The topic of time and narrative time in Russian novels of the 1920-1950s

This article is devoted to the analysis of the forms of the narration time in Russian post-Symbolic novels. In modern narratology the forms of time can be analyzed both in the context of the description of particular narrative structures and in relation with positing the generalized categories of a narrative work. This article deals with only one aspect of this problem which can be defined as correlation between the narrative time and the narrative strategy (i.e. how the object, agent and recepient of the discourse are posited). The analysis is based on the novels by V. Nabokov, I. Ilf and E. Petrov, Vs. Ivanov, B. Pasternak. The characters' and narrators' 'experience of time' (P. Ricoeur's term) is correlated with the basic semantics of the narrative. This can be identified by studying the interaction between time aspects of the subject's 'point of view' (B.A. Uspensky's term) and relations between tenses and event time in the narrative world. In novels which manifest the 'narrative strategy of provoking', the 'unreliable' narrative and avant-garde poetics the time is connected with the philosophy of 'picaresque', 'carnival', and 'game'. The 'adventure-time' is materialized in the plot details of I. Ilf and Evg. Petrov's The Twelve Chairs (1927). The arrival in Moscow is marked by the episode where the protagonists look at different clocks on the railroad terminal realizing that each of them tells different time. Even the clock, which has to be objective, actually has individuality (the basic value in the comic world view) in its point of view. In tragic discourse the same method of materializing the course of history is connected with entirely different meanings including fate, destiny, transcendental principles of human being. The story about a clock which predicted the illness of the character (Doctor Zhivago, 1957) is an example. Anachronies which can have different semantics in the novels with different strategies manifest in the change between the time of story and the time of narration. In the Russian language they are represented by changing the tense from the past to the future and verb aspects from perfective to imperfec-tive. This points out the difference between the world of heroes and the world of the narrator who takes the role of a 'director of discourse' in V. Nabokov's and Vs. Ivanov's novels. Metalepses in B. Pasternak's novel are connected with narrative syncretism, the dialogue between the narrator and the protagonist who is also a persona in his own poetry. Temporal paradoxes of the novel (the presence of fragments in the present tense) can be explained by the specifics of the protagonist - as the character he is in the narrative past, as the agent of perception (appears in the narrator's voice) he is in the narrative present, as the author of his poetry he is in the narrative future. To sum it up, the problem of correlation between the past and the present, the general and the personal history becomes not only the most important part of the story, but also an impulse for experimenting with different forms of presenting the narration which influence the readers' reception, their experience of time.

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