The synthetism of Ruslan Kireev’s autobiographical narrative Fifty Years in Paradise

The material is the autobiographical novel Fifty Years in Paradise by Ruslan Kireev, which has not previously been the subject of scientific and critical reflection. The relevance of the work is due to the growing interest to the literature of retrospective biographical plan, to specific varieties of autobiographical prose, and due to the need to study theoretical aspects of biographical narration, in particular issues of the laws of the genre and the peculiarities of the genre synthesis, the correlation of truth and fiction in the autobiographical text, the nature of the interaction of central images (the hero and the author), the temporal organization of the autobiographical text (biographical and epic chronotopes). The aim of the research is to analyze the dominant strategies of Kireev’s autobiographical narrative and to identify the type of contemporary literary autobiography that his narrative tends towards: autobiography as document, autobiography as fiction, literary autobiography, quasi-autobiography (pseudo-autobiography), or others. Attention to the chronotope of the novel by Kireev, in particular the identification of subjective (hero’s) and objective (author’s) chronotopes allows us to differentiate the strategies of the writer’s worldview and to outline various tactics for using the document (diary, memoirs, notes, reviews, etc.) and its modifications. The main methods used in the research are historical-literary, typological and poetological in their unity and complementarity. The theoretical basis of the research was works on the problems of autobiographical prose (by D. Likhachev, M. Bakhtin, S. Averintsev, L. Ginzburg, N. Leiderman, M. Lipovetsky, T. Breeva, E. Boldyreva, E. Dobin, T. Kolyadich, N. Nikolina, S. Mashinsky, G. Romanova, V. Halizev, et al.). The attempt to qualify Kireev’s text and reduce it to the traditional varieties of the autobiographical novel allows us to say that Kireev’s narrative is adjacent to the basic modification that is most common in Russian (modern) literature and is defined as a synthesis of autobiographical prose with documentary (autobiography with a documentary basis) one. Such a definition, on the one hand, corresponds to the signs and features that were traced in the course of the analysis; on the other hand, it corresponds to the author’s intention, which Kireev sought to implement in the novel Fifty Years in Paradise: to create an (auto)biographical document that reflects the truth of the person and the time. However, we should also supplement the definition “documentary narrative” with the property of “philological prose”, the author’s own literary narrative, in this case directly related to the theme of the writer’s creative work and formation. The novel’s composition, text division, “Close-up” (the writer’s portrait) chapters, the author’s digressions point to an “artistic” component of Kireev’s documentalized narrative. Contribution of the authors: the authors contributed equally to this article. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

Keywords

Authors

References