Search of genre in Shtoss and The Landlady novels: on creative interaction of late Lermontov and early Dostoevsky

The transitional character of the epoch of 1830-40s, the changing aesthetic paradigms provide a possibility of creative search. In this article the problem of search of the genre in the works of late Lermontov (in the novel Shtoss) and early Dostoevsky (in the novel The Landlady) is considered. The experience of drawing up the whole from the parts in A Hero of Our Time defined in many aspects the direction of further Lermontov's search. The novel was the result of creative search, but Lermontov's last prose experience - Shtoss -represented the process (not the result) of creating the genre-''ensemble''. The Landlady, as well as Shtoss, concluded the search of new forms of the time, and opened the way of development for the Russian menippea in many aspects. In the article an attempt to identify the diversity of genre models in the basis of genre phenomenon of Shtoss and The Landlady is realized; the role of genre models in the creative dialogue of the writers and in the epochal process in general is determined. Each genre form is identified by the type of the represented chronotope. In the article their relationship and characteristics are described. It is possible to extract such genre models from the two stories as: the novelette (as the "intermediate" genre, which corresponds to the transitional character of the epoch), the Petersburg story (Lermontov in Shtoss anticipated some tasks and methods of ''natural school'', as well as Dostoevsky's approach to depicting Petersburg by perception of the city by the consciousness of the character-dreamer), the fantasy (in the article non-conformity between the fantastic reality of Dostoevsky and the type of implicit fantasy of Lermontov is discovered), the novelist narrative, which gave new opportunities for creative intentions of both writers. The creation of especial emotional-fantastic atmosphere in the stories, which not only affected the change in the functional characteristics of chronotopes, but also caused the occurrence and realization of the ballad genre model in Lermontov's Shtoss and the model of the ''terrible story'' in Dostoevsky's The Landlady, is considered separately. The texts complication by this narrative strategies help to identify the complex nature of the main heroes, to create new chronotope types, to make an emotional background necessary for the organic synthesis of all the elements. Thus, the problem of creative interaction of M.Yu. Lermontov and F.M. Dostoevsky is determined by the complex processes of continuity and polemic. The search of the genre is one of the areas of convergence of the two paradigms of the writers. Using the synthesis of different genre models Lermontov perceived and conveyed the emotional atmosphere, which would later appear in the early works of F.M. Dostoevsky. The attempt of various forms of genre narration, the creation of narrative strategies of the menippea, and a new approach to understanding the reality and the human types in The Landlady became an original projection to the creation of a new type of a Russian novel.

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