Reflection and narration in The Journey of Criticism by S.K. Fereltst

The article analyzes the narrative schemes, motifs and stylistic organization of The Journey of СтШЫят in the aspect of metatext and reflection. The text was written in 1810, but it was published in 1818 only. The book needed censorship permission. It had no reader's interest at that time. The text was republished in 1951, and then it came into the sphere of research interest. This matter is investigated on the material of research papers, articles and monographs of Aleksandr Kokarev, Gennady Ovchinnikov, Georgy Ma-kogonenko and others. Moreover, features of epistolary narration as a complex cycle form were investigated following the conceptions of Aleksandr Yanushkevich and Vitaly Kiselev. The Journey of Criticism as a metatext accumulates themes, plots and fables of the literature of the second half of the 18th - beginning of the 19th centuries. The author of the book bases on a type of a polyphonic narrative and polysemantic words, building ambiguous contexts and, at the same time, redoing his identity, hiding it behind its conventional "criticism" (Kostelyanets). Equally important, narrative here exists between Alexander Radishchev's and Laurence Sterne's strategies. The first tradition is connected with exposing satiric narration that represents reality as results of social processes and crimes (as Alexander Radishchev's Journey From St. Petersburg to Moscow, Nikolay Novikov's and Nikolay Strakhov's journalism). The other tradition is connected with different forms of sentimentalism (including narration as game, characteristic for Laurence Sterne and Henry Fielding). In general, the so-called "provincial plot" of the The Journey of Criticism creates dissonance between the actual names and subjects whose discourse is the primary social dimension. At the same time, the plot in The Journey of Criticism seems to be associated with L. Sterne's fiction, or texts of the intermediary closest to it, and the object of satirical derision could be first highly imperfect translations of novels by L. Sterne. In this perspective, The Journey of Criticism can be considered as a way of reading A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, a type of a commentary to the original text and its interpretation through the optics of L. Sterne. Obviously, The Journey of Criticism is a similar process of reinterpretation, sometimes recreating reality through parody and grotesque mechanisms, a place for literary reflection in its discursive space. In this perspective, The Journey of Criticism becomes a semantic mediator, giving the previous cultural tradition a fundamentally different sense. Results and observations which are presented in the article could be used in teaching the history of Russian literature of the 19th century. Perspective of the research is determined by the analysis of archival materials of the Russian State Historical Archive.

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