The book of poems that you are holding in your hands is addressed to a wide range of readers. It will not leave indifferent either a fine connoisseur and connoisseur of literature, or a lover of the poetic word, or a person completely far from poetry, into whose hands this book fell by chance, or a professional critic.
The author of the collection is Marina EPSHTEIN, a Russian-speaking poetess who has been living in Australia since 1979, in an accessible, penetrating and understandable form for everyone, she speaks about different moments of our complex and diverse life.
I can't divide poems into chapters.
Love. Nature. Philosophical. About kids…
No matter what, but it is written about the main thing:
About our mortal life. About everything in the world.
Marina was born on April 17, 1939. in the cultural capital of Ukraine - the city of Kharkov. Since childhood, she was fond of poetry, was the editor of the school wall newspaper and its regular author. She studied at the philological faculty of Kharkov University. She worked as a teacher at the school, in charge of the library of the technical school.
Until recently, her poems were not known to the general public. But the ubiquitous Internet did its job: on the Odnoklassniki social site in the Poetry group, Marina decided to open her page, and her poems were immediately noticed and noted both by colleagues in the poetry workshop and by lovers of Russian poetry from different countries peace. Here, on the site, Marina was noticed and invited to cooperate by the editors of the international almanac of Russian-language poetry and prose "Feelings Without Borders". In one of the collections of the Almanac, Marina published her poems for the first time.
I wrote to the table many times,
Yes, it happens now too.
Everything can endure paper.
What is a lie, what is the truth without embellishment,
To her that love, that divination-
Such is her fate.
During her long life, Marina wrote many poems. Perhaps there is no such topic that she would not touch in her poems. These are love and hatred, civic and philosophical reflections, nature, travel, the world of childhood, literature and its heroes ... And on each topic, the poetess can speak with any reader in a clear, juicy and figurative language. Despite the fact that Marina has been living away from her homeland for a long time, her poems have not lost the depth, colorfulness, and accuracy inherent in true native speakers of the Russian language. Her speech is figurative, metaphorical and correct. But this correctness, literacy in observing the norms of the language and the laws of poetics, does not make her poems dry and callous, they not only make you think, they excite the soul, make the heart beat faster.
Write write! Sharpen your pen.
... Epithets and sophistication of a clever man.
It must be nice and sharp.
Not only a pie, but also a highlight.
Marina herself says the following about the subject of her work: “I have always been worried about topics related to a person’s personality: his experiences, emotions, relationships between people. To write on one topic, it seems to me, is boring, uninteresting.
Whatever the poet writes about
He returns to the soul.
She hurts, gives advice,
Meet and say goodbye.
Marina's poems are positive and optimistic, they preach faith in a person, in his best qualities: kindness, the ability to think, love, make this world more beautiful and perfect. Remember this name - Marina EPSHTEIN!

Marina Belyaeva,
literary editor of the Almanac "Feelings Without Borders",
Laureate of the international competition "Golden stanza" 2009,
2010

Britikov Anatoly Fyodorovich

Introductory article (to the collection of A. Belyaev "Fiction")

The name of Alexander Romanovich Belyaev is a whole era in our science fiction literature. His early works appeared in the mid-1920s, almost simultaneously with Aleksey Tolstoy's "Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin", the last novel was published already during the Great Patriotic War. Belyaev was the first Soviet writer for whom new in Russia literary genre became a matter of life. Sometimes he is called the Soviet Jules Verne. Belyaev is related to the great French science fiction writer by intelligent humanism and the encyclopedic versatility of creativity, the materiality of fiction and the scientific discipline of artistic imagination. Like Jules Verne, he was able to catch on the fly an idea that was born at the forefront of knowledge, long before it received recognition. Even his purely adventure fiction was often saturated with far-sighted scientific and technical foresights. For example, in the novel Fight on the Air (1928), which was reminiscent of Marietta Shaginyan's adventurous fairy tale Mess-Mend (1924), the reader got an idea of ​​the radio compass and radio direction finding, power transmission without wires and 3D television, radiation sickness and sound weapons, about the artificial cleansing of the body of fatigue toxins and the artificial improvement of memory, about the scientific and experimental development of aesthetic standards, etc. Some of these discoveries and inventions were still being carried out in the time of Belyaev, others still remain a scientific problem, and still others have not lost their freshness as science fiction hypotheses.

