“Shakespearean text” in the Russian detective story of the early 21st century

The objectives of this article are (1) to find out how the Russian detective story, as a representative of “formula stories” (Cawelti), actualizes the “Shakespearean text”; 2) to determine the nature of the “evidential paradigm” (Ginzburg) and its connection with the “Shakespearean text” in the novels Shakespeare Must Die (2014) by Valeria Leman, Prospero’s Maze (2017) by Anton Chizh, and Shakespeare’s Last Play ( 2019) by Natalia Alexandrova. The analysis of the discursive practices of the three Russian writers is carried out using the methods of comparative studies and imagology, within the framework of which the traces of the “Shakespearean text” in modern Russian detective stories are investigated. The “Shakespearean text” in this work is considered widely - as a holistic thesaurus, including the artistic and aesthetic complex of Shakespeare’s ideas; his vision of the past, present and future; the system of the artistic world presented in the works of the Great Bard; a set of endless interpretations of the life and work of Shakespeare, his philosophy and poetics. The article raises questions about how exactly the “Shakespearean text” is presented and what the ways of its functioning in the works selected for the analysis are. The conducted research allows inferring about some directions and methods of reception of the “Shakespearean text” by the authors of Russian detective stories of the early 21st century. In these works, composed according to the strict detective standard, the following components of the “Shakespearean text” turned out to be the most attractive: Shakespeare’s authorship question, Shakespeare’s sonnets, his metaphor of life as theater from the comedy As You Like It and his play The Tempest. In the analyzed detective stories, the “Shakespearean text” plays a plot-forming role, determines the nature of the concept sphere, in varying degrees of expression performs the function of “evidential paradigm”, determines the configuration of characters in the structure of the artistic world. The contact and necessary connection of the novels by Leman, Alexandrova, and Chizh with Shakespeare and his works is based on convergent and divergent relations to the most important semantic and structure-forming units of the “Shakespearean text”. Some plot motifs of the analyzed novels testify to the direct perception of Shakespeare’s biography and works, which, however, underwent transformation according to the laws of formulaic fiction and became evidence of the fruitfulness of the dialogue between mass and classical literature. The “Shakespearean text” influenced the genre and poetological nature of the early 21st-century Russian detectives, which acquired the qualities of philological prose by testing a stable model of detective narration in the intertextual field of the Great Bard. The deep subtext of Shakespeare’s works, which are ambiguous, problematic, amenable to various interpretations, is in tune with our time; therefore, the purely philological play with the “Shakespearean text” by Leman, Alexandrova, and Chizh gives their detectives the quality of intellectual reading. This happens even though the novels Shakespeare Must Die, Shakespeare’s Last Play, and Prospero ’s Maze, due to their genre, use only certain elements of recognizable structures and do not claim to explain the value of Shakespeare’s legacy for the 21st century. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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