“A Garden of Forking Paths”: Reimagining Dreiser (Dreiser’s Path: A View With a Modern Lens. Edited by Irina V. Morozova. Moscow: RSUH Publ., 2023. 206 p.)

The review focuses on the collective monograph Dreiser’s Path: A View with a Modern Lens (2023). The scholarly work reevaluates Dreiser's significance as a classic of American literature and offers a contemporary perspective on his legacy through the lens of modern methodologies such as critical race theory, postcolonial theory, gender theory, etc. The attention of prominent researchers in American literature and culture from Russia, the USA, Canada, and the UK is drawn to Dreiser's contradictory and hermetic view of society and its artistic projection. The monograph reevaluates Dreiser's creative legacy, considering both major and well-known works as well as minor forms. The researchers featured in the monograph highlight the reasons why certain laws operate in Dreiser's artistic world, align Dreiser's value system with the social norms prevailing during his time, typologize the components of Dreiser's texts, and theorize them using contemporary methodological tools. They also juxtapose Dreiser's texts with other artifacts of American culture and demonstrate the evolution of Dreiser's perception from the times of the USSR to the present day. The monograph was conceived in 2021 as a special tribute to Theodore Dreiser to mark his 150 anniversary

On the Gibbs states of the noncritical Potts model on Z^2

We prove that all Gibbs states of the q-state nearest neighbor Potts model on Z^2 below the critical temperature are convex combinations of the q pure phases; in particular, they are all translation invariant. To achieve this goal, we consider such models in large finite boxes with arbitrary boundary condition, and prove that the center of the box lies deeply inside a pure phase with high probability. Our estimate of the finite-volume error term is of essentially optimal order, which stems from the Brownian scaling of fluctuating interfaces. The results hold at any supercritical value of the inverse temperature.Comment: Minor typos corrected after proofreading. Final version, to appear in Probab. Theory Relat. Field