In the 1960s, the famous American physicist L. Szilard published the story “The Mark Gable Foundation”, surprisingly reminiscent of the old Belyaev story “Neither life nor death”. Szilard took the same scientific topic- suspended animation (prolonged inhibition of vital functions) and came to the same paradoxical collision as Belyaev: the capitalist state also freezes the reserve army of the unemployed "until better times". Belyaev physiologically correctly defined the phenomenon: neither life nor death - and correctly guessed the main factor of suspended animation - the cooling of the body. Academician V. Parin, who already in our time studied the problem of suspended animation, had reason to say that initially it was most thoroughly covered not in scientific literature, but in science fiction. It is important, however, that from the very beginning Belyaev approved scientifically substantiated foresight in our science fiction.

He was an enthusiast and a real ascetic: he wrote a whole library of novels, novellas, essays, short stories, screenplays, articles and reviews (some were recently found in old newspaper files) in some fifteen years, often bedridden for months. Some of his ideas developed into a novel only after being tested with an abridged version, in the form of a story, such as, for example, "Professor Dowell's Head." He was amazingly industrious. The few surviving manuscripts testify to how painstakingly Belyaev achieved the ease with which his works are read.

Belyaev was not as gifted as a writer as Alexei Tolstoy. " Images are not always successful, the language is not always rich", he lamented. And yet his skill stands out against the backdrop of science fiction of the time. " The plot - that's what he felt his power over”, - recalled the Leningrad poet Vs. Azarov. This is true. Belyaev skillfully weaves the plot, skillfully interrupts the action "on the most interesting". But his talent is richer than adventure entertainment. Belyaev's strength lies in a meaningful, rich, beautiful fantasy. The mainspring of his novels is the romance of the unknown, the interest of exploration and discovery, the intellectual situation and acute social clash.

Already Jules Verne tried to communicate scientific information in such episodes, where they would easily be linked with the adventures of the heroes. Belyaev took a further step - he included scientific material in a psychological context. For this reason, the sci-fi theme often receives an individual coloring associated with the personality of this or that hero. When in the novel "The Man Who Found His Face" Dr. Sorokin, talking with Tonio Presto, likens the community to hormonal and nervous systems workers' self-management, when he contrasts this view of the organism with the opinion of other scientists who speak of the "autocracy" of the brain, and at the same time ironically remarks: " Monarchs were generally unlucky in the twentieth century”, - all this wittily translates medical concepts into the language of social images and corresponds to the patient’s ironic intonation:

“What are you complaining about, Mr. Presto?

To fate."

The doctor perfectly understands what fate the famous artist can grieve about: the hilarious dwarf Tonio Presto is weighed down by his ugliness. The action takes place in America. In the depths of the likeness of the body to the "Council of Workers' Deputies" lies Dr. Sorokin's belonging to another world, and this figurative political association anticipates Tonio's rebellion against American democracy. Sci-fi theme (Dr. Sorokin turns a dwarf into an attractive young man) develops in several semantic plans at once.

Belyaev always sought to poetically express the rational content of his fantasy. Artistic detail he is always very purposefully colored with a fantastic idea, because the essence of the poetry of his novels is in the fantastic ideas themselves. The secret of his literary skill lies in the art with which he mastered science fiction material. Belyaev subtly felt his inner aesthetics, he knew how to extract not only rational, but also all the artistic and emotional potential of a fantastic idea. Belyaev's scientific premise is not just a starting point entertaining history, but the grain of the entire artistic structure of the work. His successful novels unfold from this grain in such a way that the fantastic idea "programs", it would seem, artistically the most neutral details. That is why his best novels are solid and complete, that is why they retain their poetic appeal even after their scientific basis has become obsolete.

With a metaphor, sometimes symbolic, often already expressed in the title (“Amphibian Man”, “Jump into Nothing”), Belyaev, as it were, crowned the fantastic transformation of the original scientific premise. One of his stories, buried in old magazines, is entitled "Dead Head" - after the name of a butterfly chased (and lost in the jungle) by an entomologist. But the "dead head" is also a symbol of a person's loss of his mind in the silence of uninhabited forests. "White Savage" (the title of another story) is not only a white-skinned person, it is also a light human nature against the gloomy backdrop of capitalist civilization. By the way, in this story Belyaev used the motives of the American writer E. Burroughs, whose novels about the man-ape Tarzan were a resounding success in the 1920s. The Soviet science fiction writer managed to give a banal adventure collision an unexpectedly deep and instructive - scientifically and socially - turn. In 1926, The World Pathfinder magazine began publishing his fantastic film story "The Island of Lost Ships" - a "free translation" of the American action movie, as the preface said. In an ordinary melodrama with chases and shooting, Belyaev invested a lot of information about shipbuilding, about the life of the sea, and translated adventure romance into an educational plan.

