RUS - Journal of Russian Literature and Culture
Universidade de São Paulo. Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Fátima Bianchi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
An absence of a thousand faces – about Zoo, or letters not about love, by Viktor Shklovsky
This review presents a reading of Viktor Shklovsky’s epistolary novel Zoo, or Letters Not About Love through the lens of Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the absent object.
Copyright (c) 2026 Valteir Vaz https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
“Land of Screaming Stones: Osip Mandelstam and the Concept of Stone in the Armenian Cycle - A Poetics of Matter, Memory, and History”
This article examines the concept of stone in the so-called Armenian Cycle of Acmeist poet Osip Mandelstam, in connection with his 1930 journey to Armenia, highlighting a decisive transformation: from an Acmeist “architectonics of form” to a “stratigraphic poetics of existence,” in which stone ceases to function as a constructive principle and instead becomes a medium of memory and a materialization of historical experience. The study emphasizes the relationship between materiality, temporality, and the representation of trauma in Armenian history. Within this framework, it investigates how the opacity of stone enables the poet to articulate collective memory through a logic of inscription and resistance, thereby avoiding the demands of ideological transparency imposed by Socialist Realism and configuring an ethics of language grounded in density, trace, and persistence.
"Afrikanskaya pauza": translations of José Craveirinha's poetry into Russian
This article examines aspects of the Russian translations of José Craveirinha’s poetry. To this end, the research required a mapping of his translated poems: three Moscow-based anthologies were obtained (one African, one authorial, and one periodical) from the 1970s and 1980s, featuring 52 translated poems by Craveirinha. This mapping enabled an analysis of the following topics through distant reading: (1) the context and chronology of Craveirinha’s canonization in the Russian language and the USSR; (2) material aspects of the publications and their implications; (3) prefaces and the literati involved with the anthologies; (4) the selection of poems and the resulting projection of Craveirinha.
Copyright (c) 2026 Samuel Caetano Costa Pereira https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Baratynski's "The ring", a fantastic short story from 19th century
This article presents the translation of the short story "The ring" ("Persten’", 1830), by Yevgeny Baratynski (1800-1844), suceded by a brief presentation of the author and comments regarding the story and its translation. This is the author's only work of prose fiction; he was a Romantic poet remembered especially for his elegies and philosophical poems. The story belongs to the tradition of fantastic literature, which was gaining popularity in Russia in the 1830s. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first translation of the story into Brazilian Portuguese.
Writing with Shadows: Rhetoric and Classicism in the poetry of Osip Mandelstam
In this study, we conducted a brief survey of the critical reception of Osip Mandelstam, focusing on linguistic and rhetorical analyses of his poetry. From the works examined, we identified a small set of concepts proposed by critics to describe his poetics, particularly with regard to his use of figurative language and the lexico-grammatical units characteristic of his writing. Based on these concepts, we proposed a critical reading of the poem “Tristia”, investigating its classicism as part of the poet’s style, while also considering the particularities of his language and the relationship between discourse and the author’s contemporaneity. Beyond a poetics attentive to the uses and possibilities of the word, we sought to understand Mandelstam’s style as the expression of a worldview, reflecting the philosophical and immediate relationship that the poet establishes with the world around him.
Russia in the Work of Gustavo Barroso: An Imagological Study
This study proposes an imagological and critical reading of the work of Gustavo Barroso, encompassing three spheres: the literary, the doctrinal, and the translational. With regard to the literary works, the focus falls on two short stories written prior to the author’s adherence to Integralism, “Autokrator” and “A rapariga de Kiev,” with the aim of showing how they construct a hetero-image of Russia as a space of atavisms and authoritarianisms. This hetero-image would later be reworked in the author’s doctrinal writings, linked to the Brazilian Integralist Action, and articulated with the elaboration of a desired self-image for Brazil — conceived as a barrier to an Oriental becoming and as aspiring to a Western, spiritualized, and cohesive becoming. However, Barroso’s relationship with Russia proves to be more ambiguous, as evidenced by his translation of Unknown Jesus by Dmitri Merejkóvski, a work which, by synthesizing Barroso’s political and spiritual concerns, seems to suggest Russian culture as a reference for the integralist.
"The return of Chorb", a short story by Vladimir Nabokov
First translation from Russian into Brazilian Portuguese of the short story “The Return of Chorb” [Возвращение Чорба] by Vladimir Nabokov, first published in 1925 under the pseudonym Vladimir Sirin.
