The Dushechkina phenomenon

The article celebrates the scholarly legacy of the philologist Elena Dushechkina, an authority on the genre of Christmas story and the ‘Christmas culture’ of Russian literature. It is mainly inspired by the publication of the late scholar’s four books in 2023: Three monographs and a collection of selected articles were published by Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie thanks to the efforts of E. Belousova (Dushechkina’s daughter). Stroganov believes, therefore, that the time has come to assess and recognize Dushechkina’s scholarly input into the corpus of Russian ‘Christmas philology:’ it was in her research, he stresses, that a pivotal change occurred and the focus shifted from literature pure (or slovesnost in Dushechkina’s definition) to literature and life, thus reflecting the 1990s’ anthropocentric trend in post-modern studies of the humanities. Following Dushechkina’s scholarly career closely, Stroganov finds that the vibrancy and originality of her works stem from her constant disregard of historical and philological canon rather than strict adherence to the latter.