A Personal Diary in the Structure of Documentary and Literary Narration: Otblesk Kostra and Starik by Yu. Trifonov

In his documentary tale Otblesk kostra [Fireglow] (1965) and novel Starik [The Old Man] (1978) Yuri Trifonov resorts to his uncle P.A. Lurie's personal diary entries of 1914-1921. In his tale, the author aims to combine the epic and the individual in the structure of documentary narration. This determines the necessity to introduce a multitude of documents into the text, and a personal diary is one of the 22 types of documents Trifonov used. This case allows addressing the issue of a personal diary functioning in documentary narration both alongside and in comparison with other documentary inclusions as well as establishing the role of a personal diary in the modeling of the historical polyphony of the previous age. Trifonov finds Lurie's personal diary highly important as an evidence of a witness, a chronicler who impartially records events in their authenticity and objectivity. By this matter, a diary is opposed to other reminiscences in the overall concept of the tale. There are several functions of personal diary entries: describing the overall condition of the social reality or its part (Rostov); giving grounds for the logic of a certain social process development; proving a fact, an event or its sequence; depicting the living conditions of a daily routine; expressing the author's and others' emotional state. On the one hand, in the novel Starik, Lurie's personal diary entries preserve their semantic potential as precise features of the time. On the other hand, though they change their configuration gaining some new functions and becoming a basis for the characters' corporeal image and psychological, moral and emotional states. Trifonov moves his focus from entries' nature to their author's personality, his state of mind at the moment of writing. It allows using a personal diary as a prototype basis to create this very personality. The occurring semantic gaps between diary entries allow the demiurge author, with the help of creative imagination, to overcome the chronicality of the personal diary entries' and their factual nature and turn them into an inherent element of the novel's literary world. The composition succession of diary entries in Starik is destroyed and reformed on other grounds: it follows the logic of personality's self-exposure and is completed with self-analysis of the main character Pavel Letunov. The factual nature of diary entries in the novel is overcome by the character's existential position, his attitude (reminiscence rather than capturing the events), expansion of horizons (inclusion of private life), changing the modality of perception (reflection, emotional evaluation). Personal diary entries are transformed. Unlike the tale, they acquire features of personal entries with their intimacy of statement and confessional nature. In the new context, they are included in the main range of the author's moral-philosophic themes of the novel and submit to their evolution.

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