Genre features of dystopia in Yuri Davydov’s “Afrikanskiy variant”

The article researches the genre features of dystopia in Yuri Davydov’s historical story “Afrikan-skiy variant” [African Option] (1970) which is a representative work in terms of the mechanism of genre integration. The authors of this article explore the cognitive “matrix” of dystopia based on M.M. Bakhtin’s and other researchers’ ideas about the transformational potential of a literary genre, about epistemological and cognitive factors of genre creation. The matrix is preserved in a number of key cultural concepts which constitute the cognitive basis (conceptosphere) of dystopia and explain the potential and limits of form variation. Genre is understood as a “cultural and historical type of conditionality” determining borders of text interpretation; synthesis of genres is understood as a full representation of essential features of each of the synthesizing genres. Synthesis of the dystopia and the historical story should be considered as an integration of three genre forms: the story, the dystopia and the utopia, whose genre features are latently present in dystopias. Dystopias are designed on the basis of utopian concepts: “Happiness / Blessing”, “Mind”, “Generality”, “Messiah / Benefactor”, “Chosen People / We”, “State” and others; and actual dystopian concepts: “Dissidents / Heretics”, “Revolution / Riot / War”, “Execution”, “Human / I” and others. “Afrikanskiy variant” is based on a documented historical fact of adventurous attempts of creating a community The New Moscow by Nikolai Ivanovich Ashinov (1856-1902) in Ethiopia. The story of The New Moscow gained wide and scandalous notoriety following numerous publications in Russian and foreign press. This story is artistically interpreted in Yuri Davydov’s story and in V. Pikul’s story “Vol’nyy kazak Ashinov” [Free Cossack Ashinov] (1976). The circumstances of the historical event (attempts to organize the community The New Moscow) became iconic to Yuri Davydov and suggested the artistic form. On the one hand (for the reader), the genre determines and projects cognition of the past, the present or the future with the help of genre concepts; on the other hand (for the researcher), it reflects the author’s way, model, trajectory of artistic comprehension of historical reality. The potential of integration of analyzed art forms is different: the dystopia, according to the authors, is demanding in terms of the material (topics, subjects and images), the story is more open to interaction with other genres of literature due to attention to the individual destiny and the human inner world. Materials of this article will be useful to researchers for general development of theoretical problems connected with to the origin and existence of genres of the utopia and the dystopia; and researchers of Russian historical prose of this period, particularly researchers of Yuri Davydov’s oeuvre.

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