Yurchenko Tatiana Genrikhovna – Senior Researcher at the Department of Literary Studies, Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences
The book under review is a collection of essays dedicated to the literature of modernism interpreted as the latest manifestation of the humanistic utopia of spiritual and moral transformation of life. This space of utopia as the “meeting place” of Russian and German-language literature is described in four sections of the book in different aspects: “Hermeneutic utopia” – about literature as an open utopian space and the relationship between world literature and national literatures; “Around the ‘Third Kingdom’” – about the idea of sensual–trans-sensory synthesis and its manifestation in Russian and German-language literatures; “Russian dispute with Freud” – about the fate of psychoanalytic discourse in Russia; “Empire and revolution” – on the metaphysical meaning of socio-historical transformations. The review provides the brief overview of the sections and concludes that the presented approach to the problem of modernist discourse is very productive: it allows us to more comprehensively identify the features of modernist literature, from the one hand, and from the other – to reveal in a new way aspects of Russian-German cultural dialogue in the context of the described common semantic and hermeneutical space.
modernism; hermeneutic utopia; German literature; Russian literature; dialogue of cultures; translation theory.