Auto(bio/hagio)graphic narrative as a tool of formation of a personal myth about a writer "of the people": The case of Georgii Grebenshchikov

The article discusses the mechanisms of synthesis of autobiographical and autohagiographical discourses in the text of the book Egorka’s Life by Georgii Grebenshchikov. The subject of the study determined the range of materials used - Grebenshchikov's prose (Egorka’s Life, The Churaevs) and the corpus of his ego-documents (primarily letters); works by Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky; Russian (auto)hagiography (primarily the Life of St. Sergius of Radonezh and the Life of the Archpriest Avvakum); some archival documents. The article aims to consider how autobiographical and autohagiographical elements of poetics correlate in Egorka's Life and to analyze the role that Grebenshchikov's final work played in the process of forming a myth about himself as a writer "of the people". We can trace the mechanisms and pragmatics of Grebenshchikov's work with samples of classical secular quasi-autobiographical prose (Tolstoy, Gorky) and, in particular, with the domestic (auto)hagiographical canon. The analysis led to a number of conclusions. Throughout his half-century literary career, Grebenshchikov systematically worked on constructing his own personal literary mythology. The most suitable field for such narrative operations was the array of his ego-documentary texts: the autobiographical texts are adjoined by epistolary and literary works containing the author's version of certain events of his biography. The book Egorka's Life can be considered as the apotheosis of this hard work. In the sense of poetics and life-creative pragmatics of Egorka's Life, the correlation of the elements of an autobiographical story and hagiographic autobiography in its text and the effect that arises from the synthesis of these genre models became central. In Russian culture, the genre tradition of hagiographic autobiography, to which Grebenshchikov's book gravitates, goes back to the lives of the Archpriest Avvakum, Epiphanius and Eleazar of Anzersky - the first autohagiographical works in the history of Russian culture. Grebenshchikov used almost all the topoi of the monk's life in Egorka's Life, fusing them with elements of other types of hagiographies. As a result, the writer created the figure of a person from the people - the peasant boy Egorka, destined for a special mission from his very birth, and with Egorka's help he ultimately formed a narrative, brought to its logical limit, about a writer "of the people" who overcame all of the numerous difficulties and joined the "light" of culture and - more specifically - literature, which became one of the key phenomena of the "undivine sacred” for Russian culture of the New Age. From the 1930s to the 1950s, Grebenshchikov turned from a hagiobiographer (in the book Radonega) into an auto-hagiobiographer (in Egorka's Life), which matches the general dynamics of the genre of hagiographic (auto)biography in the culture of the Russian diaspora. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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