Last week, the Faculty of Humanities hosted a competition for experts in ancient mythology, organized by the Department of Russian Language and Literature. The participants of the intellectual competition were students of the RYAL-221 group who study ancient literature as part of the course on the history of foreign literature.
The contestants were faced with a number of difficult tasks. It was necessary to show knowledge of the Greek and Roman pantheons of the gods, to be able to explain the famous phraseological units associated with ancient mythology, to guess the legendary epic hero, expressively recite by heart an excerpt from Homer’s Iliad or Odyssey, to present the image of one of the mythological deities. The organizer of the competition, Candidate of Philological Sciences Irina Gennadievna Сhsherbovskikh, stressed that “this intellectual and creative tournament has long been one of the good traditions of the department. This year we saw new facets of our students’ talents. It was very difficult to memorize and recite an excerpt from the Homeric poems, because the dactylic hexameter, on which the oldest Greek poems are written, is not obeyed by everyone! The most interesting task of the competition was the “self-presentation” of the mythological hero. The students had to transform into an image and present it with the help of costume elements and several poetic lines composed by themselves. These lines draw from the first person the appearance of the hero who had to be guessed. Here, too, there was a six-stop dactyl! But the sophomores coped with all the difficulties easily and cheerfully.”
The competition is over, but the mighty Hephaestus (Danil Akulov), the beautiful Aphrodite (Ekaterina Vyatleva), and the wise Rhea (Anna Shvetsova) will remain in the memory of the students for a long time. An important achievement of this holiday was that now students will easily recognize mythological heroes and ancient plots in the works of Russian and foreign literature of subsequent eras. And, of course, a good mood and a desire to prove themselves in new literary tournaments.