Comparative Analysis: Russian Cultural Assimilation and Oswaldian Anthropophagy
This article proposes a comparative analysis of identity formation in Brazil and Russia, using Oswald de Andrade’s concept of cultural anthropophagy as its theoretical axis. The metaphor of “critical devouring” serves as a consciously anachronistic heuristic tool, since the concept, developed in 20th-century Brazil, is retroactively applied to Russian debates dating back to the 18th and 19th centuries. The article acknowledges this anachronism as a constitutive limitation of the comparative proposal, while recognizing that both nations faced the common dilemma of assimilating external influences without losing their uniqueness, operating through distinct cultural processes of adaptation and identity creation embedded in their own historicity.
Copyright (c) 2026 Giovanni Pereira Pieroni https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Reification and desumanisation in Gógol and Melville
The concept of reification establishes that work dynamics interfere with objective and subjective structures in society. It is based on the understanding that, when engaged in fragmented work, individuals become closer to an objectified nature. Based on the points of convergence and divergence between the bureaucracy of the Russian Empire and the United States in the 19th century, this article aims to construct a dialogue between Akáki and Bartleby, protagonists, respectively, of the short stories “The Cloak” (1842) by Gogol and “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853) by Melville. We focus on authors such as Lukács (2003), Deleuze (1997), Araújo (2020), Agamben (2015), and Bezerra (1990). The conclusions show that, although the characters present, in different ways, a refusal to accept the dynamics of work, they are subjected to reification and dehumanisation. The comparative analysis sheds light on how the reality of these clerks can reveal similarities, even in disparate socio-historical contexts.
The Fabric of Time: Maria Stepanova and the Language of Memory in Post-Soviet Russia
Since the 1990s, Maria Stepanova has established herself as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Russophone literature. Born in 1972, her work moves freely between poetry, essay, and prose fiction, creating a hybrid space in which different forms of memory, tradition, and experimentation coexist. Her writing does not simply narrate events; it organizes a space for observing the past—both family and collective history—marked by displacements, gaps, and interruptions that make any homogeneous reconstruction impossible. In her novels, Stepanova mobilizes family archives, photographs, and minor biographies; in her poetry, dense intertextual layers range from classical tradition to the avant-gardes and the Soviet experience. In a present marked by the return of war, her poetics highlights the fragility of historical knowledge and memory.
From the overcoat to the tropics: humiliation and anonymity
Starting from Nikolai Gogol’s short story The Overcoat, this essay investigates the figure of the erased subject as an ethical and aesthetic problem reflected in Latin American literature, through a specific focus on Brazilian literature. In Akaky Akakievich, humiliation and anonymity are not exceptional episodes but a structural condition of existence, produced by bureaucratic and social mechanisms of invisibilization. By displacing this figure to Latin American literature, the essay proposes a relationship of resonance rather than direct influence. Characters such as Macabéa, by Clarice Lispector, and Fabiano, by Graciliano Ramos, reaffirm the centrality of minimal lives marked by material precariousness, silencing, and symbolic exclusion. From the Russian administrative cold to the tropics, literature emerges as a privileged space of visibility for subjects whose existence, outside the pages, tends to remain erased.
Copyright (c) 2025 Fátima Bianchi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Presentation: Dossier “Russian and Soviet Cinema: from the Empire to the Present Day”
Estamos às vésperas dos 130 anos da chegada do cinema à Rússia e do posterior desenvolvimento de uma das mais potentes e inovadoras linguagens cinematográficas em âmbito mundial, que constitui o legado incontornável dos cineastas russos e soviéticos. Apesar de muitos desses filmes circularem discretamente no Brasil desde meados do século XX, pouca atenção é dada ao estudo sistemático da História do Cinema Russo, cuja relevância para a compreensão da cultura russa e soviética é irrefutável. Por esse motivo, a composição deste dossiê busca estimular pesquisas mais aprofundadas entre nossos estudiosos. E, seguindo essa proposta, decidimos oferecer um breve panorama histórico para iniciar esta apresentação. Nosso intuito é contribuir para a reflexão sobre a cinematografia russa e soviética, marcada por uma relação complexa e contínua com a censura, que reflete tanto as convulsões políticas do país quanto a influência decisiva de seus governantes, que, via de regra, permanecem no poder por longos períodos.
