Antony Pogorelsky's novel Monastyrka: the poetics of Biedermeier (Article 1)

Basing on the novel Monastyrka by A. Pogorelsky the article actualizes the Biedermeier problem in the Russian literature. Biedermeier style elements refer to the axiological hierarchy of the rhetorical culture and to the resultant force of reality in realism (when the artist starts directly from reality, not on from a predetermined aesthetic ideal). The question of the possible allocation of a complex of Biedermeier elements in each national literature under certain conditions of its development is raised. Yet, a work with some Biedermeier features does not represent this style as a system, since these features are able to blend finely with other styles. The Biedermeier phenomenon in its duality can represent the problem of a demolishing culture in a purer form than the styles of the ready-made word or early Realism for Biedermeier suggests integrity based not on the transcendence of the ideal or the immediate social and historical reality but within the common humanistic order which mostly values the balance of the different and measure between the extremes of a juxtaposition. In this article on the material of Monastyrka the new conditions and aesthetic orientations of the word are considered on the border of culture and empiricism, its genre and choral (rumor) nature. The permanent element of the comic stems from the inconsistencies between the reality and any word about it. At the same time humor becomes a condition of their convergence. The hierarchy in Biedermeier gives way to collecting sovereign verbal forms produced by the every-day tangible reality beyond comparing these forms with the "high" metaphysical model. The aspect of reality as a collection of sovereign forms, the result of divergence of the word and the world, is connected with the problem of communication which implicates a compromise between "mine" and "alien" with all the axiological heterogeneity and non-hierarchy of being. Pogorelsky's plot is invisibly surrounded by the collective (folk) being. It is the sporadic verbal connections of various characters that overcome any delimitation - spatial, social, ethical, and even that between the past and the present. The collective word loses its epic character. It assembles like a puzzle of diverse guesswork and retellings, which allows the word to surround and tame history in its unpredictability. Along with the specifics of the word, the article examines various aspects of Biedermeier poetics of the thing in Monastyrka. The thing loses its place in the hierarchical system of values; it is situational, metonymic to the person and time. In its ordinariness the thing can become an internal reservoir of time (thing as a capsule of time, event, style); it is on the border of reality and culture, which, with external simplicity, generates a complex system of relations of the thing and the person in Biedermeier.

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