Parody in the Literary Criticism of Chukovsky (The Case of Leonid Andreyev)

The aim of the article is to reveal the role of parody in the literary criticism of Korney Chukovsky. The material of the study is his critical works of the 1900s in the context of the biographical and cultural-historical events of the era, with an emphasis on the writer's egodocuments (diaries, letters). The scientific study of Chukovsky's critical legacy is at an early stage, his literary works are mostly mastered, but most of them are books for children. The urgency of considering the stated subject is due to the contradiction between the well-known fact of Chukovsky's repeated address to parody in poems and fairy tales, his generally recognized feuilletonist skill, and his general intention of parody in everyday and literary life (“Chukokkala”), on the one hand, and the virtually unrecognized role of parodies in his critical articles, on the other. The theoretical premise of this work is the ideas of parody of Tynianov, who Chukovsky actively dealt with in the 1920s-30s. Bakhtin's ideas about the “two-voiced word” are also significant. At the same time, Chukovsky was not a parodist in a pure form, so it is justified to speak metaphorically about the “element of parody” as a principle generating various parody details in Chukovsky's multi-genre works. In the course of the study, not only his critical articles of the 1900s were analyzed, but also his early parodies and political satire in verse published in the Signal magazine (1905-1906), in which the parodying of literary texts was directed to non-literary objects. The analysis of the material brings to light not only the explicit parody techniques in Chukovsky's criticism, but also his intention of parody in the whole. Particular attention is paid to the manifestation of parody elements in his first book From Chekhov to Our Days and separately - dynamically -on the example of the set of works about Leonid Andreyev, the constant “hero” of Chukovsky's criticism. It was revealed that the element of parody in critical articles about the writer grew in proportion to the emergence of Chukovsky's peculiar critical method, the development of his own style and authorial masks corresponding to the ambivalent culture of the Silver Age. Systematization of various parody forms in the work of Chukovsky allows to suppose that it is one of the brightest features of his literary criticism aimed at penetrating into the “soul” of contemporary artists through studying and mastering their style. The multifunctional nature of parody in Chukovsky's works is conditioned by his struggle for genuine literature and his place in it. Parody is aimed at an ironic display of the “mechanized” technique of writers, assessment of their deviation from the ideal of “art as a goal in itself”, which was the axiological basis for Chukovsky's critical method (ascending to Chekhov) and for demonstrating the mastery of the writer and critic himself.

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