Self-parody in the works of Vsevolod Ivanov

The paper considers self-parody as a kind of self-reflection in the works of Vsevolod Ivanov in the 1910s-1920s. The most striking and well-known self-parody example is the image of the Chinese Shin-Bin-Wu in the adventurous novel “Iprit” that comically reinterprets one of the plot twists and the same type of character in the famous story about the Civil War “Bronepoezd 14-69”. The origins of the self-parody are not due to external reasons: the social order for the “Krasny Pinkerton,” communication between Ivanov, as a member of the “Serapionov Brothers” group, and theorists and practitioners of literary parody. Ivanov’s self-parody is conditioned by internal sources. The works of the 1910s reveal the young writer’s tendency to embody the main topics and motifs of his work almost simultaneously in tragic and comic variants. It is suggested that the writer’s self-parodies of 1918s-1919s originate from his awareness of the illusory nature of his aspirations and ideals and the impossibility of their realization. Also, a parody autobiography of 1922, in the spirit of “The Three Musketeers,” interpreting the tragic events of the Civil War in Siberia, self-parodies of the 1920s (the peasant revolution, the “secret secrets” of the human soul, the ideals of the “hearth-house” and the “mother and comforter of sorrows” destroyed during the revolutionary period) are assumed to be the author’s attempt to renounce some facts of his real or artistic biography, his desire to internally confirm for himself the correctness of his new path in life and art.

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