotyped idea of the female condition. The idea of suicide as a mode of protecting one’s right to self-sovereignty was seen as legitimate within the sphere of St. Petersburg, a secular and “Godless…” capital. Unlike Classic tragic heroes, the deaths of male protagonists, such as in Nikolai Gogol’s Nevskii Prospekt and Dmitry Grigorovich’s Svistul’kin, did not bring about great celebrations in their honor, or even faint remembrances amongst their comrades. In fact, both protagonists die lonely deaths, suffering quietly and alone in their final hours. Until the Russian revolution in 1917, such themes remained prominent in literature.

Silver Age

Silver Age is a term traditionally applied by Russian philologists to the first two decades of the 20^th century. It was an exceptionally creative period in the history of Russian poetry, on par with the Golden Age a century earlier. The term Silver Age was first suggested by philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, but it only became customary to refer thus to this era in literature in the 1960s. In the Western world other terms, including Fin de siècle and Belle Époque, are somewhat more popular.

Although the Silver Age may be said to have truly begun with the appearance of Alexander Blok's "Verses to the Beautiful Lady", some scholars have extended its chronological framework to include the works of the 1890s, starting with Nikolai Minsky's manifesto "With the light of conscience" (1890), Dmitri Merezhkovsky's treatise "About the reasons for the decline of contemporary Russian literature" (1893) and Valery Bryusov's almanac "Russian symbolists" (1894).

The early 20^th century was the period of both social and cultural upheavals and pursuits. Realistic portrayal of life did not satisfy authors any longer, and their argument with the classics of the 19^th century generated a bundle of new literary movements.

Although the Silver Age was dominated by the artistic movements of Russian Symbolism, Acmeism, and Russian Futurism, many other poetic schools flourished, such as Mystical Anarchism. There were also such poets as Ivan Bunin and Marina Tsvetayeva who refused to align themselves with any of these movements. Alexander Blok emerged as the leading poet, respected by virtually everyone. The poetic careers of Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, and Osip Mandelshtam, all of them spanning many decades, were also launched during that period.

The Silver Age ended after the Russian Civil War. Blok's death and Nikolai Gumilev's execution in 1921, as well as the appearance of the highly influential Pasternak collection, My Sister is Life (1922), marked the end of the era. The Silver Age was a golden era nostalgically looked back to by émigré poets, led by Georgy Ivanov in Paris and Vladislav Khodasevich in Berlin.

Task 1. Give Russian equivalents to the following English ones:

Flowering of poetic talent, to come to the fore, to perpetuate the idea of suicide, to become a facet of culture, to commit suicide, to be regarded as a martyr, to be overcome with feelings of love, to be victimized by society, to be accused by supporters of traditional Russian lifestyles as importing Western ideas, to suggest a weakness in character, to be the only escape, to have no deeper meaning, to view through the lens of smb., to establish a connection between smb., to bring about great celebrations in one’s honor, on par with smth., to extend chronological framework, social and cultural upheavals, to generate a bundle of new literary movements, to emerge as the leading poet.

Task 2. Give English equivalents to the following Russian ones:

Приписывать кому-л. что-л., известный во все мире, быть жертвой петербургского стиля жизни, сталкиваться с финансовыми трудностями и моральной деградацией, оказывать пагубное влияние, перемещать свое внимание с индивидуума и его действий на представление политической идеологии, узаконить идею самоубийства как способа защиты своей независимости, употреблять термин, становиться привычным, больше не удовлетворять авторов, отказываться равняться на какие-либо из этих течений, охватывать несколько десятилетий.

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