Motifs in the historical small prose by Yury Tynyanov

The paper considers the motif of emptiness and the motifs thematically related to water in the historical prose of Yury Tynyanov, namely, in stories «Sub-lieutenant Kijé», «Young Vitushishnikov» and novella «The Wax Person». In the narratives about the Russian emperors, the author uses the motifs of a sea storm and of rescuing the drowning people, traditional for historical anecdotes. In «Sub-lieutenant Kijé», the metaphor of the sea is used as an uncontrollable element - real life of the country - that Paul I fails to escape. In one of the fragments of the story, Paul I is compared to a swimmer from an old engraving depicting the Deluge; the Deluge is also mentioned in relation to the officer Sinyukhayev, whose name was mistakenly put by the scribe into the list of the dead. In Tynyanov’s prose, the motifs traditional for the prose about emperors become modified and «highlighted» by allusions to texts of other authors («The Bronze Horseman» by Alexander Pushkin), thus creating the effect of a parody, the fictitious nature and the diminishing value of the historical process (Paul I and Nicholas I as figures of lower significance as compared to Peter the Great). The choice of the anecdote plots allows the formalist writer to demonstrate the simplification and schematization of his characters, whose existence is conditioned only by writing. The disappearance of the lieutenant from the pages of «Sub-lieutenant Kijé» is as possible as the incidental emergence of Kijé in the same story. The ambivalent motif of «softness» into which everything material «disintegrates» and which symbolizes vitality, the life itself, is traced both in «Sub-lieutenant Kijé» and in «The Wax Person». Another Tynyanov’s motif is the motif of emptiness, which actualizes the link «creation/creativity - destruction/oblivion» as a dynamic structure manifesting itself in time. The analyzed works reveal the process of creation of an artistic text: just as a sheet of paper turns into a fiction space. One may find the breakthroughs of a conventional plane, with a sheet of paper and a writer’s hand holding a pen to be seen. The caricature depiction of the characters with their mechanistic actions and their limited perception of reality, and representation of the works of art more real than the life make the reader think about «Laughter» and «The Creative Evolution» by Henri Bergson and trace the connection between the ideas of the Russian formalist and the French philosopher-intuitivist. The use of the motifs of the literature about Peter the Great and the allusion to St. Petersburg’s story by Pushkin in the texts about epochs of Paul I and Nicholas I involve the works by Yury Tynyanov in the existing tradition of the historical narrative and establish intertextual links between his texts.

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