François de Curel (1854-1928) went down into the history of the French theater as an author of ‘thesis plays’. However, his works contain the features of the so-called ‘drama crisis’ which manifests itself at the turn of the 19th and 20th century, by the rejection of the canonical rules advocated since Aristotle. In fact, by analyzing A False Saint (1892), we are forced to note that the writer is undermining the dramatic structure by shifting his gaze from action to the study of the souls of the characters. Deprived of all will, they slowly get bogged down in their shady as inert world. In this way, the French playwright puts emphasis not on ‘acting character’ but on ‘retrospective character’ (passive) who dwells on his unhappy life.

This paper invites not to reflect on festivals as a celebration or a transgression but to observe them as «a play with» meaning and communication. The author considers the folklore as a genuine laboratory of observation of everyday life. He illustrates his analysis with the examples of the Binche Carnival (Belgium) and of Labour Day (1st of May) and gives an interpretation with G. Bateson’s concept of «play», as the English anthropologist had used to describe the play of animals at fighting. This leads the author to strongly insist on the small details of behaviours always imprinted with a “not” characteristic of ritual contexts.

The foregoing article is an attempt at answering the question, whether Fiodor Sologub is rightly called a eulogist of evil and an apologist of devil, as well as a God-iconoclast. For this purpose the author is trying to revise the hitherto views concerning the fi gure of God in the lyric of the Russian poet. In the effect of conducted studies it was established that the myth of Sologub, “the literary Jack the Ripper”, functioning well until today was based on unjust and often prejudicial opinions of persons from the symbolist’s generation, as well as of the later experts in literature, who ascribed to them the “crimes” committed by the protagonists of his novels (sadism, erotomania, necrophilia and Satanism). The key problem of God-iconoclasty in turn, as it has been revealed, is connected with the issue of literary mask, a play with the reader. On one hand, the poet’s God-iconoclasty is an attempt of “getting inscribed” in the creative tendency that predominated in the Russian literature of that time (the “diabolic symbolism”), on the other – it constitutes one of the stages in looking for God and the development of lyrical “I”, carrying autobiographical traits.