Историзм и реализм в творчестве Л. Улицкой

Abstract

The starting point of this study is that in 20th and 21st century literary thinking “realism” is not treated as an unambiguous category, which makes it impossible to provide a comprehensive answer to the question whether a return to 19th century realism can be observed in contemporary Russian literature. Nevertheless, a discreet poetic feature, historicity, which is traditionally part of any definition of realism and is a characteristic poetic method of 19th century authors and works, is clearly discernible.This study examines the appearance and development of historicity in L. Ulitskaya’s oeuvre through the analysis of three works. The first work, the short story Sonechka, is a purely fictitious text, in which historicity appears only through its strong orientation by external points of reference, primarily in the characterization of the concrete historical setting and one of the heroes. The character of Robert Victorovich is based on the biography of an actual prototype, but the conc-rete and identifiable biographical data are complemented by partly or completely fictitious elements. The work titled Daniel Stein, Interpreter can be classified as fiction as far as its genre is concerned; however, it imitates the historian’s work of reconstruction. The method used in Sonechka becomes central here: the character of the protagonist, which can also be connected to a concrete prototype, is described through real-life characters and documents, as well as partly and completely fictitious ones.The third text is Ulitskaya’s correspondence with M. Hodorkovsky, which is not a work of fiction, but a genuine literary and historical document. Its focus are concrete historical and social issues. At the same time, the orientation of the genre and the relationship betwe-en the author and her correspondent raises the possibility of poetic composition.The study of the three chronologically consecutive works shows that historicity has been receiving an increasing role in Ulitskaya’s oeuvre, partly in terms of the author’s position and partly in poetics in the commingling of historical and literary discourse. This phenomenon can be traced back two different sources. Firstly, the authors, primarily A. Pushkin and F. Schiller, in whose thinking and art history received an increasing significance, as a result of which they became distanced from romanticism. Secondly, the art of L. Tolstoy, in which history and the philosophy of history played a part from the very beginning and became more and more central later on.