Viktor Astafiev’s “Modern Pastoral”: An Experience of an Intertextual Reading

The aim of the article is to clarify the artistic meanings of the “modern pastoral” The Shepherd and the Shepherdess by Viktor Astafiev in comparison with the story Old Years by Pavel Melnikov-Pechersky mentioned in it. The objective of the article is to find ways for an intertextual study of non-concurrent works of Russian literature: to view the classic texts of the 19th and 20th centuries as united in the literary process and its perception by readers. In the center of the applied conceptual apparatus is the category of intertextuality, which often has contradictory interpretations. Understanding intertextuality as the ability of literary texts to set the program of reader’s perception within boundaries of the resonant space these texts form (the term of V.N. Toporov), the author of the article considers the artistic originality of Astafiev’s work taking into account the adjustments made to its content by Melnikov-Pechersky’s story. Astafiev’s modern pastoral is analyzed in the context of the history of the emergence and development of the pastoral genre in the world literature. At the same time, the genre is identified in terms of the theory of the pastoral. The parameters of the modification of the pastoral genre in the latest Russian prose are verified. A special attention is paid to the consideration of Astafiev’s work in the literary-critical context, which allows verifying and correcting the existing concepts and meanings. The author of the article aims to solve the research problem of whether the subtitle of Astafiev’s story indicates its belonging to a certain genre or some other meaning of the work. The solution lies in the sphere of intertextuality as a common (metaphorical) property of the compared texts. As a result, the author comes to the conclusion about the temporal designation of the genre “modern pastoral” that Astafiev introduced was accurate in the context of the dialectic between the personal time of the author-narrator and the historical era. In general, the experience of studying the two stories of two centuries of Russian literature proves the productivity of the categories “intertextuality”, “resonant space of literature”, “genre memory”. The two stories interact intertextually via reading, quoting, characters’ remarks on what they have read and (as the analysis of language shows) via “lexical dominants”, “single-rooted synonyms”. The study revealed the mobility of the categorical boundaries of literature and the active interaction of the designated categories, which allows making a line of predecessors and followers, replacing and supplementing each other in the single development of Russian literature. The “old” is superimposed on the artistic “modernity”, exposing the extreme conventionality and displacement of temporal boundaries in the construction of the resonant space of the Russian classics of the 19th and 20th centuries.

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