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Scientific classifications
- 6. Humanities
- 6.2 Languages and Literature
Main research areas
The primary focus of my research is Russian literature at the turn of the century. Within this framework, I study German literary, intellectual, and cultural influences, the resulting thematic, motivic, intertextual, and prosodical connections, as well as cultural mediation through translation. I also compare original literary texts with their translations, analysing them and their prosodical characteristics. In addition, I examine the distinguishing traits of Russian and German Symbolism, comparing the two artistic movements.
I have been researching the oeuvre of Alexander Blok for many decades. My analysis concerns the composition of his lyric poems (poetic cycles as well as individual works), dramas, essays. I study the characteristic features of Blok’s writings within the context of the oeuvre of the poet, at the same time taking into consideration mythological, Russian, German literary sources any typological parallelisms (Novalis, Goethe, Schiller, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Heine, Nietzsche, Wagner, Rilke, Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Tyutchev, Andrei Bely, Vyacheslav Ivanov, etc.). I observe and analyse the prosodic characteristics in their relational context. The comparison of the lyrical subject as well as the composition of poetic cycles in the works of Blok and Rilke is an especially productive research subject, that can be considered as a novel direction in the field of literary science.
From Russian Post-Symbolist lyric poetry my research examines the poetry of Osip Madelstam along with the poems and novel of Boris Pasternak. My primary interest concerns the Ovidian sources of Tristia, the book of Osip Mandelstam, however, at the same time the composition of the cycle also lies within the scope of my research. In the novel Doctor Zhivago I analyse the imprints of the personality, poetry, and individual poems of Blok. This can also bring us closer to the governing compositional principles of the poems included in the 17th chapter.
The subject of the modern German-language poetry of Germans living in Hungary requires a special scientific approach. In this case strict poetic principles cannot be applied solely, but other circumstances influencing historical determination and minority existence also must be considered. As the result of poetic analysis, beyond the individual poetic characteristics of the literary works, generalisable correlations concerning this type of poetry also emerge.
Within the framework of a Russian-Hungarian collaborative research project, I studied cryptopoetics, primarily in lyric poetry.
The aim of this investigation is to reveal and describe Akhmatova’s cryptography that hides the addressing of certain poems to Aleksandr Blok. Based on the most important achievements of the Akhmatova research (preliminary on Toporov’s monography), the project presents the results of a detailed study about Akhmatova’s cryptopoetic means (thematic, lexical, motif, syntactic, stylistic, compositional, verse and others). The most interesting period from the point of view of the investigation is 1911-1921, and especially 1913, but other periods of Akhmatova’s work (and of Blok’s too) are also considered. Intertextual analysis demonstrate the dialogue between the two poets and various types of references to Blok’s works by Akhmatova after his death. In addition, the „Poem without a Hero” is examined as one of the keys to decoding Akhmatova’s early poetry.
German Romantic literature has been a central area of my research for several decades. My work has included studies of Novalis’s writings and fragments, the relationship between Heinrich Heine’s poetry and Romanticism, and Ludwig Tieck’s short fiction. My current project examines the motifs of the miner and the mine in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Die Bergwerke zu Falun, while also providing an opportunity to revisit and extend my earlier research on these motifs in the works of Novalis, Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Henrik Ibsen, Alexander Blok, and Thomas Mann.
My research on Rilke has combined comparative approaches with author-centered studies. More recently, I have begun a new project focusing exclusively on Rilke, specifically an analysis of one of the poems from Neue Gedichte, "L’Ange du Méridien".