Narrative as form of History's Representation in Texts by Boris Pilnyak

This paper is devoted to the study of the texts by Boris Pilnyak “Ivan Moskva” and “Red Tree” in the narrative aspect and explore in these novels the motives connected with the interpretation of history. Narrativity, narrative forms, types of narrator are subjects of study of the science of narratology and it is assumed that just such a research focus is convenient for studying the representation of history in Pilnyak's texts. At the same time, this work is not an attempt to “embed” Pilnyak’s text into some conditional typological framework, but aims to answer the question of why Pilnyak uses the “chaotic” type of narration in the text peculiar to him. So, Victor Hoffman wrote in his article “Pilnyak’s Place”, saying that the writer's works break up into “embroidered pieces”, thus forming a patchwork structure: “Pilnyak doesn’t have any solid things”. The analysis of the narrative structure of the text is at the same time a broad and very narrow field of literary criticism. This aspect has, at least, the advantage that, covering, first of all, the range of questions relating to the field of "form", it inevitably concerns also questions relating to the field of "content". Thus, his study makes it possible to find the clue to Pilnyak, a writer whose ambiguity and lack of understanding is largely due to the fact that most of those who wrote about him approached him, based either on the characteristics of his poetics, or on his thematic and ideological orientation, often ignoring the fact that form and content do not exist in isolation from each other. For this study, the most interesting is the attempt to comprehend the “fragmented” narration of Pilnyak, which will be characteristic of his literary work not only in the 1920s, but also in the entire corpus of his texts as a whole. The stories of Pilnyak “Ivan Moskva” and “The Red Tree”, which are considered in the paper, also have a direct bearing on the perception of history by the “post-revolutionary” human. Both literary works describe the 20s - the first Soviet years, and also affect different temporal layers - Ancient Egypt, the Time of Troubles and the assassinations of czarevitch Dmitry, the Petersburg period of the Russian Empire. This paper is observing the main narratological works and the works of scholars whose analyses can be called narratological, because they affect the problems of the structure of the text and the type of narration: Gerard Genette, Wolf Schmid, Frank Rudolf Ankersmit, Paul Ricœur, Yuriy Lotman, Hayden White, etc. In the largest systematic narratological work published in Russian today, Wolf Schmid observes the main narratological ideas of different scholars and contrasts two understandings of narrative, the first of which highlights the existence of a narrative instance, and the second is the eventual nature of the narrative text. Both of these understandings are, however, closely related to each other. Yuriy Lotman in his book “The Structure of an Artistic Text” defines an event as “a character's movement across the border of a semantic field”. The result of this study is likely to be the conclusion that Pilnyak’s texts are not structured syntagmatically, like the historical prose of the period of realism, although, according to Jacobson, Pilnyak’s prose is based on metonymy, not metaphor. The foundation of Pilnyak's stories is a paradigm, and, as in poetry, the role of rhyming elements here is played by motives. And such a text arrangement was chosen by Pilnyak not accidentally, but in order to show a post-revolutionary understanding of history: the antithesis of heredity and syntagmatics (passing from generation to generation, from father to son, etc.), fragmentation and chaotic temporal layers.