Филологический класс (Jun 2022)
Intertextual and Genre Strategies of P. Vail (The Essay “Abram Terts, the Russian Filibuster”)
Abstract
The purpose of the study is to analyze the essay of the famous Russian emigrant of the “third wave”, critic and publicist Peter Vail’s essay “Abram Terts, the Russian filibuster” (1997), to discover the intertextual layers in the text, and to realize their artistic functions and connection with the genre nature. The main research methods used in the study include the combination of the cultural-historical, biographical, intertextual, structural-semantic, and metapoetic. The integrated approach used in the work allows the authors to discover new facets of the creative originality of Vail’s literary essays. The study result in a new analytical understanding of Vail’s journalistic strategies in the process of creating the image of the emigrant writer Andrei Sinyavsky (Abram Terts), and traces the methods of forming a memorial essay created at the intersection of traditional practices of literary essays, interviews, journalistic reporting, personal diary, archival notes, etc. The authors argue that Vail models a mixed polygenre of essayistic narration arising on the basis of interaction between traditional genre formations. As a result, Vail’s intertext of essayistic narration acquires an external and visualized character – the essay appears mainly in the form of a chronicle of events. In the essay, Vail does not offer detailed reflections, does not comprehend events, but fixes them; he offers not a thought, but a look. However, from the point of view of the authors of the article, it is this fact that constitutes the peculiarity of the essayistic form of Peter Vail.
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