Alexander Zholkovsky’s Lecture at the Seminar " West and East: Universalism of Culture"

On June 26, 2017, within the framework of the seminar of the IL for the Study of Russian and European Intellectual Dialogue, Professor A.K. Zholkovsky delivered the lecture "On love plots of Bunin: "Business Cards" structure».

In his lecture Professor Zholkovsky presented an original analysis of the story "Business Cards". The author emphasized that this story (from the late cycle "Dark alleys") is distinctly intertextual and metaliterary. In the development of the invariant Bunin plot about an exceptional love meeting of heroes, a critical role is played by literary "scenarios", which these characters follow in their behavior. The story is exquisitely poetic, in particular, in the sense of wording. Its constructive supertask is a combination of a trivial plot on the verge of a light "porno" with a sophisticated literary technique, and, more broadly, removal of the age-old opposition "nature vs. culture ". 

A.K. Zholkovsky is a Ph.D. in Philology, a professor at the University of Southern California (Los Angeles), the author of two dozen books, including monographs on the works of Pasternak, Babel and Zoshchenko, and two hundred papers on linguistic semantics, Russian literature, theoretical poetics, and infinitive poetry; analysis of works by Pushkin, Tolstoy, Leskov, Mandelstam, Iskander and others.