Belyaev's indestructible curiosity for the unknown always looked for support in the fact, in the logic of scientific knowledge, while the plot was used mainly as an entertaining form of serious content. However, his fictitious plot was often based on fact. The impetus for the adventure plot of one of the early works The Last Man from Atlantis (1926) could have been a clipping from the French newspaper Le Figaro: A society for the study and exploitation of Atlantis is organized in Paris". Belyaev forces the expedition to find in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean a description of the life and death of the proposed continent. The writer drew the material from the book of the French scientist R. Devigne "Atlantis, the disappeared mainland", published in 1926 in Russian translation. The plot developed on its basis served as a frame main idea, also taken from Devigne (Belyaev cites it at the beginning of the novel): “ It is necessary ... to find the sacred land in which the common ancestors of the most ancient nations of Europe, Africa and America sleep". The novel unfolds as a fantastic realization of this truly great and noble scientific task.

Introductory article to the collection of short stories by A.P. Chekhov.

"Brevity is the sister of talent ..." This phrase is on everyone's lips. But not many people know that it belongs to the greatest artist of the word Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. This aphorism, which has become winged, can serve as a kind of epigraph to the writer's work.

Undoubtedly, Chekhov's stories are distinguished by laconicism, brevity, lack of beautiful and pompous phrases, but this is one of the many features of his works.

What can so interest the reader that he wants to read the story again and again? What attracts him so much in these often ordinary and vulgar stories? How can the most typical, ordinary heroes differ?

Chekhov himself spoke of his writing style as follows: “You can cry and moan over stories, you can suffer along with your heroes, but I think you need to do this in such a way that the reader does not notice.” Chekhov's reticence and restraint affects the reader more than big words. One of the critics of the early twentieth century rightly wrote: "And when he was silent so deeply and meaningfully that he seemed to speak expressively."

Indeed, the author's assessment is not expressed clearly, it is scattered throughout the text. The author avoids straightforward and unambiguous assessments of the characters. His heroes are living people, not schematic carriers of some ideas. Yes, and the main idea of ​​the work is also always hidden, since the main thing for the writer is not the proclamation of any statement, but the search for truth, not the solution of the issue, but its statement. So, the feelings, thoughts of the characters are also guessed, they are not directly mentioned. And in expressive dialogues, we can see the wisdom of the characters, although this is also hidden.

“Truth is born in a dispute” (Socrates) And Chekhov allows the reader to independently draw any conclusions. The story becomes an occasion to think about your life. And in the sometimes banal, ordinary plot, a deep meaning is hidden.

If you like comic novels, satirical stories, anecdotes, then you will be pleasantly surprised by Chekhov's favorite tricks in his works: humor and irony, satire and sarcasm.

Chekhov's jokes are also based on generalizations. Drawing the image of a shopkeeper in the story "Requiem" we can see how "Andrei Andreevich wore solid galoshes, those huge, clumsy galoshes that only positive, reasonable and religiously convinced people have on their feet." The writer's humor is based on the exponentiation of any trifle and accident. This is Chekhov's poetics of trifles. The author goes from details to a greater generalization.

In his stories, Chekhov focused on what is the most ordinary in everyday life. From the first to the last action, the main event of the work "Ionych" is obscured by the everyday events of life. How to explain this feature of Chekhov's stories? First of all, the writer seeks to understand what motivates the characters to do something. Therefore, Chekhov refers to emphatically ordinary everyday episodes, at first glance quite insignificant, filled with trifles. This helps him reproduce the most character traits modern life, under which his characters think, act, suffer. Another characteristic feature of Chekhov's stories is connected with this feature. The source of the conflict is not in the contradiction and clash of passions. In The Man in the Case, for example, there is no one to blame. Who is to blame for the lifestyle of teacher Belikov? No one is subjectively guilty. Life develops outside the will of people, and suffering occurs by itself.

Who is to blame? This question comes up in every story. Thanks to these features, we understand that it is not individual people who are to blame, but the whole life in the endless monotony of its everyday life.

All Chekhov's work is a call for spiritual liberation and emancipation of man. M. Gorky told the writer: "You seem to be the first free and worshiping person that I have seen." Undoubtedly, this inner freedom as main feature Chekhov's character is reflected in the stories presented in this collection.

This collection includes almost the entire book of poems "Terroir of Solitude" and some of the previous books: "Pure Women's Lyrics", "Properties of the Shell", "I Create the Sky" and the next one, which is still written "A Together".

