Cannibals, criminals, grotesque and mass-fiction: How the parody is made (Victor Burenin and Dmitry Minaev cases)

Parodies and travesty texts of Russian journalism of the early 1870s (published in “Iskra” and “Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti”) are considered in the aspect of genre functions, conventions, and elements of the “contract” between the author and the reader. The paper attempts to contextualize the parodies “Cannibals, or people of the sixties” (1871) by D. D. Minaev and “She is a criminal, or not?” (1872) by V. P. Burenin following the changing field of literature and journalism, in particular, a crisis of the polemic novel, growing popularity of action-packed fiction and mass literature, competition of “thick magazines”, weeklies, and newspapers. Special attention is paid to the editions of two parodies. Minaev’s parody “Cannibals, or people of the sixties” is an anti-nihilistic novel in the carnival space of grotesque and satire. By revealing the unsightly sides of the originals and prototypes, excessive eroticism (against V. Avenarius and V. Krestovsky) and sensational deviance (forcing one to recall A. Pisemsky, N. Leskov and F. Dostoyevsky), indicate the exhaustion of the source material. Burenin’s parody also demonstrates the exhaustion of topical themes and motives. Claiming to be a “follower” of A. Dumasfils, E. Zola, P. A. Ponson du Terrail, Burenin skillfully parodies both a foreign crime novel (first of all, Wilkie Collins) and domestic examples of the “same” genre (Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Akhsharumov). The parodies under study combine the baroque with the postmodernist aesthetics, making these texts available for further interpretation and commentary.

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