Review of the International Online Scientific Conference “Book Within a Book”, 2–4 October 2023

The work is a review of the first International Online Scientific Conference “Book Within a Book” organized by the A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences and dedicated to the 85th anniversary of the birth of Alexander Viktorovich Mikhailov (1938-1995), a great Russian philologist-Germanist, translator, historian, cultural theorist, and musicologist. A feature of this conference is the researchers' focus not just on intertextuality and various literary influences (allusions, reminiscences, etc.), but mainly on the presence in works of fiction of specific books that the characters mention, buy, sell, read, compose, use as storage places for other objects, talk with, etc. The idea of holding such a conference was formed during the work on the implementation of the tasks of the study The Role and Image of the Book in the Novel by F.M. Dostoevsky “Idiot”, carried out by the staff of the F.M. Dostoevsky and World Culture Center within the framework of a grant of the Russian Academy of Sciences, No. 23-2800258. The main task of the project was formulated by its scientific supervisor, Dr. T.A. Kasatkina: “We believe that the direct mention of the book in the text of a work (at least in the works of Dostoevsky) draws a radical distinguishing feature that allows us to separate the author's intention from research speculation and projections of their own reader preferences and associations on the novel”. The conference was attended by more than 55 researchers, including 47 speakers from five countries (Russia, USA, Germany, Azerbaijan, and Moldova) and 19 Russian regions (Arkhangelsk Region, Vladimir Region, Dagestan, Irkutsk Region, Kaluga Region, Karelia, Krasnodar Territory, Crimea, Luhansk Region, Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod Region, Novgorod Region, Pskov Region, Rostov Region, Samara Region, St. Petersburg, Sverdlovsk Region, Khakassia, Chelyabinsk Region). The range of books in books that the researchers discussed was the widest, and among the authors of the books analyzed are Virgil, Dante, Petrarch, Shakespeare, Casanova, Antiochus Kantemir, William Blake, Goethe, Pushkin, Eugene Sue, Gogol, Dumas fils, Melville, Flaubert, Turgenev, Bely, Conan Doyle, Kipling, Aldington, Durylin, Bulgakov, Ehrenburg, the Strugatsky brothers, Trifonov, Okudzhava, Tatyana Tolstaya, J. K. Rowling, and others. Two sessions were dedicated to the role and image of books in the works of Dostoevsky and the presence of Dostoevsky's books in Russian and world literature of the 20th-21st centuries. The organizing committee of the conference included N.N. Podosokorsky (chairman), T.A. Kasatkina, T.G. Magaril-Ilyaeva, K. Korbella. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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