Why Did V. Makanin Not Use the Diary Form in His Underground, or The Hero of Our Time?

The article raises the question of the reasons for the author's refusal to use the diary of a hero in V. Makanin's novel Underground, or The Hero of Our Time (1998), in which one of the constructive principles of the literary world organization is a projection M. Lermontov's novel The Hero of Our Time (1840) and F.M. Dostoevsky's novel Notes from Underground (1864). Refusal from writing is interpreted as a result of the character's belief that written speech has ceased to be a means of searching for personal senses (the closeness to R. Barthes' concept "scriptor"), and, in society, texts reinforce changing epistemes, i.e. dominant or alternative ideas. There are four stages in the situation of the main character's refusal to write (including the diary): (1) Petrovich's life in the dormitory, when he occupies the position of an unrecognized writer by listening to others' stories; (2) active actions and the implementation of the idea of a "blow" motivate the refusal from Petrovich's written reflection and public repentance; the main character's mental breakdown proves the need for a penitential word; (3) treatment in a mental hospital when the absence of a diary is explained by the character's desire to keep his crimes a secret, to get out of control of society; (4) main character's return to the dormitory and immersion in the flow of corporeal practical mass life, when Petrovich understands the futility of written reflection and penitential introspection. The absence of the character's intimate diary is explained by the fact that the diary would have recorded a failure in saving the "humiliated and offended" woman, because it is impossible to save Another, it is only possible to temporarily relieve the pain. The article shows the consequences of abandoning the "Word": the position of the "listener" and the actively self-defending person leads to an acute need for a confession. At the same time, the novel reveals the anthropological need for the word to give meaning to being. The article shows that the narrative of the novel is built on the inner speech of the character and is meaningful; refusal from the written word is compensated by situational inner speech. The main character, understanding existence as following the flow of life, does not abandon the intention to understand life, preserves inner speech, which is phenomenal and truthfully captures human variability and opens the possibility for philosophical reflection. The text of the novel materializes the narrator's inner speech, which organizes both the perspective of the image and the space-time continuum. The narrating character refuses written fixation despite the closeness in the novel of the character's inner speech to the diary form: I-narration, fragmentarity, chronologicali-ty. In Makanin's novel, refusal from writing typifies the reduction of the word and the text's authority in modern culture.

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