The focus of my research is 19th-century Russian literature as seen from the perspective of the prose poetics of Pushkin, Lermontov (1 monograph), Turgenev (2 monographs), Dostoevsky (3 monographs), Gogol, Chekhov, and Tolstoy. The reading methodology of these literary works is characterized by a theoretical orientation investigating into literary semiotic poetics and intertextuality. This latter is also contextualized within the scope of literary historical studies, from a comparatistic viewpoint. Special attention is paid to the emergence of lyrical intertexts in prose works – short stories, novellas and novels –, generating a lyric discourse intonation in epic genres. The literary conceptualization of time (its semantic model) and the semiotics of text-continuity are also major fields of study.

My research in literary semiotics follows three directions aiming to contribute to the disciplinary identification of the given field. The first is with a focus on theory and the selection of the semiotic criteria required in literary text/discourse analysis in search for contextualizing literary semiotics within cultural semiotics, on the one hand, and explaining its relation to literary criticism in general, on the other. The second represents an orientation to define literary semiotics from a scientific historical perspective, on the developmental line departing from Russian Formalism. The third direction is the semiotic interpretation of literary works with a central interest in the Russian classics (see, e.g. the monograph ‛A Hero of our Time’ – Literary Semiotics of our Time? Character poetics and semiotics of reading in Lermontov’s novel. Budapest, 2020, L’Harmattan [in Hungarian]). The most relevant topics include: text-coherence, literary discourse connectedness and harmonization, text-correlations, semiotic translations (intermediality, transmediality, intertextuality), semiotic autocommunication, self-descriptive textuality, metapoetic constructions, the methodology of teaching semiotics.