The terroir of loneliness” is a place for the ripening of various loneliness - the loneliness of a poet, the loneliness of a woman, loneliness in love, loneliness in life, in time and place, in age and level of erudition. life, time and place, age and level

Poems are always an attempt at contact. Contact, for example, the inner self with the outer bodily appearance. Or the outer environment with the inner world. Self-isolation is like collapsing into a black hole.

In verses, the external harmonic consonance found reveals, makes distinct only the mystically discernible essence of the relationship between the elements of nature, man and things.

A person thinks with the whole body, and not only with logical constructions. The poet's feelings are always tragic. Their volume is so huge that it overwhelms them. You can share the burden only with poetry, otherwise it is impossible to endure. And their infinite polarity is the living pulsation of your flesh and the universe as a whole. It is always a relationship, any monologue is a dialogue with an internal interlocutor, which is part of your inner peace. And even nature, and history, and religion, and God get into the inner space, become an integral part of you. "But man is the world." This is what I can say about Terroir of Solitude. And this image of attitude to the world, the image of a possible position at some point changed.

Another book of poems "And together" began. But the person saved from alienation, who puts his soul into his work, remained. I managed to save the "living soul" once again, as in others more early books poems.

In those books man was saved by feeling from reification. We are not “ghosts loaded with knowledge”, we are flesh and blood, drowned in the material concerns of this day, but we are not limited by them. You have to fight for Life and Death in the realm of feelings (something bums don't commit suicide). Fight to rise to the senses. To write something sincerely, you need to have passion. And passion is not only eros, it is any emotion brought to a peak state. And then you need to get out of it and look at your handiwork with a conscious concern for style. This is my philosophical approach.

A necessary poetic element may be the sound value of the word, and the color injected by comparisons, and the line of the length of the line - the whole complex of sensations. But only a deep trembling of the spirit is actually a conversation with the animated world - there is an inner voice, there is individuality, there is our question to this world of people that enters you, and you cannot renounce them, for the world and you are one and the same. It remains to wait for an answer. It remains to wait for contact.

3.2.2. Introductory article

This is a relatively independent essay, in which the work of the author or the published work is widely interpreted in order to help
it is better, deeper, more subtle for the reader to perceive the content of the book, to understand its complexities, to get acquainted with its history, the reader's fate
and changes in assessment. So an introductory article is especially needed.
in complex books, the contents of which are not easy to understand without additional information. It is placed most often in editions of individual works or collected works of writers, scientists, public figures(See Appendix 9 on p. 76).

The introductory contains analytical material, which should
in the broadest sense to orient the reader in the literary process
and in particular literary work. It represents the author and his book, characterizes the place of the work in the author's work.

Thus, the purpose of the introductory article is wider than that of the preface. This is both analysis and comprehension of creativity or work.

In essence, an introductory article is a historical-literary, historical-scientific or theoretical work, which to a certain extent
independently, and therefore can be published even as a separate edition or as part of a collection of works by the author of the introductory article.
By virtue of its presentation, it cannot belong to the author of the book. Most often, the introductory article belongs to the edition of the classics.

The introductory article should open the book. Her place is after title page, before the author's preface, if it is included in the publication. An introductory article can only be preceded by a preface by the publisher, editorial board or editor, or a table of contents (contents), if it is decided to place it at the end of the publication.

Formatting the introductory article:

Most often, the introductory article, like the preface, is typed in a font smaller in size than the font of the main text, in order to sharply separate the hardware text from the main one.

3.2.3. Afterword

The afterword is very close in purpose to the introductory article, with the only difference being that the author of the afterword to a greater extent operates with the material of the work, counting on the reader's acquaintance with it. The afterword not only analyzes and comprehends from modern positions author's work,
but also often complements it modern material. Unlike an introductory article, it can be written by the author of a reprinted book if a lot of time has passed since the release of the previous edition and if he prefers to include all new materials not in the text of the work, but in a concentrated form in the afterword. However, in this case, the afterword ceases to be a purely hardware part. Rather, it is an additional chapter of the work, so such an afterword would be more accurately called an addition.

The afterword is placed after the appendix (s), before all other parts of the post-text apparatus: bibliographic lists, notes, auxiliary indexes, etc. - the reader refers to these parts of the post-text apparatus repeatedly both in the course of reading and after, which forces them to be placed closer towards the end of the edition to facilitate their search.

3.2.4. Comments

This is an integral part of the apparatus of the publication, which is a set of information that explains and interprets facts, words, fragments of a text or the entire work, and thus helps the reader to deeply understand it.