Copyright (c) 2025 Erivoneide Barros, Neide Jallageas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The absence of affective memory and the non-conversion of Goryanchikov in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead
This article analyzes the narrator Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from the House of the Dead, arguing that his inability to achieve spiritual redemption and union with the common people stems from a narrative construction centered on the sterility of affective memory. The analysis identifies three interconnected characteristics: the narrator's immateriality, as he observes the prison from a detached perspective, without embodying the physical experience; temporal stasis, which confines him to a cyclical and empty present, reflected in the fragmentary structure of the narrative; and, most crucially, the absence of pre-incarceration affective memories. Goryanchikov does not evoke positive recollections from his past and remains entirely silent about his crime, preventing any elaboration of guilt or remorse. This deficiency renders inner conversion impossible. The article contrasts this condition with the sketch "The Peasant Marey," in which Dostoevsky himself recounts how an affective memory from his childhood brought about a redemptive transformation in his perception of the convicts. The deliberate absence of this resource in Goryanchikov's characterization consolidates his tragedy: reason, divorced from affective memory, becomes an inner prison, condemning him to a sterile freedom and isolation.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ednilson Rodrigo Pedroso https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Narratives in Abyme in the Film Adaptations of The Master and Margarita
The novel The Master and Margarita, by the Soviet playwright Mikhail Bulgákov (1928–1940), went through processes of burning, rewriting and circulation via samizdat, until its complete publication in 1973. Since then, it has inspired several adaptations, notably two homonymous Russian productions by Yuri Kara (1994) and Mikhail Lockshin (2024). Constructed as a specular double, the work is structured through Narratives in Abyss (Mise en Abyme), encompassing Goethe’s Faust, the biblical narrative of Pilate and Yeshua, and the context of censorship in the USSR experienced by the author and his characters. As these layers intertwine, they dilute the boundaries between the real and the fantastic, reflecting on the human condition and the duality between good and evil. This study proposes to analyze how the aforementioned adaptations translate these embedded narratives in the construction of the fictional universe for the cinema. As a theoretical framework, we draw upon studies on mise en abyme by Gide, Dallenbach and Todorov, as well as to the reflections on adaptation and rewriting proposed by Lefevere and Catrysse.
Copyright (c) 2025 Lorena Lopes Silva https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The movie in front of its abyss: Eisenstein and the teaching of cinema
This article examines the tension between the creation of art and institutional education through Sergei Eisenstein's pedagogical practices at the VGIK. It explores the hypothesis that the filmmaker's intense teaching period coincided with a deepening of the reflection on creative process, resulting in increasingly complex works. The study demonstrates the viability of an educational model integrated within an aesthetic-political project, while highlighting the inherent challenges of translating the creative act into pedagogy.
Copyright (c) 2025 José Manuel Mouriño https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Dionysian Echoes in Rabelais and his World:the Implicit Dialogue between Nietzsche and Bakhtin
This article investigates the presence of Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought in Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World, despite the almost complete absence of explicit references to the German philosopher. We assume that, although silenced by the ideological context of Stalinism, Nietzschean influence is covertly manifested in Bakhtin’s conception of carnival. To this end, we examine four analytical axes: the Russian intellectual context of the early twentieth century, biographical elements of Bakhtin that favored the reception of Nietzsche, theoretical connections already suggested by Western interpreters, and finally, the internal reading of the work itself. The results indicate that central categories of Nietzschean thought—such as the Dionysian, the eternal return, and the critique of social hierarchies—were reworked by Bakhtin from the perspective of popular culture, taking on communal and collective features in contrast to Nietzsche’s aristocratic individualism. We conclude that the relation between the two thinkers should not be understood as mere thematic coincidence, but as an implicit and creative dialogue that broadens the understanding of Bakhtin’s carnival as a philosophical, aesthetic, and anthropological category.
Copyright (c) 2025 Francisco Benedito Leite, Paulo Roberto Pedrozo Rocha https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Possessions of writing: J. M. Coetzee's reinterpretation of Dostoevsky's fiction in The Master of Petersburg
This paper proposes a comparative analysis of the critical and fictional resonances between the work of Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky and the novel "The Master of Petersburg" by South African writer John Maxwell Coetzee. Through a comparative approach, the study sought to identify narrative connections between the aforementioned novel and the broader Dostoevskyan oeuvre regarding the positions assumed by the characters throughout the plot. Thus, the research highlighted that, based on the characters constructed by J. M. Coetzee in his novel, there is an articulation and appropriation of Dostoevskyan dialogism through the characters' statements, leading the plot to simulate a "possession" that occurs not through the denotative meaning of this word, but rather through its use as a metaphor in the process of fictional writing.
