How does an individualist and skeptical intellectual who is not religious in the usual sense experience the pilgrimage to Mecca in modern times, when he or she is only one among a huge mass of pilgrims? In order to offer an answer to this question, this contribution will look at two literary texts which are quite different in terms of author, time, and genre, but show a number of similarities in terms of observations, impressions, reflections, and feelings. The first is Lost in the Crowd, the travel diary published by the Iranian thinker Jalal Al-e Ahmad (1923–1969) in 1966 on his Hajj experiences in 1964; the second is the novel Fitna by the Emirati author Amira al-Qahtani, which appeared in 2007 and takes the pilgrimage as a frame-story. It will be argued that Al-e Ahmad established a discursive tradition that had an impact on religious doubters in Iran and beyond. 

A.R. Rajaraja Varma (A.R. Rājarājavarmma, 1863–1918), a Kerala poet, grammarian and critic witnessed the late 19th and early 20th century evolution of South Indian literature and actively participated in the changes. His unique relationship with languages, great knowledge of grammar, poetic talent and a leaning towards a modern approach (to a large extent affected by English) resulted in various works which influenced the development of both Sanskrit and Malayalam. Rajaraja Varma strove to modernise Indian languages and literature, largely by the means of more innovative English. The unusual blend of styles, themes, and motives that interweave in the author’s compositions can be defined as the New Sanskritism. The aim of this paper is to distinguish characteristic features of Rajaraja Varma’s Sanskrit works and discuss them in their socio-cultural context. 

Poetics of the Iranian Revolution of 1978–1979 in the novel Die ersten Tage der Welt (2019) by Salem Khalfani

The aim of this paper is to examine how given literary devices correspond with the fatalistic portrayal of the Iranian Revolution of 1978–1979 in Salem Khalfani’s novel Die ersten Tage der Welt. The fatalism, regarded as a social necessity and dependence of the drives, is emphasised by the theatrum mundi metaphor as well as the similes comparing the revolutionary events with the dynamic processes which can be found in the world of nature. The outcomes of the revolution are, however, connected with the poetics of lifelessness. Underneath the manifested layer of the novel, which emphasises the fatalism, there is also a covert layer of the text, which suggests that the narrator may be rationalising and denying any guilt for taking part in such a destructive mass event.

Word, Image, and Music in Ingmar Bergman’s Intermedial Laboratory

The article addresses the problem of relationships between a word, an image, and music in Ingmar Bergman’s films as approached from a new perspective of multimodality theories within a wider context of intermedia studies. The proposed framework for analyses is Lars Elleström’s concept of modalities of media, which are basic categories of their possible features: material modality (the way of mediating signs), sensorial modality (the way of perception and involvement of the senses), spatiotemporal modality (concerning the cognitive conditions for fixing perception data in space and time), and semiotic modality, which is connected to meaning. As her point of departure the article’s author takes Bergman’s words about film being parallel to music, which speak for film’s formal complexity as well as intensified connotative values. Further into the article, the analyses of selected musical scenes from Autumn Sonata and Cries and Whispers are carried out to illustrate the emergence of meaning through the combination of text, image and music or image and music. The article argues that music serves as a narrative means connecting different narrative levels and/or expressing emotional complexity beyond the limits of language. Thanks to different modalities of the media involved the semiotic impact of musical scenes is more elaborate than that of the verbal text itself, and the symbolic meaning of universal relevance is achieved. 

Natureculture in the Novel Eventide by Therese Bohman

One of the basic goals of ecocriticism is to deconstruct the binary opposition between “nature” and “culture”, so typical of Western thinking, and to show that these two notions are interdependent and cannot be separated. Donna Haraway proposes to reject this dichotomous division in favour of a new term coined by her, that is natureculture.

This article aims at showing how the relationship between “nature” and “culture” is construed in the novel Eventide (2016) by Swedish writer Therese Bohman. The author focuses on the interplay between them and emphasizes the hybrid nature of reality, which could be described as naturalcultural, within the meaning intended by Haraway. Bohman exposes naturalcultural interactions on multiple levels, both diegetic and non-diegetic: starting from the title of her novel, through the imagery in the text, descriptions of the action scene, characters and the observations of the main protagonist, ending with elements of the plot. 

The Tragedy of Life and the Metaphysics of Death in the Late Work of Ivan Turgenev

The text of the article contains a series of reflections on the tragic concept of life and metaphysics of death in the works of Ivan Turgenev in the 1870s and early 1880s, which the reader can easily find in most of his works of this period. Life on earth is seen as a great universal tragedy, in which an individual human being is doomed to defeat in the fight against the metaphysical power of nature, with an iron necessity for death and mortal love disease – the most beautiful manifestation of humanity, which is also a death sentence. The precursor of Turgenev’s vision of the world was the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer; regardless of the author of Fathers and children, similar thoughts appear in the works of Charles Baudelaire and Guy de Maupassant. The authors emphasize two main reasons for Turgenev’s global pessimism: firstly, a personal tragedy associated with a deeply and deeply lived love for Paulina Viardot, condemned to failure; and secondly, the powerful influence of Neoplatonism and the pantheistic Romantic philosophy under the sign of Schelling, within which the writer’s views developed during his youth. An analysis of a number of works created in the last years of Turgenev’s life, in which pictures of the transcendent world or longing for it appear more and more frequently, as evidenced by the regularly occurring oneiric motifs and the motif of a meek expectation of death. At the same time, the writer defends the human right to a dignified death, appropriate to the inalienable dignity of every human being.