ChTO STALOS'' s Oneginym - Что сталось с Онегиным

"What Happened to Onegin" by Vladimir Pimonov is a collection of essays on literature, mythology and theater. The range of literary matter offered in the essays is extraordinary. Not only are we introduced in several essays to Pushkin¿s novel in verse "Eugene Onegin", but also to his prose tale "The Egyptian Nights", two sketches as well as an elegy "When down the noisy streets I'm walking". We get an analysis of Chekhov's "The Seagull", Shakespeare's "Hamlet" and Karamzin's "Poetry" placed in the context of the "text within text" and "theater within theater" design. We also pay a visit to Gogol's "The Overcoat", H.C. Andersen's fairy tale "Psyche", ancient Greek riddles and the myth of Oedipus. The Appendix contains two essays that supplement the main ones, but differ from them in material and subject matter. The essay "From Mimicry to the Fourth Wall" examines the relation between imitation in biology and theatricality as a cultural phenomenon. The paper "The Living and the Dead. From Initiation Rite to Political Myth" concentrates on the ritual roots of modern social mythology. Despite the diversity of themes and topics discussed in the essays, they are all united by a common structural-semantic approach to the object of the study. The idea of the author is to offer "close reading" of well-known texts and draw the reader into the methods of artistic embodiment of the hidden meanings embedded in them. The book is written in a conversational style and is designed to be accessible to a general audience.