Copyright (c) 2025 Antonio Maurício Martins Neto https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
From text to painting on glass: the recreation of The Dream of a Ridiculous Man by Aleksandr Petrov
This study aims to analyze how Aleksandr Petrov’s animated film The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1992) promotes a recreation of Dostoevskian poetics by adapting Fyodor Dostoyevsk’s short story of the same name. Based on Linda Hutcheon’s theory of adaptation (2011), Jasmine Jacq’s studies of the novelist’s adaptations (2017; 2019), and interviews with the filmmaker, this study seeks to highlight how the technique of glass painting intensifies the sensory experience of the emotions experienced by the character “ridiculous man.” Thus, by symbolically recreating the original narrative and incorporating metaphorical, sound, and visual elements, Petrov’s animated film offers a renewed experience that dialogues with Dostoevsky’s work by reinterpreting its essence through a pictorial expressiveness that is simultaneously realistic and subjective, capable of translating the spiritual density and inner drama of Dostoevsky’s characters.
Copyright (c) 2025 Douglas de Sousa , Anderson Cantanhede https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
In Ivan the Terrible (Parts I and II), directed by Sergei Eisenstein (1943 and 1945), the figure of Saint Michael the Archangel – with his face set in a flaming sun—appears in the tsar’s reception hall, a design created by Eisenstein himself. Strikingly, it echoes the long-standing iconographic tradition of the same angel that has been depicted for centuries across Latin America. Likewise, the layout of the drawing on the ceiling and walls recalls graphic solutions explored by Mexican muralists, whom Eisenstein admired so deeply that he saw them as his artistic forebears. These affinities point to the complex kind of (international) nationalism that shaped the film’s conception. The (Latin) angel who at once threatened and empowered Ivan resists any simplistic reading of the film as mere Stalinist propaganda.
Copyright (c) 2025 Luiz Felipe Guimarães Soares https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
From Revolution to Cosmos: expressions of science fiction in the early decades of Soviet cinema
This article aims to present an understanding of the cultural promotion of the science fiction/fantasy genre in imperial Russian and Soviet society, and conduct a study of the two cinematographic works selected using Marc Ferro's method of analysis. The science fiction/fantasy literary genre in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union was popular in different forms and themes. In Soviet cinema, the genre began to be popularized through two productions: director Yakov Protazanov’s film Aelita, Queen of Mars (1924) and director Vasily Zhravlev’s Cosmic Journey (1936).
Copyright (c) 2025 Vinícius Braga Mendonça, Walter Günther Rodrigues Lippold https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
"Mentally organizing what has been seen": Dziga Vertov's diary of an expedition to Crimea, August 1925
In August of 1925, Dziga Vertov produced a handwritten report about a three-day visit to the Bakhchissaray district in Crimea. The analysis of this unpublished document, conserved in the “Notebooks and notepads” section of his fond in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI), allows us to glimpse at a rarely discussed stage of his creative process, defined by him as the “montage after an observation: mentally organizing what has been seen”. From his manuscript, the multiple interests at play during the making of A sixth of the world (1926) emerge – from the advertising of the commercial network managed by the Soviet State to the ethnographic study of the region – as well as the potential forms of cinematographic documentation considered by the filmmaker.
Copyright (c) 2025 Luis Felipe Gurgel Ribeiro Labaki https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The multifaceted Aleksandr Nevsky: from historical journey to Soviet reconstruction
Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 film Alexander Nevsky sought to rehabilitate and reintroduce the thirteenth‑century saint and prince as a national hero, situating him within the patriotic discourses cultivated in the late 1930s in anticipation of the conflict with Nazi Germany, as part of the broader Stalinist cultural project. This study undertakes a concise historical review of Alexander Nevsky’s life and his leadership in the 1242 Battle on the Ice, followed by an analysis of his cinematic representation in Eisenstein’s work. Drawing upon the extant Portuguese‑language scholarship, it aims to elucidate continuities and transformations in the political uses of the prince’s memory across Russian history – from the medieval Rus polity to the Soviet era – thereby tracing the consolidation of a twentieth‑century reinterpretation of his figure through the medium of film.
Copyright (c) 2025 Guilherme Faber, Livia Bernardes Marciano https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Varia walks under the rubble: the dictates of “cinema for millions” in Boris Barnet’s mise-en-scène
This article analyzes three sequences from the film "Odnajdy notchiu" to investigate director Boris Barnet's adherence to the dictates of "cinema for millions"—a set of rules of form and content that began to guide Soviet film production from the second half of the 1930s onward, aligning films with the demands of Socialist Realism.
