Linguistic Commentary of the V. Khodasevich's Hoax "Vasily Travnikov's Life"

The final paper is devoted to the literary hoax "Vasily Travnikov’s Life", written by V. Khodasevich in 1936 while he was in emigration. In my research I manage to demonstrate how the poetics of the literary hoax is constructed on the language level and why after reading the tale it seems that the text is written in the XIXth century. In the introduction I descript the commentary model, borrowed from Marina Bobrick’s book "The Prose of O. Mandelshtam “Cold Summer”: Linguistic Commentary". The first chapter of the final paper is based on this approach and contains the analysis of direct and indirect speech of the characters and the poetic archive of Vasily Travnikov. The second chapter, dedicated to the narrator’s speech, represent statistic data from Russian National Corpus. With the use of quantitative method, I built several tables and diagrams which demonstrate the correlation between archaic and modern collocations in the author’s speech. In the final chapter I fixate and analyze literary references to the works of V.A. Zhukovsky, K.N. Batyushkov, E.A. Baratynsky and A.S. Pushkin.