They can:

1) reveal the history of the text (textual commentary);

2) to cover the creative history of the work, as well as the history of its criticism (historical and literary commentary);

3) describe the history of the publication or report on the first and most important publications (publisher's commentary);

4) explain hidden quotes, allusions to events and facts of the time in which the author worked, reveal the meaning of mentioning persons and facts in the text of the work, as well as details of life little known to the reader, etc. (real commentary, i.e. explaining the realities) .

With a small amount of comments to the work, all their types can be merged into a single, complex commentary.

A good research commentary should be concise in form, should not present information that is easy to find in the public domain. encyclopedic dictionaries and elementary guides. A major drawback of some comments is the wrong choice of commented places: often commented on what can be easily established, and not commented at all on what the commentator did not find an answer. Places not understood by the commentator must be included in the comment with an indication that this place cannot be commented on.

The commentary helps the reader to recognize the historical name, geographical name, etc., understand what is unclear, and get information about what else
in this text it is not established and not explained by science that needs
in further research.

The most important thing in a commentary is the most difficult place in a literary work. Therefore, to comment on what has not yet been correctly understood, what is now understood differently by the reader than was understood by the author or his contemporaneous readers, is an honorable task, turning commentary into research. But there are also primitive comments that explain to an adult reader what he can easily find in public reference books (dictionaries, encyclopedias, etc.), which each intelligent person must have at home or at least can find in the library. Comments that repeat information from publicly available help guides are "stupid" comments.

It is unacceptable to comment only on what the commentator easily understood, and to leave difficult passages without explanation. Of course, the commentator may encounter difficulties, may not find an explanation for this or that place,
but in such a case he should honestly write:

"The place defies explanation";

or better:

"This place could not be explained."

Thus, he indicates the need for further searches, and such an admission of one's own impotence turns out to be of no use. This is admission
honest, and it testifies to known level"scientific ethics" of the commentator - of course, if he only really made an effort to decipher the mysterious place.

Comments are always placed after the text of the work or works; they are part of the overtext apparatus of the publication. With applications and bibliographic lists or pointers to comments, it is advisable to place them after them before the notes, if the latter are separated from the comments. General comments (to the work as a whole) precede comments on specific places main place.

Possibly the following location:

Editorial comment

General textual commentary

Textual commentary on specific places in the text

Historical and literary commentary

Real commentary (may be merged with a note).

Main PRIO clearance comments:

Comments are placed separately from notes when they do not include those that refer to specific places in the main text. Comments
to specific places in the main text and notes are usually printed together, because they have the same type of subject of explanation (for example, the name of a person, a hidden quote, etc.) and the boundaries between them are unsteady;

A commentary on the entire work is an article of various lengths about the sources of the text, the history of publication and (or) the critical perception of the work. Page-by-page comments can be formatted either
in the sequence of the main text, or, like a dictionary, in alphabetical
order of commented names or objects, which greatly facilitates
search for a comment when a name or object is mentioned again and eliminates duplication of names and objects in cases where indexes and comments are placed separately;

The volume of comments depends on the type of publication according to the reader's purpose, i.e. the wider the circle of readers, the smaller the volume of comments and notes should be, since everything special to a wide circle of readers is not
need. Comments are not meant to be an exhaustive answer to a question.
Maximum conciseness is a fundamental feature of the commentary. It must contain only that without which it is difficult or impossible to understand the author - his text;

Comments are typed in a smaller font size than the font size
main text.

The original, or rather, through the assessment of the semantic and stylistic equivalence of the language units that make up the translation text and the original text. III. The editor's work on articles in an encyclopedia (on the example of translated children's encyclopedias published by Dorling Kindersley): 1. Peculiarities of children's encyclopedias published by Dorling Kindersley. Founded in 1974,...

Problems and constant incidental solution of creative problems. Actually creative work on the author's original, in turn, is impossible without a certain organizational and informational work. The editor can improve the work if contacts with the author, reviewers are provided, information is received regarding the array and flow of publications, the necessary information is found for ...

Its registration”, “Parties of the pledge agreement” and “Rights and obligations of the parties”. The two-stage rubrication chosen by the author corresponds to the reader's address (students and university professors, specialists) and the type of publication (manual). Analysis of the composition revealed the following shortcomings: 1. Sections "Introduction", "Conclusion" and "From the Author" are missing. And they could give information to the future reader about ...

In the author's edition. Structure of the book: The following elements are placed on the cover: the author's first and last name (Vladimir Sviridov), the title of the book ("Ellipsis"), the subtitle ("Journey of a man and a woman through the Ussuri taiga in the habitats of tigers and leopards"). The order is correct. On the second page of the cover there is information about the author and his photo, which is usually located ...