Copyright (c) 2025 Nuno Lindoso https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The "Sistine Madonna": Dostoevsky and the Exercise of Looking
Raphael's ‘Sistine Madonna’, dated around 1513-1514 and housed in the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden, is one of the paintings that most impressed Dostoevsky, to the point that he wrote about it in several of his novels, from Crime and Punishment (Преступление и наказание, 1866) to The Demons (Бесы, 1873) and The Adolescent (Подросток, 1875). Dostoyevsky certainly knew other paintings by Raphael. But then why this insistence on Raphael's canvas? Our hypothesis is that Dostoyevsky perceived, in a totally modern way and outside the historicist schemes of art, the conceptual and symbolic complexity hidden behind the apparent simplicity of the image and the harmonious union between the ideal of Greco-Roman beauty and Christian religious sentiment. Furthermore, with the ‘Sistine Madonna,’ Dostoevsky inaugurates (or perhaps it would be better to say, brings to light) an ecphrastic myth in literature. With his exercise of the gaze, it is not only Raphael's painting that surprises with its ability to attract the gaze of different generations, but it is Dostoevsky himself who creates new interpretative palimpsests of the work, which will flow many years later into the dramatic and bitter reflections of Vasily Grossman, who, as we know, revisits the ‘Sistine Madonna’ to propose a historical reinterpretation that continues to question the observer's gaze to this day.
Copyright (c) 2025 Biagio d'Angelo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Three essays on cinema, by Yuri Tyniánov
Written by Yuri Tynianov in the 1920s, the following essays (“Cinema – Word – Music,” “On Plot and Fabula in Cinema,” and “On the Screenplay”) form a key body of work for understanding the origins of Soviet film theory. A recognized member of the Society for the Study of Poetic Language (OPOIAZ), Tynianov applies the principles of formalist criticism to cinema, proposing a vision of cinema as an autonomous art form characterized by abstraction, fragmentation, and recomposition of expressive elements. In “Cinema – Word – Music,” he analyzes the specificity of cinematic discourse and argues for music as a structuring element of narrative rhythm. In “On Plot and Fabula in Cinema,” he applies the formalist distinction between fabula and plot to film, emphasizing stylistic procedures over predictable narrative content. In “On the Screenplay,” he critiques the conceptual confusion surrounding the role of the screenwriter, defending the screenplay as a distinct artistic form based on cinema’s visual language. These translations aim to make these reflections accessible to the Portuguese-speaking audience, highlighting their pioneering nature and continuing relevance to film studies, especially regarding narrative construction, aesthetic autonomy, and the relationship between literature, image, and sound in cinematic discourse.
Copyright (c) 2025 Raquel Siphone https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
In this second part of Marina Tsvetaeva’s essay Epos and Lyrics in contemporary Russia – Vladimir Mayakovsky and Boris Pasternak the author compares and contrasts the characteristics of both poets, particularly in terms of Epos and Lyrics, giving examples withdrawn from their poems.
Copyright (c) 2020 Aurora Fornoni Bernardini http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
A new study on Chernyshevsky by Camilo Domingues
The present work of scientific divulgation aims presenting to the interested public the recently published book “O que fazer?”, de N. Tchernychévski: a história do romance e de seu gênero literário, which originates from the Ph.D. thesis by Camilo Domingues.
Copyright (c) 2025 Rafael Bonavina https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Dostoyevsky and Freud on the Brink of Suicide: Melancholy and Mania in the Short Story The Dream of a Ridiculous Man
This paper aims to analyze melancholy in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's short story The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (2017), based on Freudian theories, seeking to demonstrate how the protagonist's melancholic suffering arises in the face of object loss and turns into mania. To this end, Sigmund Freud's text Mourning and Melancholia (2010) is fundamental to understanding how the character “ridiculous man” experiences his loss of self-esteem, indifference, and self-martyrdom, characteristics of the melancholic being. Through literary and psychoanalytic analysis, using authors who study Dostoevsky's work as a theoretical framework, the research will demonstrate how the “ridiculous aspect” of the character symbolizes not only the duplicity of the self, which he refuses to accept, but also his object loss of self-transformation through modern ideas. A narcissistic frustration that will provoke his symptoms of melancholy and suicidal masochism, but which, in a redemptive way, will transform into mania.