The aftertext phenomenon

Abstract

A new collective monograph (this is an important generic definition for the authors), brought out by the Ural State University in cooperation with a St. Petersburg press Aleteya, is their fourth publication devoted to the ‘marginal issues.’ The first three dealt with the ‘author’s crisis,’ ‘author’s failure,’ and ‘the unfinished.’ In the present book a collective effort is aimed at the analysis of the generic forms considered as ‘aftertexts.’ They range from the author’s inscription on the book to various personal documents, critical reaction, and in the broadest sense up to the whole cultural tradition dependent on the text. Most of the papers are devoted to Russian literature in the 20th c. and include a random selection of Bunin’s inscriptions, his marginalia on the book of Blok’s verse among them, Zoshchenko’s letters to his readers, the brothers Strugatsky’s reputation as a myth, etc. The collective theoretical effort does not help much to clarify the term, or to locate it with any precision in the contemporary scholarly discourse, but it wittily chooses it as an umbrella to cover the papers collected in  book and considered as variations of the ‘aftertext.’