In his book, Ajuar funerario (2004), Fernando Iwasaki presents a range of scary stories. In some cases, the horror results from the gap between the terrible story told or suggested and the tone of the narrator. Although the presence of intertextual references to canonical authors of the genre often leads to parody, laughter, or smile never last long in Iwasaki’s literature. The reader soon realizes that even if horror has ceased to be embodied in the traditional motifs of the genre, it is still there, alive and kicking, ready to put our certainties in crisis and give us new chills.

A review of the commentary on the Batrachomyomachia by Joel Christensen and Erik Robinson.

The subject of analysis is the opposition of two themes – boredom and pleasure – in Chekhov’s The Shooting Party. The category of “boredom” includes the characters’ daily duties and work, while “pleasure” corresponds to the unfettered Karamazian lust for life. The fight against boredom turns into the pursuit for the fulfilment of all life desires but also leads to conflicts, which leads to many tragic events related to the deaths of several of the novella’s heroes. The polarization of the world of text on the metaliterary level allows us to notice the features of parody in relation to the popular literature of the day.

Post-truth and parody in old and new media – This paper presents a description of a few issues of the satirical magazine Il Male, published in Italy in the second half of the 1970s. These special issues – somewhat parodies – copied the typographic format of the main Italian newspapers of that period and were filled with odd and invented news. In some respects these publications anticipate parody and falsification in the digital era. In particular, some Internet sites that play on the slight distinction between false and true reports, and make us reflect upon the reliability of the information, can be considered as heirs to this experiment.

This paper is dedicated to a study of the religious layer in I. Ilf and E. Petrov’s novel The Twelve Chairs. The analysis provided leads to a deeper understanding of the novel as a travesty. First of all, the few existing works devoted to the problem of biblical referencing in The Twelve Chairs are listed and summarised. Secondly, these existing works will be supplemented with previously unmentioned and unstudied allusions. Following on from the religious aspects considered are: the novel’s title, the parallel between Jesus and Ostap Bender, the character of Fedor Vostrikov, the story of the ‘hussar‑monk’ and several biblical allusions contained in The Twelve Chairs. Finally, in the last part of our research, all the religious motifs are classified in order to further an understanding of the authors’ attitude towards the Bible. In conclusion, we determine the nature of the perception of the Bible in The Twelve Chairs.